Green up your garden this Autumn – Gardening Tips from Ecover

Spending time in the garden is one of the most relaxing ways to spend a weekend. It is also a great way to lower your food miles (by growing your own vegetables), encourage biodiversity (by planting for wildlife) and reduce your kitchen waste (by composting!). You might already be reducing the amount of chemicals in your home but why not follow some of our top tips for greening your garden

Avoid using pesticides and insecticides in your garden, try out some natural alternatives instead. For example crushed eggshells or sharp grit is an excellent alternative slug repellent.

Re-use household rubbish in the garden ice lolly sticks for plant labels, egg boxes for seed trays and compost your kitchen waste in a wormery. With a bit of imagination your empty Ecover washing up liquid bottle could become anything from a mini-cloche to a bird feeder. Email your garden inventions to newsletter.ecover@greenhq.co.uk (Please also share them with this journal - Ed.)

To combat a slippery moss covered path add half a pack of Ecover chlorine free laundry bleach to a watering can and sprinkle over. The moss should quickly die off.

Save water by installing a water butt. Alternatively try out a Drought Buster, which uses the siphon principle to empty your bath water onto your garden.

Here are 5 top gardening tips for Autumn to help you on your way to greener fingers:

1. Don’t be too tidy! Worms love leaf litter and a healthy lawn will benefit from worms dragging fallen leaves into their burrows below the turf.

2. Don’t bother with bonfires. Pile all your autumnal trimmings into a corner of the garden: compost heaps provide habitat for all sorts of helpful gardening allies, like hibernating hedgehogs, nesting bumblebees or slug munching slow worms.

3. Leave stands of teasels, evening primrose and even sweet corn plants to over winter; the seed will provide forage for flocks of finches and all those nooks and crannies in the wrinkled vegetation will house hundreds of hibernating invertebrates.

4. Make (or buy) some bug boxes, hollow tubes like bamboo canes, cow parsley or even the dreaded Japanese knotweed make superb dwellings for safety seeking bugs. Stuffing plastic bottles or steel cans with layers of stems or bark and placing them in a protected place ensconced in a log pile or cleft of a shrub is not only fun but provides habitat for ladybirds and lacewings alike.

5. Many species of birds will be looking to put on some weight in anticipation of colder and harder times ahead so its a good time to clean bird table and feeders before offering winter time treats like sunflower hearts or suet.

Being greener in the garden by encouraging wildlife is easy and fun particularly if you get the kids involved!