Tag Archives: mulching

Gardening in more extreme weather – 1

26 July 2026

Today we had a little very light rain, the first in many weeks; and it’s cooler, only 26 degrees this afternoon. The forecast is for 31 degrees in a couple of days, with no likelihood of any more rain in the next couple of weeks. Apparently, this is the new normal.

So we need to adapt how we garden, both for drought and heatwaves any time after March or April, and for wetter, milder winters.

One way that we’ve been changing the way we garden has been accepting that some plants just won’t thrive in these conditions. In particular, roses don’t do well in heat, and we can’t just replace them with the Mediterranean plants we’re advised to use, as they don’t like our claggy cold wet soil in winter.

Instead, we’re encouraging the ones that self-seed, as they seem to thrive better when they’ve chosen where they’re going to grow, which in turn leads to less need for watering. We have wonderful tall fennels, wild carrots, teasels, geraniums, foxgloves and musk mallows. We’re still using dahlias and asters a lot, for more vivid colour, and to reassure people that we’re not just letting the gardens run wild.

We do have a good structure for the gardens as a whole – a lavender border down both sides, with flowering shrubs in most of the beds.

The lavender’s actually a bit tricky, we’ve lost quite a few plants over wet winters, but we take cuttings every spring and have (almost) enough plants to fill the gaps. There are several different varieties of lavender in those borders, and some seem to be more resilient to winter wet and cold soil, so those are the ones we’re taking cuttings from.

And we’re also trying not to waste any water in these hot, dry summers! Or exhaust our volunteers. We use watering cans anyway, so the current hosepipe ban doesn’t affect us, but we’re just watering plants that haven’t yet got established; and the ones that are flowering their socks off for us, like the penstemons and dahlias. We need to spend half an hour watering a little more often than once a week.

Fortunately, the soil holds much more moisture than it used to when we started work here, thanks to all the leaf mould and garden compost we’ve added to some of the beds, but we still need to water in this kind of heat and drought .

But like most of the country at the moment, we’re still hoping for rain to keep everything alive and thriving into autumn.

What have we been doing all winter?


19 March 2026

We haven’t posted much recently, but we’ve spent the long grey wet winter preparing the Gardens for this year’s flowers. There’s still plenty going on round at the gardens.
Now at last we’re seeing the sun, and seeing the effect on all the plants – not least the weeds, which have really started to grow. We’ll be starting to deal with over the next couple of weeks.And at last, we’re seeing the sun, and seeing the effect on all the plants – not least the weeds, which we’ll be starting to deal with them over the next couple of weeks.

A lot of what we do over the winter involves leaves and compost bins. When it’s not raining, we might be emptying one of the compost Daleks (bins) so we can turn the other bins into it; or we might be adding leaves to the leaf bin to make mulch – ‘black gold’ – to keep moisture in, and stop weeds growing.

And the Town Council’s Grounds Staff have added many large bags full of leaves to the bin – thank you very much! They’ll be put to good use.

We’ve also been nursing a lot of cuttings through the winter – it’s one of our main ways of increasing the number of plants here, without having to buy more. And when we grow our own, we know they haven’t had to be treated with pesticides to look good for sale, or with hormones to make them bloom earlier – neither of those are good for bees. They’ve had a tough time getting through this long wet winter, but they’re really beginning to take off now.

We’ve been asked a couple of times how we decide which weeds to take out, and which to leave – I’ll do a more detailed post on that in a week or so. But basically, what we’re doing now it trying to remove just those invasive plants that could be trouble later on, like ground elder, sheep sorrel, celandines and violets (lovely as they are, they run rampant and can choke other plants). We still want to leave a lot of ground cover for insects, for another couple of weeks till the soil warms up.

Then the fun bit starts, when we try to work out which seedling is a plant we really want, and which so isn’t!


Sneak preview – here’s the first patch we’ll be untangling. A real haven for bees at the moment, they love red deadnettle as it’s full of nectar; but give it a couple more weeks, and it’d be a mess. That’s the balance we’ll be trying to sort out.

https://linsladememorialgardens.uk/2017/11

A few photos as spring arrives

12 March 2026

Here are a few photos of the Gardens, taken this week as primroses and hellebores take over from the winter aconites and crocuses.

The crocuses don’t photograph well, which is a pity; over the last few years they’ve spread all over a couple of the beds. Bees are just starting to look for nectar and pollen, so it’s well timed! Here are a few photos of the other flowers in the garden at the moment:

The first flowers of pulmonaria and grape hyacinths – these two are real bee magnet flowers in early spring

The primroses have spread all over the garden

Hellebores and a clump of crocuses in one of the bottom beds

Protecting plants over winter

23 November 2025

A couple of blog posts ago [https://linsladememorialgardens.uk/2025/10/27/using-dead-leaves-in-the-gardens/] we mentioned that we’d be putting dead leaves directly onto the beds to protect plants over the winter. We’ve had a couple of sharp frosts this week; it was time to get started.

The frosts turn dahlia leaves and stems black and manky – not a good look for a public garden, and not particularly beneficial to insects for hibernation. So over the last couple of visits the team has cut them all down, added some of the dry stems from the wild flower bed and chopped them all up (to make them rot faster) and added them to the compost bins in the work area.

We’ve still left a lot of stems in the wild flower bed for hibernating insects, but leaving some airspace between the plants shows off the seed heads, and looks just a little more deliberate – and it gives us on-site Browns to add to the Greens that are (were?!) the dahlia stems. When we make compost we aim to have about the same volumes of Greens (leaves, stems, grass, coffee grounds) as of Browns (dry stems, broken-up sticks, cardboard, shredded paper, torn-up egg boxes). And we tear or chop things up so there are more broken surfaces, which rot down more quickly.

We emptied a few more bags of leaf mould over or round specific plants, then raked up a few trugs full of leaves from the grass and added them on top – this will help to protect the roots from the cold wet winter to come. A number of plants like dahlias and salvias can withstand frost, but they really hate cold, wet, poorly drained ground – which is exactly what we have here. Adding this extra organic matter should help; most of our dahlias have come back year after year.

Using dead leaves in the gardens

27 October 2025

We’ve just emptied the first bags of leaves into the leaf mould bin that we cleared a couple of weeks ago, it’s good to be back in that routine for a couple of months.

We’ll also be starting to empty bags onto the ground around plants soon, which keeps the soil covered and helps it hold moisture; it also makes the gardens look tidy ahead of Remembrance Day.

But a little later on we’ll also be putting leaves directly round many of the plants, to insulate the roots more by trapping air round them and keeping frost off them, and to provide more shelter for all the beetles and small creatures that have moved in over the decade we’ve been looking after these gardens. It’s a real balance between maintaining a wildlife-friendly garden, and keeping it looking tidy and respectful; and tucking dead leaves round plants doesn’t help the tidiness. So we wait till after the services, when everything’s dying back and the leaves don’t look out of place or scruffy.

These leaves will gradually rot down over the winter, adding organic matter to the soil, which will help it hold moisture – very important in the kind of summers we’re having now, with weeks on end without rain, with added heatwaves. This year we hardly had to water at all.

It’s been interesting to notice that mainstream garden writers and presenters are increasingly suggesting we put leaves directly round plants for the winter – what a long way we’ve all come since the general advice was to cut everything down and clear the ground for the winter. I seem to remember it was called ‘putting the garden to bed’ – well, I’d rather have a blanket over me when I’m in bed, and a blanket of leaves seems to suit plants better, too!

It’s that time of year again!

12 October 2025

It’s nine years since we started collecting bags of leaf to make leaf mould. Originally we just emptied them into Dalek-type composters like these:

but we soon found we needed to construct a much larger bin, with two 2-metre cube compartments – one to collect that year’s leaves, and one to let the leaf mould rot down for a further year.

And now it’s that time of year again – if you’d like us to collect bagged-up leaves, drop us an email or message us on Facebook and we’ll come and pick them up and add them to the bin. We emptied it this morning, it’s all ready and waiting:

Supplying some of our sister sites – Bossard House in West St (2)

27 May 2019

The alkanet began to take over, and while it looks really pretty in early spring, with its fresh green leaves and brilliant blue flowers, it’s one of the favourite foods of the scarlet tiger moth, which shreds its leaves – very good from an environmental point of view, less so in terms of how it looks. The plant also suppresses many other plants, so we’ve gradually removed it to take somewhere more appropriate, to replace it with other wild flowers to keep the site looking good all year.

This spring we’ve also added more of these wild flowers, as well as a few non-native plants that work well in an area of naturalistic planting like this one, such as raspberries, to give some height and structure (and bees just love them!), purple toadflax, geranium macrorrhizum, Michaelmas daisies and bugle. All of these were propagated from plants that had become congested at the Memorial Gardens. We also donated some seedlings of Bowles’ Golden Grass from one of our gardens, via the Pocket Park by the station, another of our sister sites. In this case, it’s not so much a source of nectar and pollen for bees, as the kind of habitat some of them need for nesting, as several species nest in clumps of long grass, including that one.

 

And so it continues – we’re now potting up some rudbeckia for a couple of months for autumn colour; we’ll plant it out in a couple of months when it’s developed a good root system, as that means we won’t have to spend so much volunteer time watering new plants to get them established.

And the last thing we’ve been able to share is some of our leaf mould, thanks to hours of work by the Memorial Gardens team and much-appreciated contributions of sacks of leaves from Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway and many other residents and gardeners. We now have enough for any of our bee-friendly sites around Leighton Buzzard that need it – generally, we don’t improve the soil at all in wild flower areas, but at sites like this one, we need to add organic matter without adding the fertility that comes with compost or manure. We make sure the ground’s wet, then just put the leaf mould on top (not digging it in even with a trowel, as that disrupts the soil structure), and it starts holding in moisture at once and keeping weeds down by shutting out the light they need to germinate. Then worms start pulling it into the ground, and doing the hard work for us!

What has been really nice for us has been the appreciation of members of staff, who said they’d enjoyed watching what we’ve been doing, and they really like it!

 

Earthworms!

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Earthworms!

15 March 2019

 Following on from the last post – it’s still been too cold for the children to sow any seeds, so when they wanted to come and help this week, we decided to go on an earthworm hunt. Over the last couple of years we’ve gradually increased the amount of organic matter in the soil by mulching (covering) it with layers of compost, when available, and leaf mould. The idea was to help the soil hold water better – very necessary last year in that long drought – and to help increase the many microoganisms that help make nutrients available to plants, and generally do a lot of our work for us. We thought it would also have increased the number of earthworms in the preschool bed, making it very likely they’d find some.

So last Monday, we again had two children helping to push a spade down into the bed, then pull backwards (with a little help from an adult holding the handle), so that a lump of earth rose out of the ground on the spade, and split slightly open to reveal a few wriggling earthworms inside it. Then we lowered it to the ground, and they dived in to find them, the bravest of them picking them up, the rest enjoying watching one on my hand. And once again, I’d thought they’d enjoy the digging and rifling through the soil, but I had no idea how entranced they’d be, just with the lump of ground rising up on the spade – there’s nothing like gardening with three-year-olds who are seeing these everyday things for the first time, for making you see them as wonderful, too.

And then they just wanted to dig until it was time to go back to the pavilion; some of them dug the earth along the edge of their bed, while a couple of others took turns to throw leaf mould from the trug onto the ground, which will help us repeat the cycle all over again.

In theory, we don’t dig the ground in the gardens, as it’s much better not to keep breaking up all the mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria under the surface; but this an exception that’s really worth making, just to watch the children’s delight in their gardening.

Less weeding!

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2 February 2019

One of the main changes we’ve this year isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s made a huge difference: we stopped turning the soil over when weeding. It’s only the top hundred centimetres or so that gets disturbed, but that’s enough to damage the soil structure and all the micro-organisms that help get nutrients and moisture to the plants, and the disruption also brings weed seeds to the surface. Those weed seeds germinate once they’re exposed to the light, and the weed cycle starts all over again.

So we’ve been experimenting with a ‘no-dig’ method for looking after the gardens (apart from the wild flower bed by the car park – the poppies and cornflowers grow best in newly-disturbed soil, so we do dig that bed over). We’ve been mulching (covering) the beds with leaf mould or the compost we make in the work area round the back of the gardens, which keeps light from any weeds, and stops them growing. When seeds do blow in from the surrounding gardens and hedges, they do germinate but the weeds are so much easier to remove when the roots are just in the mulch, and not going right down into the soil. We can either just scrape the side of a trowel along the earth to remove seedlings, or slip the point of a trowel under the plant’s growing point (the centre of the plant, where all the stems or leaves come out from at ground level) and lever the top of the plant out – it doesn’t take long to do this for each individual plant, as there are comparatively few in the undisturbed ground.

Looking at the records we keep, I see that in 2017 we spent 48 man-hours weeding; that’s a lot of volunteer time. This year, we spent 17 hours.

We do tend to leave weed seedlings that germinate in autumn, as they help to cover the soil and protect it from heavy rain that drains away nutrients, and from wind that erodes it. It’s a belt and braces approach – the main protection against rain and wind is the compost or leaf mould we put on top of any bare soil, but the plants help, too. And many of those plants are ones we actually want, like Californian poppies, red deadnettles, echiums, cornflowers and so on. If we have plenty of self-sown bee magnets, we can always remove them later if we want to put something else there, and if they’re in the right place, it’s less work and less expense for us!

Another benefit of all the compost and leaf mould mulches is that they get drawn down into the soil by all the worms there now, which increase soil organic matter, and help it to hold more moisture – something that was really useful last summer, when we had five months of exceptional heat and drought. So we’re really grateful to everyone who helped us collect record amounts of leaves this year, which will be usable leaf mould in a year or so. Thank you!

A long hot summer

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02 October 2018

It’s nearly three months since we managed to post on this blog; I’m sorry for the long silence. This summer has really taxed us, with much more watering than usual both at the gardens and on our own allotments and the other gardens we look after. There’s been a knock-on effect too, as we couldn’t move any plants or try and establish new ones during the drought and unusual heat, so there’s been a backlog of work which we’re only just getting done. And now we’re running straight into the leaf-collecting season – though for the first batch we had help from the local preschool, who had a great time on Monday helping load leaves into bags (and run through them, and run around with those big-hand leaf collectors which a couple of the boys felt made them into mini Incredible Hulks).

Our original plan for this year was to consolidate the planting, and to try and reduce volunteer hours as we’d just be maintaining the gardens, rather than rescuing them from the invasive plants like white clover and self-heal which were choking the beds when we took over. This year, we said, we’ll just be able to do a bit of deadheading and move a couple of plants that would be happier in other places, and perhaps add a few more plants that we’ll have grown ourselves.

Well, along with the bit of deadheading we’ve had to do much more watering – we usually try to water as little as possible, partly so as not to waste a valuable resource, and partly because plants grown ‘hard’ (with all they need, but not overfed or overwatered) seem to thrive better. But we did end up watering many parts of the beds with a hose five times in the last five months, and using watering cans for specific plants that weren’t sufficiently established before the heatwave started. These include the five new roses, which need a proper soaking every week for the first year or so even in normal weather, to encourage their roots to get down into the soil; so we’ve given each of them a couple of cans of water every week. At least the thick mulch of leaf mould we put on in May has helped keep what moisture there is deep in the soil, and watering most of the gardens once a month is probably not too bad for this year.

We didn’t manage to sow many hardy annuals as the ground was just too dry and we’d have been watering them every couple of days, though we did raise a few tomato plants with the preschool (and the fruits are just beginning to ripen now). Their peas and carrots didn’t survive the heat, though, and we’re rethinking what we do in their bit of the garden – for a start, we’re adding more herbs and some lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina) as they love the smells of rosemary, mint and fennel, and the softness of the lamb’s ears leaves.

At least with the combination of heat that stopped many weeds from germinating, and mulch that kept light away from those that were there, we haven’t needed to weed the beds since July, just before the In Bloom competition this year. We had a lovely sunny day for the judges’ visit, with the preschool children out in force demonstrating just how much they love watering anything and everything. The whole team came along, too, including our invaluable Duke of Edinburgh’s award student Miles, who’s helped us so much this year.

And in September we heard that Leighton Buzzard had been awarded 12 Golds, 2 Silver Gilts, and two ‘Best in the region’ awards (for Linslade Wood and for the Tactic youth project). The gardens are part of Mentmore Road park, which was one of the sites awarded a Gold – it’s good to know we’re all on the right track!