While I’ve been pottering around in gardens this week, there are a few things I’ve found that don’t look that great and certainly don’t help plants look their best.
The first thing I’m going to show you is what not to do with what I think is Lomandra (a genus of native Australian mat rush), or it could be a species of Dietes, but it is actually hard to tell what it is you are looking at it.
The trouble with this plant is that there is so much dead plant material within it, that the actual plant is struggling. Before I took over looking after this garden area, someone should have cleaned all this material from among the surviving leaves. The dead material has clearly been there for a while. To rectify this, all this dead material needs removing when I get the time, as I was on my own the day this photo was taken.
Another issue is that the soil the plant is in is really hard and full of random bits of building rubble and/or stones. To solve this, I would put some compost down as a mulch (I would love to add the worms too), to help break up and aerate the soil and add nutrients back into it. This would also allow water to filter into the soil to reduce the reliance on irrigation systems. A more traditional bark mulch can, of course, be added to the top of the compost.
I will note here that digging the compost into an existing garden bed, especially one with such compacted soil is hard work, really time consuming and would damage existing plant roots, none of which are good things. Laying the compost on the soil as a mulch allows all the benefits of doing so, but letting nature do the hard work for you!
Next on my list is something that I see all too often in many places that I go to, not just at work. Please have a look at the photo below.
In this photograph, it shows bare soil with tree roots and an irrigation pipe showing. The black material is likely to be weed matting, with the idea being to prevent weeds from growing by preventing the weed seeds from getting the light they need to germinate. It’s clearly been there too long to be effective as the matting is mostly buried (it should be on top of soil if it is used).
Apart from the weed matting issue, I really don’t like seeing bare soil, especially when it looks like it is compacted and eroded too. We need to look after our soils, whether they are in the countryside, our gardens or our commercial landscapes.
To rectify this without damaging the tree roots, I would again add a thick layer of compost and some mulch over the top of that. As the mulch breaks down I would top it up to keep soil covered. If the planting is changed in the future, I’d have the whole thing covered in plants so that the soil is completely covered by these plants, rather than just having it bare.
Simple things in gardening often make all the difference to how a garden area can function-if you get the basics right, your life is a whole lot easier.