Banking

You may have noticed that there is a raised bed or banking in the photos. This is one of the things I have been doing but haven’t told you about yet.

This was the soggiest corner of the garden. There were several things I could have done here, but reasons why I didn’t.

1. I could have built a shed. It would have solved the problem of what plants to put there!…But I didn’t want to completely block the light to the window in the house behind and why would I want a shed in a dark, damp corner of the garden that I would have to squelch across every time I wanted the trowel?
2. I could have turned it into a bog garden…But there is already a pit four feet deep filled with gravel and with an apple tree growing out of it…I was not going to dig all that up! (Nb, digging pits or trenches and filling them with gravel does not always help with drainage!)
3. I could have made it into a pond…See above.

So, I decided to build above the problem!

Luckily for my bank balance, we managed to get hold of a load of red sandstone for free. (I love free stuff!) My brother helped (thanks again) to cart it all to my house. Then I spent the next couple of days building a wall. As you can see, it is a dry-stone-wall (built without concrete or mortar). This means there are gaps for small things to live in and for plants to plant themselves in!

I had bought some plants to go in the wall already so I “planted” them in gaps as I was building. They are plants that can cope with not having that much water, as the banking will be quite fast draining compared to the rest of the garden!

At the end of the raised bed that joins the lower bed I used logs instead of stone, partly because it looks nice and partly for wildlife reasons. The idea is that mini-beasts can live under the bark or in between the logs. Gradually the logs will rot down, making food for plants and other mini-beasts. And of course, having mini-beasts means food for birds and other creatures!

I got these logs from the same place as the sandstone. They were all scrap. If you want to copy my idea, please don’t go to woodland and chop down trees or remove dead or fallen wood, as these are all essential to the woodland environment. It is much better to use wood that would otherwise be thrown away. If someone you know is having trees cut down or worked on, ask if you can have some of the waste wood. Also, try and persuade them to keep some themselves so there is even more food for wildlife! (And get them to visit the RSPB website (link at top of blog) to find out more about managing trees for wildlife…)

I filled the banking with topsoil (also free – wow, we’re good at getting free stuff!). I hope having the lower part of its trunk covered doesn’t kill the apple tree. I figured that that sort of thing might happen in nature anyway, especially if the tree was growing in a dip or a crevice. I chopped off the tree’s lowest branches to encourage growth higher up. It seems to being doing well so far! I haven’t got round to putting all the plants in the raised bed yet. There’ll be more pictures when I do though!