Environment

The growing season is upon us and the Committee on Climate Change is encouraging us all to do our bit to encourage biodiversity, reduce carbon emissions, chemical and plastic pollution.

OUT: petro chemical based flower, food and lawn fertilisers, spot and systemic pesticides
IN: more spaces for wildlife, green manures, plant based pesticides, companion planting

We at LAWE (Looking After Woldingham’s Environment) are excited to see how many nature based solutions we can add to our organic tool kit. And we would like to share the following links with you, in case you also find some fresh ideas on perennial problems.

1. Healthy Soil
Everything starts with healthy soil. It’s important to stop using any chemicals as they leach with water far from where you first applied them, depleting life in the ground, endangering birds and small mammals as well as any pets who chomp on the treated grass or plants. Avoid digging and compaction, make sure the earth is always covered and that moisture is constant.

For details, look to Garden Organic:

• ‘To feed the soil, and improve its structure, use bulky materials like garden compost, rotted manures or leaf mould. These materials release nutrients slowly, improve soil conditions, and stimulate essential microorganisms.

• Growing green manures is another organic technique for soil improvement.

• Liquid feeds (like comfrey tea – it stinks but it works: https://horticulture.co.uk/comfrey/tea/) can help your plants in times of stress, mycorrhizal fungi improve root nutrition uptake and worms will sort out your soil

• If you don’t already, try the No-Dig method which uses thick mulches to suppress weeds.’ Why break your back digging when you can rely on the worms to drag the mulches down in to the soil, fertilising and aerating it at the same time, leaving you to get on with something else. www.gardenorganic.org.uk/expert-advice/garden-management/soil/managing-your-soil

2. Ecouraging Biodiversity
Four really easy ways of doing this are:

• Give your lawn an early mow and then leave it to grow until July/August. Mow some paths through it and a couple of areas where your table and chairs are. It’s quite surprising how many flowers appear, which pollinators come to enjoy in an instant and how many birds come to feed on the extra grubs and creepy crawlies that make it their home. In 2021 participants of Plantlife’s No Mow May campaign reported: ‘over 250 plant species including wild strawberry, wild garlic and a dazzling array of rarities including adders’ tongue fern, meadow saxifrage, snake’s head fritillary, and eyebright. Wild orchids including the declining man orchid, green-winged orchid, southern and northern marsh orchid, and bee orchid lit up liberated lawns … Lawns are sometimes considered to be wastelands for wildlife but Plantlife today illuminates that, under the right management, they can be biodiversity hotspots; EFC surveyors recorded almost 100 species of pollinators on their lawns in 2021, including 25 types of moth and butterfly and 24 types of bee including the scarce moss carder bee.’ www.plantlife.org.uk/uk/about-us/news/no-mow-may-dawn-of-a-new-british-lawn

• If moss is your lawn problem and you don’t fancy a meadow, how about creating a velvety soft moss lawn? According to the Oxygen Project: ‘A small moss lawn can absorb more carbon than 275 mature trees. It can also produce a ton of oxygen, requires significantly less water than grass, absorbs air pollutants and prevents soil erosion and runoff. www.theoxygenproject.com/post/moss-lawns-saving-the-planet-one-yard-at-a-time/

• Leave a wild patch in your garden, furnish it with old logs, a variety of dead material, twigs, dry stems, cones, add a bug hotel and hedgehog house. More ideas at: www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-grow-wild-patch-or-mini-meadow

• If you don’t already have one, dig a wildlife pond – no fish, filters or pumps, just some oxygenating plants and see who discovers and sets up home there. Here’s how: www.surreywildlifetrust.org/act-wildlife/helping-wildlife/wildlife-ponds

3. Natural Fertilisers
• Home made compost, a mix of vegetable matter, grass, carbon from cardboard, regularly turned.
• And nettle or comfrey tea both make excellent natural fertilisers: www.gardenorganic.org.uk/expert-advice/garden-management/pests-and-diseases/making-barriers

4. Pest Control
Good quality organic soil, rotational growing, barriers to deter mammals, birds, butterfly and fly larvae, companion planting to encourage beneficial insect predators, sacrificial planting to attract for example blackfly to nasturtiums instead of your beans, parasitic biological control.

• Horsetail spray for blackspot and other fungal infections: www.permacultureapartment.com/post/horsetail-fungicide

• Flowering plants play a vital role in the organic garden for the creatures they attract, many of which play an important role in pest control or pollination. For a full list of plants to attract honey and bumbles bees, hover flies and other beneficial insects and mature butterflies: www.gardenorganic.org.uk/expert-advice/how-to-grow/how-to-grow-flowers/flowers-to-attract-beneficial-insects

• And for more on fruit and veg diseases and pest control, including for slugs and snails: www.gardenorganic.org.uk/expert-advice/garden-management/pests-and-diseases/making-barriers

5. The Problem with Glyphosate, used in many common herbicides
Sold all over the world, its makers have faced court cases from gardeners and horticulturalists,
claiming it is carcinogenic and protests that it kills pollinators and beneficial insects and causes damage to birds, small mammals and humans when they ingest it:
www.theoxygenproject.com/post/explainer-what-you-should-know-about-agrochemicals/