Date/Time
Date(s) - 14/10/2022
7:30 pm
Location
Kilmington Village Hall
Categories
Kathy Crouch has been a regular visitor to the Gardening Club in the past, and with good reason. Her expertise is happily shared with her audience and she sprinkles her talks with colourful tales of her life experiences, all of which makes for an entertaining evening.
At 63, Kathy now finds that, whereas gardening used to cause sore muscles, these days she has sore joints after being in the garden or her allotment! She has various tricks to avoid too much discomfort and, like many of our recent speakers, she employs the ‘no dig’ technique, preferring instead to hoe (using a long-handled, triangular-blade hoe) and mulch regularly, which keeps weeds at bay and stops soil compaction on her allotment.
The New Perennial style of gardening is ideal for the low-maintenance gardener as it involves mixing grasses with herbaceous perennials in drifts, thus ensuring a naturalistic look. They stand up on their own, do not need a lot of feeding and the seed heads provide food for birds. Do gardening magazines make you feel guilty when they list jobs that need doing in the garden, month by month? In fact, Kathy believes that, if the jobs have not been done by Bonfire Night (5th November), then they can wait until Valentine’s Day (14th February). Take it easy when you start gardening again after the winter – do a variety of jobs, each for a short time to ensure you don’t seize up!
As an award-winning garden designer, Kathy is frequently asked to design gardens that are easy to maintain. She showed some photos of low-maintenance gardens designed in recent years by other designers – some very trendy ones with grey or anthracite-coloured gravel or chippings and very little in the way of plants. However, they differed considerably from the photos of Kathy’s own designs, which frequently include small, grassy areas and easily-reached borders planted with perennials that form efficient barriers for weeds.
How else can we achieve a low-maintenance garden? Once established, a tropical garden only needs two or three days’ work a year. The Desert to Jungle nursery near Taunton is the ideal place to start. A woodland garden is a perfect place for shade-loving bulbs and planting bulbs is a good way to introduce colour, especially in spring, with snowdrops followed by daffodils then bluebells. The Kilmington area is a great place for an orchard. Plant dwarfing fruit trees, mixed with fine grass and some flowers instead of an herbaceous border.
Plants that can look after themselves are a good idea, e.g. Agapanthus ‘navy blue’, Phlomis ‘russeliana’ – it obliterates weeds – Diascia ‘personata’, and Geranium ‘Rozanne’. Are there any plants we don’t really want any more? Wisteria is lovely but the maintenance is considerably longer than the joy it gives, so Kathy suggests growing it at lower level e.g. along a wall or a fence where it can be kept under control without the need for ladders.
Kathy demonstrated how to use the long-handled hoe in order to avoid injury (sideways with thumbs up not down) and she highly recommended using a ‘Golden Gark’ which is a shovel, a rake and a sieve, all in one very light tool. Although it is expensive, it is an invaluable ‘new trick’ to help all gardeners, not just old ones!
Jean Falconer