3 garden tips

If you want to see healthier plants and more wildlife in your garden, focus on water FIRST.

Be clear on where the water is, how you manage it and what you want to achieve. Water gives life — but only if it’s managed well. Just ask beavers.

In southern Australia, water is often scarce — or expensive. That’s another reason to approach it with intention and insight. But let’s not make it complicated. Here are three tips that apply to ALL gardens in southern Australia — regardless of garden style and whether rented or owned.

First: Safe drinking bowls. A wide, shallow bowl, filled with pebbles and placed low to the ground — creates two things:

1) An attractive focal feature.

2) A safe place where small creatures like bees and geckos can drink without drowning. Just tip it out and refill it once a week — to keep it fresh and kill any mosquitoe larvae. Keep the rim low to the ground, so skinks can easily drink too. Aussie lizards are among your best garden helpers — eating snails, slugs and the odd cockroach!

Second: Mulch or thick leaf litter is a low maintenance way to save water in the soil. Leaf litter also makes it much easier to pull out weeds. Bare ground that bakes in the sun, forms a kind of soil ‘concrete’ that makes digging or pulling weeds virtually impossible. Thick ground cover plants do a similar job if you prefer (or combine them). Bare soil is not ‘neat’ — it’s vulnerable to damage and wastes water.

Third: Get and use two essential tools:

1) A soil moisture gauge. A simple one costs less than $20 AUD and last for ages. It’s simple to use for both pots and ground plants. You will be surprised at how dry or wet the soil is, when you thought the opposite. Most gardeners use sheer guess work, which wastes time and water — or leads to stressed plants. Just this once tool will put you ahead of most.

2) A good quality hose reel. Get the best your budget allows. And use it. If you develop a fairly easy discipline of using the moisture gauge, then watering (if needed) — then rolling your hose back up again, you’ll feel SO good about the efficiency and tidiness that one simple routine entails. The time you take to water your garden gives valuable space to breath and meditate on nature.