Katie’s Green Gardening

Another of Jim’s creations. Beautiful bin store with a living roof. Who knew bins could look so beautiful? So glad to have Jim on the team 🔨🪵🪚 James Wakefield

This is a border we planted up a couple of years ago for a super customer. It’s still thriving and looks better every year. The advantage of hiring us to plant up your borders is we have a wealth of knowledge to make sure you get really good, reliable plants that perform well for the area they’re in, the aspect and the soil type. We absolutely love the work we do as well so we bring with us bags of enthusiasm for creating a space that lifts your spirits every time you see it.

This is Jim! Pictured demonstrating the full languishing potential of the cracking bench he made with Charlie this week for a customer who wanted to sit amongst the new tropical border we’d planted up for him. Welcome to the team Jim!

We were more than a little thrilled to be asked to create a stumpery for a lovely customer recently. Filled with shade-happy ferns, it’s such a nice garden feature for a shady corner. All materials sustainably sourced

We w**d this out of borders all the time and yet look at this! Glorious! Wouldn’t be the case if it was bindw**d though! **disjustaplantinthewrongplace

We did not build this. And nor would we! This was posted on a group asking what to plant - the planting depth is 30cm. That is such a limiting planting depth and is so often how they are built; the area below that very often used to hide stone and leftover materials.

We are a team of gardeners who build. We build with planting and growing medium at the forefront, so when you come to put your plants in you can be confident that the build is fit for purpose.

If you want a landscaper to build you a garden that thrives, give us a call 😊

One of many lovely plant ups of late 😍 We have two big plant ups next week so we’ll be in the nurseries a fair bit. So if any of our existing customers want some plants bringing to their next visit, let me know asap and we’ll pick them up at the same time!

Not sure what you want? Send me a message and I can can give you some options or you can just give me some details of where you’ll be planting them and leave it with me to sort something that’ll flourish 😊

Popped in to one of our gardens today to deliver some plants but then had to drop everything for an urgent hedgehog rescue mission! This poor little guy fell in a post hole. He was carefully retrieved and fed a gourmet tagine from a well-known pet food company, served with a saucer of water. A few hours later he’d polished off most of the tagine and scampered off. And all the post holes have been covered up! 😥🚑🦔

Another lovely plant up finished today, all tucked in nicely with cardboard for suppressing w**ds and woodchip to cover cardboard, feed the soil and give it a lovely polished finish. Lots of beautiful summer giants in here preparing to burst through in a couple of months - Rudbeckia, Heleniums and Agapanthus dotted through Verbena, a selection of salvias and several others. Iris and Geums are looking beautiful already and a few alliums will be popping soon.

First plant up of the year! Ahh we’ve missed this so much! Our customer had tried seed bombs on this bank previously but wildflower meadows are actually harder to make and maintain than sometimes suggested. We advocate instead for adopting a wildflower meadow feel with mixed perennials chosen with nature in mind. Here we’ve used grasses mixed with teasel, circium rivulare (a personal favourite of mine), hollyhocks, verbascum and scabious with (in my opinion underrated) penstemons, salvias and geums. It’s gonna be GORGEOUS! And wildlife will love it 🙌

That’s it! We’re fully booked for maintenance gardening for 2024 for the moment! HOWEVER! We hold space for one off projects in our schedule year round so if you want any of these things, we can help! > > >

🌷Plant ups - get the garden w**ded and filled up with reliable, great performing plants that suit your garden, your taste, sun/shade, then woodchipped to keep those w**ds away!

🌪️ Blitz - we can help you get back on top with a big blitz

🧱 Garden paths - why shouldn’t the path also be beautiful as you walk on it through your beautiful garden? We do all sorts of garden paths to suit your space and needs

🌈 Garden design / redesign - if the garden’s not quite working for you, we can help talk it through with you and offer simple ideas to bring about the vision you want. And then we can make it happen for you too

🪚Landscaping - raised beds, pergolas, trellis, veg beds, fruit cages, yep yep yep. We can do all this!

If you’ve enquired about garden maintenance recently and I haven’t got back to you yet or you’re waiting for confirmation, don’t worry. We’re just trying to squeeze you in still. But sadly we can’t take on any more maintenance for the moment. We’ll update on here if that changes!

Pond dipping last week to manage the oxygenating w**d. No frog spawn in this one but we’ve seen lots in others. Buckets of the removed pond w**d left beside the pond for pond life to crawl out and back to the water. Such a beautiful pond this one!

After a wet morning, a cake from TheCakeEngineerClevedon at the Thursday market cheered us right up! Gluten free option for Claire too so she’s double happy 😀😀

We had our annual orchard pruning training yesterday with Wilding Cider (home of the most delicious cider I’ve ever tasted) to keep our knowledge fresh and up to date. Still a few weeks left for apple and pear tree pruning if you’d like us to book you in!

Jollying pots! That was the task at one customer’s this week. Last visit the customer discussed what she likes and set a budget so we could bring plants ready this week to pot up for some on-the-cusp-of-Spring cheerfulness in the garden 🌼🌷

Great job yesterday pruning this beautiful old apple tree. In cases like this it’s about choosing which branches to take for maximum benefit because you just can’t take all the ones you’d like to. The aim is to allow sunlight and unhindered movement through the branches, reducing as much congestion as possible.

Then on to a very wobbly pear tree that was given some padded support using natural wool fibres and a broken garden fork, which we couldn’t help thinking looked a little like an old American president…! 😂

I think it’s fair to say that I lost control of this area in my own garden last year! With momentary dry weather, if you’re also noticing bits that got away from you, don’t wait til Spring to get it back! Winter is a great time to get it under control because you’re w**ding and they’re not growing! Give yourself a nice clean slate so by the Spring you’ve got time to plant it up after a few weeks of thinking about how you want it to look. Give us a call for Winter rescues!

Totally support this advice. Hawthorn also supports over 300 insect species!

Our wildlife expert, Vicky, has been extolling to us the virtues of hedges. ‘Bird feeders are great,’ she says, ‘but hedges are an excellent and very sustainable food source for lots of different birds. Not only do a host of hedging plants produce berries but they also offer shelter for invertebrates on which some species, including wrens and goldcrests, feed. Some spiky hedgerow plants are also useful in nesting season as they offer some protection from predators for the nests and venturesome fledglings.’

Among the best berrying hedging plants for birds are:

Hawthorn
Holly
Viburnum (such as guelder rose)
Honeysuckle
Privet
Crab apple
Elder
Cotoneaster (pictured)
Pyracantha

A Christmas Gift with a difference! Does someone you love have a garden that’s become overgrown or a bit neglected? Or in need of some fresh inspiration and a bit of muscle? The perfect Christmas Gift for the garden lover in your life!
£50 - Inspiration, design and advice consultation (2 hours)
£160 - Half a day with two gardeners
£300 - Full day with two gardeners
Got something else in mind? Bespoke packages can be put together - drop me a message with what you have in mind!
Gift certificate included and delivered locally by Christmas 🎄

Happy customer this morning text me to share her appreciation for Kate who looks after her garden ⭐️

Overgrown apple trees or pears? Or just in need of pruning by a safe pair of hands? Winter is the perfect time for pruning orchard trees. We can help with individual trees or whole orchards. Get in touch if you’d like our help 🙂

Happy birthday Kate! Queen of the path, patio and driveway! No-one can rival Kate’s zero-tolerance w**d annihilation of hard landscaped areas! Lovely birthday drinks this evening after the wettest of wet weeks and a masterpiece of a birthday cake made by our Claire (it’s a perfectly w**ded path of course!)

The “greenest” dry stone wall you can get! Zero concrete and all rocks repurposed from the garden we built it in.

Cement production generates about 8% of the global total of carbon dioxide. So we are keen concrete dodgers wherever possible!

For all our projects we consider our materials and where we can approach things differently to reduce our ecological impact. That doesn’t mean we charge customers more for costly alternatives - it means thinking different and adapting our methods whenever we can. It’s not always possible but it all helps and provides constant learning too.

We named the wall Hadrian 😁

We were there to w**d the path and do some cutting back, but when the customer shared that they actually hate the gravel path, we suggested some alternatives, took up the gravel path and made a green and white ferny haven in this shady border. Love ferns 🌿

We’re still planting up! Season’s not over yet!!

It’s prime bulb planting season and there are loads of gorgeous varieties and combinations available. Let us know if you’d like us to bring some along to plant at your next visit! 😍