The Feral Gardener

Sitting in my garden this morning with my fleece over my dressing gown and a lovely, steaming mug of coffee, I smiled to myself wondering what my neighbours must think of my approach to gardening. My method can be described as a combination of thrift, ecological-mindedness, a fair amount of total ignorance about gardening, and a bit of laziness too. I like that the most ecological approach to gardening often seems to also be the easiest.

I did work hard last summer getting a lawn area seeded for the little one to play on, and planting our first vegetables. Then I was a tad disheartened when the lawn grew in patchy and we lost most of our radish crop to pests. The weeds, however, grow with abundance - I kept meaning to borrow a hoe and tackle them, after a few afternoons spent digging out each and every one with a trowel. Then I discovered books like The Forager's Garden (Anna Locke) and Letting in the Wild Edges (Glennie Kindred) and realised I could be digging out plants that were useful or beneficial. I decided to stop weeding indiscriminately and instead to learn what exactly I had growing. I also choose not to use chemical weedkillers or fertilisers, which sometimes feels like I'm stacking the odds against myself, but I'm adamant it's the right thing to do. 

One of the few things we bought new when we moved in was a compost bin, which is happily doing its thing. Dai's dad has offered us his old water butt, and we've made pathways out of rubble we found in the garden when we moved in, and planters for herbs out of whatever we could find, such as an old sink and a beer keg. Currently I'm saving up Amazon vouchers (one of the survey sites I use pays in Amazon vouchers rather than cash) for a bokashi bin set, so that we can turn our kitchen scraps - including those that can't be composted in a standard compost bin, like meat and dairy - into fertiliser.

The first frosts came around before I was ready, and we lost many strawberries and a couple of tomato plants. At first the colder weather drove me indoors, but after deciding to resume my morning sit spot regardless of the weather, I began to spot more and more wildlife in our weedy, scraggly patch. Robins are apparently partial to the three tangled elder trees that I had gingerly separated and gently pruned in the hopes of helping them avoid disease. There were blue tits in the bare-branched apple tree that reached over our fence from nextdoor. Once or twice we spotted a squirrel racing through the yew trees just behind our fence.

My neighbours on the left have the most velvety and pristine lawn you can imagine, which is nursed by sprinklers dawn till dusk, April till October (I've never seen their children in the garden - though I've seen them gaping at us from the bedroom window!). Comparatively, last year I decided not to mow my lawn, to help it establish itself, and since I haven't weeded it either what I have now is a small and bedraggled meadow (I will mow it in the spring!). I also didn't rake up the leaves from the neighbouring sycamore - I can't quite get behind the idea of raking a biodegradable, soil-nourishing product into plastic bags, so I'm hoping it will work as a kind of free mulch.

The result of all this is that right now, my garden looks a terrible mess. The clematis at the bottom of the garden has evidently been left unmanaged for several years, and has swarmed up the nearest yew tree with parasitical fervour to form a green wall between us and the cemetery. I'm not sure what I can do about that - I tried hacking it back last year but it has simply shot straight back up with undiminished enthusiasm. But in the spring we will have nettles for tea and soup, and in the summer we have blackberries - though Dai would rather plant a thornless variety. We were able to decorate our house for the winter solstice with holly and ivy from our own garden. 

As well as our three elders and nextdoor's apple we have a beech tree, a conifer and a small aster of some description. We've also tried planting a cutting from a friend's fig tree, and should soon find out whether or not that has been successful. So the ingredients for a forager's forest garden (and a small, handy grove) do seem to be in place, and I'm hoping that my job this year will amount to steering it in the right direction, and adding more and more edible plants.