The Organic Garden
Green gardening for a healthy planet
Allan Shepherd

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

Ten principles of organic gardening

Chapter one My space: planning your garden

Chapter two Garden micro-climate and soil care

Chapter three Choosing and growing your plant stock

Chapter four Gardening for food

Chapter five Gardening for wildlife, ornament and fun

Chapter six Weeds, pests, diseases and disorders

Chapter seven Gardening beyond the garden

Chapter eight Climate change and gardening: the elephant in the room

Further reading

Directory

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Picture the scene. I’m standing in a Weld halfway up a Welsh hillside knee-deep in slug-infested cabbages. As I bend down to pick another slimy gastropod off a brassica leaf I notice a tousled blond figure waving at me. Even with 30 metres between us I can see that my guest has four undone shirt buttons beneath the collar. It’s not my lucky day. It’s only my landlord, rock legend Robert Plant, come to pick up some basil. It can’t get much more surreal than this, I think to myself, as I wander over to shake his hand, self-consciously wiping the slime trails off my fingers as I go. Here I am, organic market gardener and tenant farmer to the man who wrote ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’. I’m standing in his field, the sun is shining and right at that moment I’m having the time of my life. I am not worthy.

Some days, the sunny ones mainly, it was a bohemian rural idyll. We had discussions about politics as we dug. Friendships were made and one or two great romances forged.

When I met Robert Plant ten years ago I was living out a good-life fantasy. A couple of friends and I farmed a rough bit of high-altitude sheep Weld, not at all what you’d imagine as a ‘good’ place to grow vegetables. We had a Rotavator that didn’t work and a wonky-wheeled cliché of a car – a traditional French peasant’s 2CV (apparently they were designed to carry so many dozens of eggs down a French farm track) – that broke down halfway through the season.

A hundred and one things that could go wrong did go wrong. We lost plants, money and one of our rabbit-catching cats. Not deceased, just debunked to a nearby farmhouse. By rights we shouldn’t have survived more than a few weeks. But we did. And we actually managed to grow vegetables. Even with minimal experience we delivered a weekly box of vegetables to 50 families within a 30-kilometre radius.

My friends and I used to play a game we called fantasy farming. We’d see some neglected corner of a farm and plan grand schemes of orchards, organic smallholdings and market gardens. We were disillusioned with mainstream agriculture and thought we could do better. For a brief period in 1996, at Robert’s place, we did.

We transformed a barren sheep field into a productive vegetable patch and enriched the lives of hundreds of people. Folks came to visit from all over Britain. Some came for a few hours. Others stayed for days. We had wonderful picnics of fresh salads and homemade elderflower wine. People brought musical instruments and played homemade songs (though never Robert, unfortunately). Our friend Kevin built a gardener’s shed out of straw bales and lime plaster – one of the first of its type in Britain. We sat in it on rainy days dunking bakery doughnuts in tea.

Some days, the sunny ones mainly, it was a bohemian rural idyll. We had discussions about politics as we dug. Friendships were made and one or two great romances forged. There was plenty of heartache – and arguments too. It was the stuff of life.

The garden was even featured in the Lily Savage programme Life Swaps on BBC2. Jenny and Roxanne, the two women who started the garden and did most of the hard work setting it up, lived in an automated house of the future for a week while their swappees came to work on the field. My favourite line from the resulting TV programme came as one of the participants berated the vegetables: ‘Why are you so slow?’

At the risk of sounding like someone who has never quite got over his first love, I haven’t experienced the same feeling of contentment and connection to a piece of land since. Before I worked there I never imagined that gardening could bring together so many elements of life. Even when it rained, when the water soaked through our waterproofs to our skin, when the wind blew the clouds over us like dandelion seeds in a storm, it was still the best. And we got to sell basil to a rock god. Party on, dude.

Now go back another twelve years. It’s 1984. I’ve never heard of Robert Plant. I’m on a bus back from Lincoln, having just experienced my first fast-food-induced food poisoning. I don’t know why I’m ill. I’m an ignorant fourteen-year-old. A teenager obsessed by the Golden Arches. I’m fat and furious. I live in the middle of nowhere and every time I go near a city I have to get my fix. I’m part of the emerging culture of obesity. A trendsetter. Ahead of my time. I’m the only fatty in the village.

Despite my weight problem, I manage to garden a little vegetable plot with one of my friends. I keep the accounts. We buy seeds and fertiliser. We reap a huge harvest of vegetables, some of which we sell to the local shop. When we come to work out the accounts at the end of the season, the fertiliser has taken up most of the profit. It puts me off gardening. I go back to playing Football Manager on my Amstrad 464.

Then, somewhere between 1984 and 1996, I think I was abducted by organic-loving Led-Zeppelin-listening aliens.

If I can go organic, anyone can.

I own my own piece of land now. It’s no Chelsea show garden but it’s mine and I love it. I enter my garden and immediately want to slow down to the pace of a snail. I take it all in. And see what thoughts are thrown up. More often than not the change of pace is inspiring.

At night, when the garden is as quiet as a mouse, I like listening to the sound of ivy crack under the weight of snails, and watching bats swing in and out of the street light opposite, devouring moths with pendulum efficiency.

When I look up through the wood behind my plot and see thousands of insects illuminated in the shafts of light that come through to the garden, I am reminded of how much life there is on planet Earth. They look like dust particles caught in a cinema projection, but they seem as wonderful as any image you might see on a silver screen. At night, when the garden is as quiet as a mouse, I like listening to the sound of ivy crack under the weight of snails, and watching bats swing in and out of the street light opposite, devouring moths with pendulum efficiency. During the day I watch spitfire house martins picking off daytime flyers.

It’s the opposite of fast-paced veggie gardening. I’m in no hurry. I’m more interested in the wildlife in my garden. And creating a space that inspires me and my friends. Organic gardening is not just about growing food. It’s also about creating beauty and biodiversity. This is what I tell myself, as I work my north-facing, damp, shady, slatey-soiled place, berating the vegetables for being too slow. It’s good to eat food grown in your own garden but sometimes I get more out of just watching and listening.

To ease my regret at having lost out in the perfect garden lottery, I have developed a simple hierarchy of choice when it comes to buying fresh vegetables. I have a box of vegetables delivered every week. I supplement the box with a few things from an organic market stall and a local shop owned by an organic meat farmer. If all else fails I go to the supermarket.

As if this choice wasn’t enough, my friends take pity on my shade-dwelling self and offer me vegetables from their own sun-kissed plots (which is a bit of a laugh anyway, living in Wales as we do). These vegetables always taste the best, perhaps because they are usually cooked or eaten raw straight from the plot. Despite my best teenage intentions I seem to have landed in community-spirited gardening nirvana.

As the adverts say, it doesn’t stop there. We have a fantastically well-organised seed-swap group to keep favourite varieties of plants going, a wide selection of organic plots to visit and one of the UK’s oldest Soil Association-approved vegetable plots, run by Roger MacLennan at The Centre for Alternative Technology. We have people selling organic cut flowers, others growing more salad than you can shake a stick at. Every other person seems to be a gardener. Frankly I feel inadequate.

And everyone wants to give you something or offer you some advice. It’s as if organic gardeners in my area have gone through some sort of harmony realignment device and come out the other side wanting to help people. To be part of this community is uplifting and exciting.

But the truly amazing thing is that there’s nothing particularly unusual about our scene. Go to almost any area of the country (and world) and you will find something similar going on. Frankly, my teenage self would be horrified by this slow food revolution. And none of it franchised! Just ordinary people coming together to make food important again.

Every which way you care to look there’s some amazing activity going on in Britain: 300 organic box schemes, 250 farmers’ markets, 1,000 community gardens, 59 city farms, 75 school farms, 500,000 volunteer gardeners, thousands of organic allotmenteers…the list goes on.

St Ann’s Allotment Gardens in Nottingham, one of the biggest and oldest in the country, boasts a thriving list of community enterprises benefiting everyone from nursery-age children to the long-term unemployed. Ragman’s Lane farm in Gloucestershire has taught generation after generation of organic gardeners. Ludlow has declared itself a Cittàslow centre for good living, creating in the town an atmosphere conducive to appreciating quality over speed in all aspects of life. In Cornwall the real Eden project is going on at Ken Fern’s Plants for a Future in Lostwithiel. Here they’re testing a new system of horticulture called perennial edible or forest gardening that could help us to garden successfully in conditions of climate change. In Totnes Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust is doing the same. In Kent Iain Tolhurst is developing new ways to garden without recourse to artificial or animal-related by-products. Coventry has the Heritage Seed Library and Garden Organic (HDRA); Bristol, The Soil Association and the ethical bank, Triodos; London, Fresh and Wild organic food shops; Keighley, The Ecology Building Society. Every part of Britain has an emerging network of community-inspired organic businesses and volunteer organisations.

Why is all this happening? I think it’s because people have rediscovered what it’s like to be part of something. Whether it’s a community or a local group or a movement. It’s fun and it feels like you’re doing something vitally important. It’s bringing people together to combat loss of biodiversity, social injustice and, the biggest threat to our culture, global climate change.

If I was abducted by aliens, it happened metaphorically, one night in 1991 – the first time I visited The Centre for Alternative Technology, or CAT as it is generally known. In those days you arrived at CAT via a ten-minute walk up an unlit, unpaved driveway shaded by trees. I climbed the path with fifteen friends from Hull University (we were all volunteering for the weekend). When we emerged from the trees at the top of the drive we entered a starlit courtyard of stone buildings. It was the first time starlight took my breath away.

A small handmade wooden sign directed us to our billet for the weekend – an unpretentious little wooden hut I later found out was a reclaimed exhibit from the 1976 Ideal Home Show. It was called Tea Chest. There was no one around. It was like a fairytale house. I half expected a little hobgoblin to come out shaking a stick at me. We opened the door and right in front of us laid out on an old wooden table was a beautiful homemade cake with a little note attached to it. The note said: ‘Help yourself.’ Some people say how notes like ‘I love you’ or ‘Will you marry me?’ changed their lives. For me it was ‘Help yourself’. With those two little words I was hooked. If this was organic living, count me in.

Visiting CAT for the first time was like pushing back the coats at the back of the wardrobe and stepping into Narnia.

Visiting CAT for the first time was like pushing back the coats at the back of the wardrobe and stepping into Narnia. I couldn’t believe such a place existed. Here were people who acted on their beliefs, not in a highminded fashion, but in a very practical down-to-earth way. They would show the world it was possible and preferable to live an organic lifestyle by doing it. By building houses with wood instead of concrete, by generating their own power using renewable energy, by growing their own organic food. Even by baking homemade cakes for complete strangers. Luxury items might have been scarce but they had plenty of passion and nerve. And they had community.

Through 70s’ recession and 80s’ economic miracle, the workers at CAT just carried on ploughing their own furrow. Showing that you didn’t have to buy in to what the rest of the world had to offer. You could do something different. They weren’t the only people to go against the prevailing wisdom. In the late 60s and early 70s organisations that have become household names were started in cramped offices all over Britain: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, The Soil Association, The Henry Doubleday Research Association (now Garden Organic).

But CAT has always been a little bit different. Out on a limb in Wales, hidden from view almost, it had the opportunity to test the alternatives without anyone really noticing. At least that was the intention. But even by 1976, within the first two years of its existence CAT attracted visitors. A trickle at first, then a steady stream of curious people, all wanting to know what was going on at the disused quarry in Machynlleth. Even TV execs became interested. They dispatched Blue Peter presenters and the Why Don’t You? team to find out what you could do if you switched off your television set and did something less boring instead. Royalty came. First Prince Philip and then his son Charles. All the time CAT, or The Quarry as it became known, carried on doing what its founder Gerard Morgan Grenville set out to do – show that alternatives were not only possible but preferable.

And now the alternatives have come of age. The Soil Association represents the fastest-growing agricultural sector in Britain. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth feature in just about every news broadcast. Garden Organic (HDRA) has the support of our leading garden horticulturalists. And CAT helps hundreds of thousands of people every year find practical, positive solutions to environmental problems.

The non-organic world is a place I will not go back to. Despite the CS Lewis analogy, I think the organic world is the more real. It is why I live.

When I was seventeen my A-level history teacher told me of a book that started ‘come with me as we rush headlong towards the conclusion’. I can’t remember the title of the book but the quote obviously made an impression on me because it’s stuck in my head for nineteen years. I can’t promise such a breathless experience as that, Mrs Hedley, if you’re reading this, but I can say that this gardening book is unique.

This book goes beyond the realms of other organic gardening reference books by treating gardening as the starting point for a whole organic lifestyle. We show you how to garden organic and live organic. We believe you can’t value organic living more highly than when you work a garden. Working a garden helps you appreciate why slow food is better than fast. Why home-grown is better than bought. And why seasonal is better than imported. A garden is like Google. A question answered with every hit.

CAT has three important words in its mission statement: to inspire, inform and enable. I hope The Organic Garden does just that too.

Ten principles of organic gardening

I want to start with a story – if you are sitting comfortably.

Once upon a time a contented shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier kept a flock of sheep alive on a hillside of wind-blown soil, in a corner of France almost lost and best forgotten. There were no trees on this land, nor were there any of the joys that trees would have brought with them. There were no springs of water and no streams. No plants. Or animals to eat them. And as there was nothing there to take pleasure or profit from, there were no people either. Apart, that is, from those who had to live there, who had no choice in the matter. And of these people most were as harsh and bitter as the wind that swept through the gaps in the walls of their blank stone houses.

Although he could have been easily discouraged by this landscape, Elzéard was not interested in the reality that was. Only with the reality that was yet to be. Content to be alone, not bitter or lonely in his isolation, longing for nothing, Elzéard spent his unoccupied hours planting acorns – wherever he found an empty desolate spot that deserved to be occupied by timber and leaves. With no wife or family to occupy his time, nor matters of important business to attend to, nor entertainment to distract him, with the years on his side, he realised he could plant a forest, and did so.

As the acorns grew into saplings and the saplings into trees, he noticed how the raindrops no longer ran along the surface of the compacted soil to puddle the hillside with damp craters. But instead ran down the leaves and the branches and the trunks of his oaks, into the soil, where the water stayed, until the earth could hold no more. Then it bubbled its way out again, through springs and into one of the many streams that now ran through the forest.

When the leaves fell he watched the worms and the ants break them up and drag them into the earth. He witnessed plants erupt from seeds he had not planted.

When the leaves fell he watched the worms and the ants break them up and drag them into the earth. He witnessed plants erupt from seeds he had not planted. He did not care how they had got there. Perhaps they had re-awakened from a deep slumber, or maybe they were fresh migrants arrested in flight from some other place and shackled to the earth by his trees. That they were there was the only thing that mattered, and that insects came to feed on their nectar and that birds came to feed on the insects. And that owls returned to hunt the mice that ate the seeds of the flowers. And that rabbits and deer came to eat the plants. And finally that humans returned in their tens of thousands to take pleasure in the amazing and mysterious natural phenomenon that was Elzéard Bouffier’s forest.

The original version of The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono is a golden cloth of literature compared to the tailored square of material I have presented above. I haven’t really done it justice, so make it the next book you buy. What I will try to do in this book is give you the skills and ambition to have your own back garden Elzéard Bouffier moment. Not to plant a forest! Just to take a dead space and transform it into something living and wonderful. A good place for people, plants and animals.

One: create space

Space: as in, a place to be. Gardeners grow flowers and vegetables and fruit and herbs and trees and shrubs, but over all these things they create space.

They bring together disparate elements and make something whole and beautiful. They learn which combinations of plants and materials work well together and which don’t. They appreciate how space can change the way we feel, defining our moods, inspiring and enchanting us. We know when we have stepped into a beautiful garden space. We can see how much love and work has been dedicated to it. We get an idea of what sort of person the gardener is. The gardener gives more time and attention to detail to a space than any other type of person. Unlike an interior designer who leaves when the job is finished, the gardener’s job is never completely done and nor does a gardener want it to be. Though we rest between work, a garden space never sits still. Plants grow and die back, and have illnesses and unwelcome pest visitors. The garden space changes from day to day. We watch what’s happening to our plants and tend to those which have succumbed to one of life’s little mishaps. This is the joy of caring for a garden space.

Two: soil is everything

Before you plant a single thing, get your soil care right. Plants need nutrients from compost to grow strong and prosper. Some plants will grow on poor soils but the ones we demand to grow most often, the vegetables, the fruit and the cultivated flowers, need to eat a lot of food to grow. Chemical gardeners use artificial fertilisers to feed their plants. Organic gardeners use compost and other soil improvers.

Compost improves the structure of the soil, helping soils to retain water when plants need it most, and provides food for composting creatures. Healthy soils produce healthy plants less likely to be attacked by pests and disease.

One of the most striking displays at the CAT visitor centre is a simple row of vegetable beds, one next to the other, each one filled with a different quantity of slate, soil and compost. The first bed is made up entirely of slate waste. The second bed is just slate and soil. The third bed slate, soil and compost.

Plants grown in the first bed are always small and weedy, and are attacked readily by slugs and other pests. Plants grown in the second bed are only slightly better served by the soil than those in the first. Only in the third bed, the bed stacked high with soil and compost, are plants able to flourish as they should.

Three: grow a little food

Food grown at home is better for you and better for the planet. Raw food picked fresh from the plant is better for you than cooked. And there are always more foods to eat than we ever imagine.

When I moved to Wales I fell amongst inspirational people. Every single day of the year Roger MacLennan and his volunteers prepared for the whole of the CAT staff (and still do) enough salad for each of us to fill a large plate. Amongst the salads were leaves I had never tasted before and flowers I would never have thought you could eat. Each one of these plants was raised without a single chemical and with more or less no external energy required, by which I mean materials and resources brought in from beyond the garden. The compost was made on site. The wood for materials came from hedgerows around the garden. Even some of the tools were homemade. Amongst the rows of vegetables, Roger planted flowers to attract predator insects and around the edges he dug ponds for frogs to venture forth from and eat slugs. The food travelled approximately 200 metres to reach the table (at most!). And each day we sat together, talked and enjoyed what had been grown for us.

Four: don’t garden alone

Wildlife is at the heart of your organic garden, so enlist the support of your garden allies. A true organic gardener assesses how to work with nature to get the most from their garden without having to be its constant guardian. The garden is more important to those species that occupy it full-time, so make a garden for those who always use it. If you do it right the pollinating insects will bring you flowers. The composting creatures will improve your soil. The predators will eat the pests. Garden for other species and they will garden for you.

Five: grow for ornament

Vegetable plots are only part of the story. Ornamental gardens can be organic, and edible and non-edible plants can be grown together in beautiful spaces. And beautiful spaces change lives. We are only beginning to understand how bad spaces ruin lives, but with each passing year there are fresh studies that reinforce the commonsense view that people with access to beautiful spaces are happier. Just as we see studies showing that young people perform better at school if they have access to healthy food, so we are beginning to see how people of all ages perform better in beautiful environments. In Chicago, crime rates have fallen dramatically in areas where new parks have been created. It seems that people have more respect for each other and their local area when they are under less stress. And access to beautiful spaces reduces stress.

When I was twenty-six I met my friend and long-time collaborator Chloë Ward. Chloë is a true gardener, by which I mean it is her main occupation. Much of what I know about gardening I owe to her. Chloë is one of those rare people who can see beyond that which exists today to think about what might be possible in the future. Like Elzéard Bouffier, she plants for her own enjoyment but with an eye on what might be in the years to come. Many of the pictures you’ll see in this book are taken at the Garden Organic (HDRA) gardens in Yalding, where she formerly worked as deputy head gardener. Chloë’s particular mission is to grow edible plants in spaces that are designed not as vegetable gardens but as ornamental landscapes, mixing the ornamental and the edible. A fact borne out by her writing on food gardens in this book, including the section on the up-and-coming and relatively new technique known as forest gardening, a subject about which she is one of only a handful of people qualified to write on.

Six: value lies in the land

July 2006 saw two of the hottest days ever recorded in Britain. The beautiful damp, lush green Wales I know and love started to look like the Mediterranean. First, CAT gardener Roger MacLennan recorded the highest temperature in his garden in twenty years. Then the next day the record was broken. In 2006 the Welsh rain failed us. A temporary blip or a sign of things to come?

The question that concerns me most is how can we garden and live in an era of climate change without losing the peace, security and good living we enjoy today? As the government’s chief advisor on the issue has already suggested, climate change is now a matter of national emergency. Perhaps we need to conjure up the spirit of that other great national gardening effort, the Dig for Victory campaign of the Second World War, to look forward to our better world. To rekindle a love of gardening in a time of global crisis would be a wonderful thing.

But what kind of gardening should we aspire to? In the future, will each of us need to garden for self-sufficiency and put our leisure pursuits to one side, just as millions of people did during the Second World War? Or is this a different kind of crisis, where it is more important to use our gardens as little centres for well-being and low-carbon lifestyles?

When I’m in my garden I buy less music, I rent fewer DVDs, I don’t go out so much. I stay in, I dig, mend, make, plant, plan. I travel less. Use less electricity. Need no space heating. I invite people round and we party. It’s all a way of cutting my carbon use.

I figure if I can build a good life for myself here, one that is continually refreshed by new experiences of my garden, landscape and home town, I don’t need to travel or pursue carbon-costly activities. I’m trying to kick carbon addiction by creating a low-carbon lifestyle and my life is all the richer for it. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but my garden helps me keep within what the carbon experts say is a global fair share of carbon emissions – 2.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to a UK average of 10 tonnes – the amount of carbon every person in the world could produce each year without causing global climate change. I’ve long since given up on the idea of total self-sufficiency. CAT’s Peter Harper once calculated the productivity of his garden. He weighed everything that came out of it – vegetables, fruit, garden waste, wood, the lot – for a year. He wanted to see in percentage terms how self-sufficient an average garden could be. He calculated that his garden could generate around 0.5 per cent of his annual space-heating demand in wood cuttings and about £140 worth of fruit and vegetables (at 1997 prices). After removing the cost of seeds and plants from this total, the economic value of his garden amounted to 0.9 per cent of total household expenditure. The true value of a garden lay not in its economic output, however, but ‘in terms of entertainment, therapy, exercise, education, contribution to environmental quality, nutrition, convenience, gourmet delights and sheer connectedness with the Earth’. In other words, all things that are priceless.

Self-sufficiency is a grand ideal but it may not be what is needed during this period of global climate change. My friends Tom and Lisa Brown (pictured above left) have a smallholding and grow almost all their own foods, make endless amounts of honey, jams and chutneys, and generally lead what you might describe in the old cliché as ‘The Good Life’. But they have a lifetime of learning under their belts and several acres of land in which to make their dream possible. The good life is a good life but it is also a full-time occupation. When I walk around Tom and Lisa’s place I am struck by their absolute commitment to the value of land, and their place in the history of the land they now have stewardship over.

In this period of climatic instability we will need to care for our own little patches with equal passion. Bad weather erodes soil and weakens our plants. But if we know our land well we can help to do our bit to keep it strong and healthy. If we can guide our own gardens through the traumas that climate change may bring, we will have played our part.

Seven: plant for biodiversity

To keep a check on the villains in your garden, fill it up with lots of different species of plants. Gardens are healthier if they have a large variety of different species and plants are less likely to suffer from disease.

In the flatlands of Lincolnshire I lived amongst space that was more or less dead for nature. Field upon field of agricultural crops stretched out around my village. Every summer millions of black flies blew across the open hedgeless country into our gardens. Here they would rest upon our clothes on the line, so much so that we would have to wash them all over again. They fell between gaps in our window frames and filled up the aluminium corners like ground black pepper. They got into the roots of our hair and into the corners of our eyes. The worst job I could imagine in my childhood was mowing the lawn on a hot day, one hand on the sticky vibrating plastic handle of the hover mower, the other brushing away the sweat and the flies from my face.

And all beyond me I could see the flat, open, soulless fields filled with their single crops stretching out for miles and tractors showering chemicals over them. If you were a black fly where would you go? Beneficial insects like biodiversity and pests hate it.

Eight: make a social space

Make gardens for people as well as for plants and animals. Gardens are not just for wildlife or food production. They are social spaces too and need to be designed for humans.

As a gardener I’m most interested in atmosphere, purpose and technique – what a garden feels like to be in, what it will be used for and how I can make it work horticulturally. We need a garden to do different things for us. A garden space does not just cater for one emotion or for one person or activity. It must mean different things for us at different times. For me a garden is a foil to my ever-changing moods. It’s a social space when I want it to be. A quiet space whenever I need it. A place to be active. A place to be still. A sanctuary. An invigorator. One male reviewer of my last book called it too feminine for any red-blooded Englishman. I wasn’t offended by the criticism. His wife loved it.

I’m altogether comfortable with my feminine side. A garden requires a long-term commitment to care and nurture. You can get all macho about gardening, but I think it’s a mistake. If your only relationship with a garden is to do with strength and posturing, you might as well abandon subtlety, suggestion and the idea that a garden can cater for more than one mood.

Nine: go local

Whenever you can’t meet your own needs, support your local gardening enterprises. Small organic nurseries are a wellspring of local plant knowledge as well as being part of the glue that binds a community together. Local craftspeople can supply us with garden furniture, bird houses and feeders, fencing materials and other garden paraphernalia. Market gardens and box schemes can deliver much of our food.

My friend Sue Harper has her own cut flower business. It’s called Sweet Loving Flowers. She wants to grow local cut flowers to reduce the need for those flown in from the four corners of the world. Sue’s plants are hand grown and tended organically on a small, oneacre, south-facing field in Wales where, contrary to some of my occasional moans, the sun does shine. Sue was once the gardener for the famed River Café in London but moved back to Wales about five years ago to bring up her child. Her enterprise is tiny compared to some of the multinational companies that import a continuous flow of chemically produced, hot-house-grown, air-miles-laden, environmentally damaging plants from abroad. But she is only one of a handful of people meeting the growing demand for organic, local cut flowers.

Work with materials that are local to your area and learn how to fashion some of the things you need in your garden from natural, sustainable materials. Natural materials grown close to home are a fantastic and beautiful resource. As you will see later, this could include beautiful woodland materials such as willow, hazel and oak, or natural earthen products such as slate, local stone or clay. Very often they are also materials that the average gardener would feel happy to learn to work with. Some of the techniques for using them are very pleasing, almost therapeutic.

Half of garden design is about choosing plants. The other half is about materials and structures. The impact on the environment of buying a few plants is relatively small compared to the impact of some garden materials, furniture and accessories. The atmosphere and ecological footprint of a garden can be spoilt by poor material choice. Make sure you are not creating a paradise at home by destroying one somewhere else.

Ten: what we do in our gardens matters

It matters to somebody somewhere, even when we think it doesn’t.

Many people have changed the direction of my life. Some of them I’ve never met. Top of this list is Chico Mendes. Chico Mendes worked in a small area of rainforest in a remote region of Brazil. His job was to extract a harvest of natural rubber from trees – a job he could do without harming the trees. Chico supplemented his income by collecting other things from the forest too – Brazil nuts, herbs and fruits. He believed in harvesting from the forest in a way that would keep the forest intact for ever. Being totally reliant on it he was horrified to hear that his area of rainforest was to be cut down. Faced with the loss of his own livelihood, he organised a peaceful campaign of protest and resistance. He was sitting on the steps of his home when two gunmen hired by loggers shot him dead.

Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soil?

What could be so important to take the life of a man like Chico Mendes? The sad reality is that the wood Chico died to protect was turned into charcoal, garden furniture and plywood fences. It appeared in chain stores around Britain and we bought it.

How extraordinary it must have been to garden a rainforest. To walk amongst giants every day. To be no bigger than an ant nor older than a child in comparison to the living things around you. How brave to go into your garden every morning wondering whether you will return to sit on the steps of your home each night. As gardeners we can imagine how it must have been for Chico Mendes as he heard the bulldozers move onwards through the forest. Wondering when his garden would be next.

I can picture the landscape after the bulldozers moved on. It doesn’t take much imagination. We’ve all seen the photographs. Can there be anything more ugly than the jagged edges of felled tree stumps poking up from empty soils?

But however vivid these pictures are, they still don’t tell the whole story. We might think that within a few years farmers are happily ploughing and harvesting crops on this new landscape but the truth is that once a rainforest has been removed from a piece of land nothing on that land is ever quite the same again.

Rainforest soil relies on rainforests. Once they are removed the soil loses its fertility. It is a story that 300 million slash-and-burn farmers know all over the tropical world. Each one cuts, farms and moves on, chasing ever-decreasing circles of fertility until they are forced off the land altogether, into city slums. This is competition at its most brutal. Competition amongst men for land, and with nature for fertility.

Making ethical decisions

You’re going to need to be equipped to start living organically, so I thought it would be helpful to list the thought processes that go through my mind when I’m making an ethical decision. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a puritan and never buy anything brand new. It’s just that I like to think carefully before I buy anything.

Before you buy…DIY

 Do I need it? This is a classic example of an obvious question often overlooked. How many times do you buy something on impulse and then realise that you could have done very well without it? This may seem a bit puritan to people who like shopping without boundaries, but the first step to ethical living is think before you engage credit card.

 Can I make it at home? In Chapter one I rattle on about a garden bench I made. It’s not a particularly amazing bench but, because I made it, it’s the best thing since unsliced bread. Making stuff yourself is the best ecological option. You can choose the materials yourself and put it together in the least energy wasteful way.

 If I can’t make it myself, can one of my friends or swap buddies make it or offer me another solution? Check out www.freecycle.org for a national network of swapcrazed freeloaders.

 If I have to buy something, can I buy recycled, secondhand or reused?

 If I have to buy new, can I buy products that are sustainable, local, natural and carry an approved symbol? (Be it a Soil Association, Forest Stewardship Council or other ethical standard.)

 If I can’t buy local or natural, can I buy sustainable from the UK or Europe and from an ethically minded national company?

 If I can’t buy from Europe, can I buy fair trade, organic and sustainable from developing countries?

 If I can’t buy within these criteria, should I bite the bullet and buy it or is there another solution I hadn’t thought of?

This sounds like a laborious process but actually after a while you can make these decisions quite quickly. It’s just another skill to learn.

Buying new products

If you’re buying new stuff how do you know what you’re getting is really green, organic or ethical? There’s a whole host of different symbols and standard-setting organisations out there but which are the ones that ensure the highest standards? I’ve tried to pull together the best symbols and organisations here, give you an idea of what each of them stands for, and a contact point to make further enquiries.

Understanding ethical symbols

Soil Association. The Soil Association symbol covers things such as food, compost, liquid fertilisers, seeds and plants. A full list of organic certifying bodies is available from www.defra.gov.uk/farm/organic/standards/index.htm. The Soil Association is the most widely recognised symbol, and comes from the grass roots organic movement: www.soilassociation.org.

Organic Farmers and Growers. One of the other main organic symbols. Check www.organicfarmers.org.uk for full standards.

Vegan Organic Network. This symbol guarantees that your food comes from a supplier that does not use animal products to grow food. Support Vegan Organic Network to combat climate change and for help in growing your own food the green, clean and cruelty-free way: www.veganorganic.net.

Vegan Society. Guarantees products are free from animal products and have not been made using any processes that might have harmed animals: www.vegansociety.com.

Vegetarian Society Approved. Signifies products have met the following criteria: free from animal flesh, contains only free-range eggs, GMO free, cruelty free and no cross contamination with non-vegetarian ingredients. www.vegsoc.org.

Leaf Marque. Affordable food produced by farmers who are committed to improving the environment for the benefit of wildlife and the countryside: www.leafmarque.com.

Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Internationally recognised standard for sustainable and well-managed fisheries: www.msc.org.

Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Indicates products which contain wood that comes from a forest that is well managed according to strict environmental, social and economic standards: www.fsc-uk.org. See also page 48.

European Energy Label. Manufacturers of certain household electricity products must label these products with information on energy consumption and performance: www.defra.gov.uk/environment/consumerprod/mtp.

European Ecolabel. Europe-wide award for non-food products that minimise impact on the environment: www.defra.gov.uk/environment/consumerprod/ecolabel.

Rainforest Alliance. Goods from farms and forests that are managed in an environmentally and socially responsible way: www.rainforest-alliance.org.

Energy Saving Recommended. This logo is your guarantee that the product will save energy, cost less to run and help the environment. Managed by the Energy Saving Trust: www.est.org.uk/recommended.

UK Fuel Economy Label. Shows how much carbon dioxide a car emits: www.lowcvp.org.uk.

VOC Labels. Indicate the relative content of harmful VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) in paints and associated products. VOCs cause air pollution and may be harmful to human health: www.coatings.org.uk.

Mobius Loop. Indicates that part of a product can be recycled where facilities are available. The inclusion of a figure shows the percentage of recycled material that has been used to make a product. www.biffa.co.uk/getrecycling/symbols.php.

FAIRTRADE Mark. Products that meet international Fairtrade standards. These include long-term contracts and a price that covers the cost of sustainable production and living. Some money also goes to community groups: www.fairtrade.org.uk.

Reading between the symbols

Organised standards are almost always the best way to ensure that products are ethically up to scratch. However, there are some exceptions. Many local suppliers in my area have not been through the certification process, but because I know them and what materials they use and how they grow and harvest their materials and plants, I know I am getting an environmentally sound product. Mail-order catalogues and websites do not always brand products with a logo but use words such as 100 per cent recycled or made with organic materials. If you’re not sure, ask the supplier which standards they meet and decide on face value whether you want to buy the product – with or without the logo.

Wherever possible in this book I’ve tried to make suggestions for new products to save you the trouble of doing all the research, but products and companies change all the time so please use the information I have provided as a guide rather than an absolute recommendation. Also I am one writer working alone. If you have any doubts concerning a product or a company then you should refer to those organisations whose job it is to monitor standards and provide information (see above).

When you’re looking for a supplier, use these questions to know if they really are what they say they are. Ask them where do their products come from? What is their policy on recycling? What are they doing to reduce CO2 emissions? There are plenty of great ethical companies now who share your values. It takes time to find good suppliers but often the rewards are much greater than the effort. I get an enormous buzz from discovering a new company selling a new range of well-thought-out products.

Where to go for independent information and advice

CAT provides one of the best information services in the country. It has a huge database of contacts working in the environmental sector. CAT does not set standards or review company performances but will act on complaints made about companies, which can result in their removal from the database. Phone their information line on + 44 (0) 1654 705 989.

Ethical Consumer magazine is the single most important source of information about products, services and companies available to the average consumer. Each month it analyses a different set of products for their environmental and ethical performance. A must read.

Gardening Which? magazine does not necessarily focus on environmental and ethical considerations so much as quality and performance of products, but sustainability is also about how well a product performs and lasts. It does have special environmental features and as a general read for the average gardener it is extremely good.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has extremely strict buying criteria for all of its products. Each supplier has to fill out a ream of forms before the organisation will stock its goods.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth both produce wide-ranging reports on ethical and environmental standards and whistle-blow the illegal activities of polluting companies worldwide.

Other magazines: Organic Gardening, Permaculture, The Organic Way – the magazine of Garden Organic (HDRA) – The Ecologist, New Consumer, Free Range, Growing Green International from VON and Clean Slate – CAT’s membership mag – are all good sources of information.

Useful websites include www.ethical-junction.org, www.greenguide.co.uk and www.reuze.co.uk.

Buying tools – used or new?

Before you buy anything new go along to a local car boot sale, ask around your mates and check on www.freecycle.org. Don’t buy anything until you’ve exhausted all these secondhand options. Apart from secateurs – which have to be clean and sharp to prevent the spread of plant diseases – and some specialist tools (of which more in a moment), all these tools are just as effective secondhand. Tools need to be rigorous and tough. Check that handles are strong and that the blade or prongs do not bend easily. Some cheap hand forks and trowels bend easily. Press them onto a surface to test them.

There are thousands of unwanted tools cluttering up sheds all over Britain and some companies are getting into the recycling spirit by reclaiming, reconditioning and selling them on. These ‘vintage’ tools are sometimes difficult to get hold of and have special features not normally available. I curse the day I missed an opportunity to buy a reconditioned Victorian daisy grubber from Wales-based group Tools for Self Reliance Cymru (www.tfsrcymru.org.uk). It was a lovely piece of work that would have made my weeding a lot easier. Buying secondhand tools saves energy and materials and avoids difficult ethical questions about where the tools came from.

When to buy new

In some situations it’s worth buying new. People with back problems or disabilities that prevent them using run-of-the-mill secondhand tools can access good ergonomic tools at www.carryongardening.org.uk, the website of Thrive, an organisation specialising in horticultural therapy. One example is the Swoe cultivator – an extremely useful type of hoe that looks like a golf club. It’s lightweight, but extremely strong and can clear weeds on the backwards and the forwards motion. Turned on its edge it can be used to dig holes for planting, to draw seed drills, and for ridging soil. It is not necessarily designed for people with disabilities but its flexibility and lightness make it a particularly handy tool. The excellently named Lazy Dog Tool Company produce handmade back-saving tools in Yorkshire. Their RIP (removal of individual plants) system keeps bending to a minimum. I also found something called a speed weeder (a small hand tool that enables you to hook weeds out under the root; especially useful for removing weeds from walls and the cracks between paving), which is made in the UK for the Gardeners’ Royal Benevolent Society.

Many new tools are made in developing countries. Most of the time it’s impossible to know in what conditions these tools have been manufactured. It is certainly true to say that health and safety regulations for workers are nowhere near as strong as ours; similarly environmental regulations will be less stringent. Some high-street retailers have made efforts to improve the rights of the workers who supply their tools. B&Q has a long-term goal of transforming the working conditions of suppliers and reducing the environmental impact of their work. If you want to know how good the claims are you need to check out Ethical Consumer magazine’s website www.ethicalconsumer.org.uk.

Most power tools get used for a total of just fifteen minutes in their entire lifetime so cut down on waste by renting from hire shops, borrowing from friends or asking on a swap shop. Of the ten companies investigated by the magazine Ethical Consumer, Draper came out top, followed by The Stanley Works and Makita Corp. and then Black & Decker. The WEEE Directive (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) requires member states of the European Union to set up collection systems for all old electrical equipment by the end of 2006.

Basic garden tool kit

One fork for digging out weeds, turning over soil, lifting plants, forking in compost and manure

One spade for digging holes, moving soil, making trenches

One rake for levelling soil ready for planting seeds, removing some lawn weeds, gathering grass clippings, etc

One hoe for removing weeds, marking seed trenches

One hand trowel for digging small holes and removing some weeds One hand fork for removing easy-to-lift weeds

One pair of secateurs for light pruning

One small pruning saw for removing slightly thicker unwanted growth

One pair of scissors for cutting flowers, string, etc

One knife for removing difficult weeds from patios, walls, etc

One sharpening tool for keeping your cutting tools sharp

Chapter one My space: planning your garden

My granddad detested disorganisation of any sort. He kept all his files in immaculate order and planned everything exceedingly well. If my granddad was writing this book he would expect you to prepare detailed plans of your garden on paper to which you could refer later. And you would need to work out exactly how much spare time you had, and whether or not it was feasible to do the things you wanted to. I am ashamed to say that I have not inherited his sense of order or preparation, I can’t draw and I’m not too good at keeping records. What I can do is appreciate how the seasons change the garden, work out what type of soil I’ve got and what plants I can grow, shape the garden to suit my needs and see that the wildlife get their fair share. None of this is difficult. It just takes time, knowledge and a sense of calm understanding. I tend to keep all the information about my garden in my head and move it around from time to time to come up with the next stage of my slightly baggy long-term development plan. Your impression of a garden changes over time and you learn things that you couldn’t possibly have imagined when you first encountered the space.

Take a gap year

Unless you’ve just bought a new-build house, you’ll come into a garden as a small link in a great chain of people who have come before and who will enter after. New-build gardens come without any of the emotional and physical clutter of other people’s plants, sheds, ornaments and rubbish to worry about. If you’re starting work on an old garden, it’s rarely advisable to tear the whole lot down and start again. It takes up more energy, materials, time and money and is not environmentally, financially and emotionally sustainable. Decide what you can live with and work with what you’ve got.

Whether your garden is new or old, it takes a good year to get to know it well enough to really start pulling a plan together. Plants are either sun-loving, shade-tolerant or semi-shade tolerant and the shade cast in your garden will vary from month to month over the whole year (see page 68). You’ll need to learn how other weather conditions such as rain, wind and frost affect the garden (see pages 72–85), because they will all affect plant growth too. If you’re planning to put in fencing, hedging or any structural elements, you’ll need to site them carefully to make the most of these conditions (see page 38). You’ll also need to know what kind of soil you have – clay, sandy, boggy, dry, stony, rich, poor, acid or alkaline – and what sort of plants will grow there (bog-loving, drought-tolerant, acid- or alkaline-loving, and so on). For the sake of clarity I’ve put all this important information in Chapter three.

Plant editing

After about two years of being in my current garden I’ve really started to appreciate all the wildflowers that come up. I haven’t had to do anything to encourage them – just leave them be. In fact, in large parts of my garden I’ve developed a policy of editing what’s there naturally rather than buying and planting seeds. This means digging up those weeds that will become invasive (see pages 190–207) and leaving those wildflowers I know I want. Foxgloves (Digitalis), cambrian poppies (Meconopsis cambrica) and red campion (Silene dioica) are all mainstays in my garden and they’re all fantastic for pollinating insects. They are also resistant to attack from slugs and snails. Editing is a good way to learn about the differences between weeds and wildflowers if you’re just starting to garden.

But editing has obvious limitations. You can’t edit yourself a vegetable patch. Or an orchard. Or a perennial flower border full of your favourite plants. If you want to grow the plants you prefer, rather than those the soil throws up, you have to write your own story – not edit nature’s. This means working out what sort of planting schemes you want, what shape beds to make and how much room to give to each different element within the garden. You’ll also have to decide how to enclose your boundaries and where to put your paths. If your pencil skills are like mine – only fit for French caves – don’t feel you have to draw everything. Keep it in your head. For once it may be better in than out.

Hopefully as you read this book, you’ll get an idea of what sort of plants you might want to put in your garden. If you’re like my mum you’ve probably already overstocked it in your imagination to Kew Garden proportions. Remember to leave room for all the other things you need: paths, seating areas, hot tubs. The last one is optional, obviously, but unless you’re in possession of a Harry Potter broomstick you’ll need the first two. A balance has to be struck between plants and infrastructure. And if you’re starting with a clean sheet you need to plan both at the same time.

Pulling shapes: landscaping and other materials

Most of the hard landscaping materials in my garden were chosen by the previous owner. Luckily he landscaped the garden sensitively, creating terraces using walls made of slate, largely reclaimed from the part of the house he took down to make room for an extension. It must have been a huge job – one that I’m very glad I didn’t have to do. I can live with my hard landscaping, and I don’t intend to change it or add to it. If you’re starting from scratch or want a change, however, you’ll need some eco-options for paths, walls, fences, seating areas and any other random garden features like trellis, arbours, and so on. Perhaps, more than anything else in your garden, it is important to get your landscaping features right. If chosen badly they can make a big impact on your garden and the environment.

Soft landscaping vs. hard landscaping

It is possible to garden entirely with so-called soft landscapes. Soft landscapes are created using living materials and include lawns and grass paths, hedges made using trees, shrubs and other plants, as well as arbours and other living structures made out of trees such as willow. If it is managed sensitively, soft landscaping is mostly more environmentally benign than hard landscaping. Hedges need to be trimmed responsibly and regularly – preferably using power-free tools or power tools that use renewable energy – and can produce a number of useful by-products, such as fruit, poles for staking peas and beans, decorative material, and so on. Lawns and grass paths are lovely to walk on and fairly low maintenance, but be careful how you cut them. A study funded by the Swedish Environment Protection Agency found that using a four-horsepower lawn mower for an hour caused the same amount of pollution as driving a car 150 kilometres. In preference use an electric mower or, even better, a non-powered mower.

Hard landscaping is made from quarried materials or cut from timber and includes decking, walls, fencing and hard paths. Common materials include stone, cut timber, concrete, brick, plastic, metal and glass. Wood is the most environmentally benign material if it is cut from responsibly managed woodland (see information on FSC approval, pages 26–27) or, even better, if it is reclaimed waste wood. Avoid MDF (medium-density fibreboard). It is made using wood and a bonding agent called urea-formaldehyde, a dangerous material described by some as the ‘asbestos of the 90s’. In preference use untreated wood.

Quarried stone usually comes in its raw unprocessed form. Quarrying is hugely destructive of local environments so look for reclaimed materials if you can. If you can’t, use materials that are local and traditional to your area. Unprocessed materials are generally better for the environment because processing usually involves the use of more energy. A prime example is cement, a major component of concrete. Cement has to be burned at 1500°C (worldwide the cement industry creates 10 per cent of all CO2 emissions).

The range of reprocessed materials available to the gardener has increased over the past few years: look out for paving materials made out of reclaimed brick, chipped slate, recycled glass and reclaimed aggregates. A lot of energy is needed to produce glass, and likewise plastic, but both materials are used extensively by the gardener to capture heat and speed up the growth rates of plants. Old windows can be recycled into cloches and although polytunnel plastic wears out after a few years it can then be turned into mini cloches or laid on the soil to heat it up in early spring. Plastic is used extensively to make water butts, watering cans, compost bins, raised beds and other common garden objects. Look for products that are 100 per cent recycled.

Fencing, hedges and walls

Possibly the first thing you need to do in a garden, if it hasn’t been done already, is to fence, wall or hedge it off. A barrier between you and the rest of the world helps to keep out four-legged pests like rabbits, deer and sheep (although will rarely deter foxes and cats); gives shelter and privacy to a garden; and helps to screen out ugly noise and views. Fences and hedges also offer protection from wind, but a solid fence that stops the wind dead is less stable than one that slows the wind speed down. Fencing can cast shade on a garden so you need to strike a balance and plan your materials carefully.

Fencing options

If you’re buying a standard cut-wood fence, the sort of thing found in most garden centres, look for the FSC symbol, as before. A company called Forest Garden supply a huge range of DIY shops and garden centres with a massive range of wood products for the garden, including fencing, gates, sheds, storage boxes, trellis, and so on, using wood cut from FSC-approved UK forests owned by the Forestry Commission. Hurdles are a nice alternative to wire fencing and the more conventional garden fencing in most DIY stores and garden centres. They are made from untreated coppiced wood and can be bought or made at home using the same skills as for rustic furniture-making. The best website I found on the subject was www.allotmentforestry.com. Not only does this have a whole set of wonderful free fact sheets explaining how to make gates, fences, tables, arches, bird tables, hurdles, plant supports and a laptop table, there is also a directory of craftspeople working with coppiced material in England. For more information on fencing, see page 79.

Hedges

NEVER PLANT LEYLAND CYPRESS! Sorry, had to get that out of my system. Leyland cypress (Cupressus leylandii) is a fast-growing conifer that needs to be trimmed to maintain a good hedge, and rarely is. You usually see hedges brown, dying and ugly because the owner panics as they grow and grow and grow…and cuts the top off. Or else you see them more than 6 metres high, from which height they shade everything in sight. See www.hedgeline.org for some truly awful hedges gone wrong and try to avoid doing the same in your garden. I’ve picked out some good hedging trees on page 81: check them out before buying.

Hedging takes a few years to establish and will not keep out pests until it is thick with growth (and even then rabbits may still get through). In the interim use a wire fence as a temporary shield. The height and type of wire fence required varies from pest to pest (see page 216), as does the lengths of the stakes used to support it. For the

Ethical choice: natural finishes

Gone are the days when everyone covered their fences with creosote or white paint as a matter of course. The average can of paint contains fungicides, heavy metals such as cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Titanium dioxide, used in most shades but particularly in ‘brilliant white’, is a possible carcinogen and can cause respiratory problems and skin irritation. Paints also give off VOCs (volatile organic compounds) when drying. VOCs are known to induce eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches and dizziness; some are suspected or known to cause cancer in humans. There is now a range of environmentally sound alternatives for waxing, polishing, painting, decorating and otherwise preserving internal and external surfaces. CAT sells some of them, as does www.greenshop.co.uk and www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk. Brands include Auro, Green Paints, Stuart Furby’s Lime Earth Paints, Ty Mawyr Lime, Eco-strip, Holkham Linseed Paints, Osmo Uk, Earthborn, La Tienda, Treatex and Clearwell Caves.

stakes use local untreated chestnut, which lasts longer in the soil. Bash the stakes in at 2-metre intervals with a sledgehammer and draw the wire as tight as you can before fixing it in place using a hammer and 10-mm fencing staples. For more information on hedges, see pages 80–82.

Making a wall

Walls tend to be made out of earthen materials (i.e. those that come out of the ground), although you do get some very nice walls that mix earthen materials with wood – a technique known as cordwood masonry. If you want a stone wall, research which stone is local to your area and buy accordingly for a wall that fits in with your local environment. Alternatively, use reclaimed brick (www.salvo.co.uk or check with local builders’ merchants), or make your own – see left. Making your own bricks gives you a great sense of pride. Organics is all about gaining confidence by doing it yourself. Avoid using concrete blocks. Many show gardens have experimented with walls made with recycled materials, including old bottles, tin cans, rubble, and so on. These are either built using a binding material such as mortar, or more simply stacked in rows using gabions. Gabions are steel mesh boxes primarily used in the road building and construction industries. Now you can get garden-sized gabions from www.stones3.co.uk. Fill the mesh up with natural stone, reclaimed building rubble or any material that will hold weight.

Cob is used extensively by eco-builders. It is made by mixing subsoil with straw and water, and then pounding or treading it down to form free-standing walls (see page 57). In a similar vein, rammed earth, mud bricks and stabilised earth blocks are all popular natural building materials for walls.

Seating areas and paths

Grass is the most obvious soft landscaping choice for a seating area. If you’ve got a large lawn and want to cut down on the mowing, think of leaving some of it to grow longer into meadow and keep only a small patch of regularly cut lawn for seating. Meadow lawns need only be cut two or three times a year, saving energy and creating a habitat for wildlife (see page 165). You can get different mixes of grass seed nowadays, catering for different uses and sites: www.organiccatalog.com is a good place to start looking. Wiggly Wigglers, www.wigglywigglers.co.uk, have also launched their own cut wildflower turf which you can lay like ordinary turf.

For something a little shorter than a meadow, plant an informal lawn with flowering bulbs. Plant spring bulbs and your lawn will be free of flowers and ready to walk on by the time it comes to summer socialising. Remember that lawns get very scuffed up if you have to do heavy work in the garden. My own lawn is more or less dead but I plan to reseed it with a shade-tolerant seed mix when work is complete.

Woodchip can be used as a non-living soft landscape material for seating areas and paths. It can be laid directly onto the soil, but to ensure seating areas and paths are kept weed free, it’s best to use a permeable geo-textile membrane underneath. The membrane is laid in a single layer and the woodchip poured on top until it covers all the membrane to a depth of at least 5cm. Most garden centres sell woodchip – usually recycled from forest waste. Geo-textile membrane tends to be made from plastic: for a more natural alternative try Hemcore Biomat. This is made in Essex from hemp grown in the UK without the use of pesticides and herbicides.

www.traceytimber.co.uk, sell woodchip made from reused pallets. Biomat is available from www.amenity.co.uk and www.ewburrownursery.co.uk. Try www.rooster.uk.com, www.drgrowgood. co.uk, www.specialistaggregates.co.uk – all sell shells, a by-product of the fishing industry. Recycled glass chippings are available from these sites: www.derbyshireaggregates.com, www.decogem.com and www.rbgc.co.uk. Also try www.stevemassam.co.uk for crushed brick from factory rejects, and www.salvo.co.uk and www.reuze.co.uk.

Woodchip is a low-impact material and will need replacing as it rots. Hard landscaping materials such as timber decking and concrete paving slabs last longer. Both of these can be destructive to the environment: source FSC-approved timber decking or reclaimed materials from salvage yards. Try Ashwell’s Recycled Timber Products, and Wideserve and BPI Recycled Products for recycled decking. A wide range of long-lasting ‘chipped’ hard landscaping materials – shells, glass, crushed brick – are available. Again these should be laid on top of a permeable membrane to prevent weed growth.

Other garden essentials

The word organic doesn’t just refer to plants, it means all the materials you use to make garden essentials such as sheds and benches. Here are some ideas to get you started.

The Bench

Now that you’ve decided on the basic structure of your garden, the next thing you need is a bench. Some people may argue for shed, tools, seeds, but I reckon bench. Of course, under the bench heading I’d include hammock, chair swing, stool, recliner, deck chair, turf chair, chaise longue or anything upon which one may park one’s bottom – or, even better, lie down. Somewhere from which to survey the garden, dream dreams, make plans and entertain guests. I’ve shaped a whole area of my garden around a bench and postponed planting the beds around it until I know it works as a good place to sit. That’s how important this bench thing is to me, and my benches are organic.

The natural materials to use in my garden are slate and wood. These are the two materials that lie beneath and around me in huge quantities. So it’s quite in keeping with the garden to use waste slate and wood materials wherever I can. The previous owner left copious quantities of both when he left and I’ve been cursing him ever since I moved in. But when I got round to making my bench I said a little prayer for him instead.

You have to know that my garden is made up of a set of flat and sloping steep terraces, a large, slightly messy pond and a variety of slate walls, all facing north-east. The sun shines in the morning on all parts of the garden but only on one part from the afternoon on (the small plot I have given over to those sunlight-hungry families of plants we call vegetables). My bench sits snugly into the sloping earth overlooking the pond. It gets the morning sunlight beautifully (apart from about one half hour or so when the sun passes behind an enormous conifer planted by my neighbour as a 30cm-high sapling thirty years ago). When the day is at its hottest, the bench is only dappled by sunlight and becomes a fantastically cool place to retreat to when working the garden is no longer a pleasure. Before I cleared the area it was a mass of old building timber, chicken wire and felled conifer hedge – a combination of the previous owner’s waste and my own garden trimmings. Clearing it has been a monumental task and it would have been easier to have put my bench somewhere else, but nowhere else would do. From here I am close enough to my pond to see my frogs blink and far away enough from my neighbour’s titanic decking (which haunts my garden like a hovering buzzard) to avoid the hot fat that I feel sure will rain down upon me if they ever have a barbecue when I’m lying on my lawn.

Ethical choice: turf benches

My bench is quite a rudimentary affair, in that it just sits on the earth. My eco-builder friends Jenny and Medhi have created many similar benches for their festival gardens, including a long turf bench shaped as a snake, with individual seats carved along the snake’s back. Using a natural material like earth is convenient if you happen to be digging a pond or a sunken area and need to do something with the earth you’ve dug from the hole. You can even buy cardboard cutouts to help you shape the earth like a grass armchair (www.purves.co.uk). There’s also a plan for a turf sofa at www.readymademag.com, an excellent American website with lots of DIY projects.

Making furniture with green wood

Most carpentry work is done using wood that has been seasoned, which means it has been left until the moisture has completely gone (which takes a couple of years). The wooden benches you get in your average high-street store are made from seasoned wood. They are also usually treated with a preservative, which may contain toxic materials harmful to the environment. Green wood, as the name suggests, is wood that has been freshly cut and not left to dry out. The tools and the techniques for using green wood are quite different than for standard carpentry but are actually very good for the average gardener prepared to spend a bit of time learning the tricks of the trade. This is mainly because most of the materials you need can come from your own garden, as long as you’ve got a few trees or a hedgerow. Or ask your local park, woodland or local authority if they have any hedge trimmings or unwanted felled wood you could use.

The simplest form of green woodworking is stick furniture. This is literally furniture made from sticks harvested from hedgerows and coppiced woodlands. Stick furniture doesn’t last for ever but then it doesn’t matter if your mood changes and you want to replace it with something else. Just use the old chair for kindling. I’ve seen the same principle applied to an office made out of cardboard. The whole thing takes very little energy to make and is completely recyclable once the client has tired of it. Stick furniture is a lovely addition to any garden and you can book yourself on a day course for not much money (www.bodgers.org.uk, or locally to me Sylvantutch +44 (0) 1654 761614). For slightly more advanced homemade benches you could consider investing in a pole lathe (a footoperated device for turning wood), a set of lathe tools and a book such as Ray Tabor’s Green Woodworking Pattern Book. This contains more than 300 projects, ranging from stick furniture to tool making to gates, fences, hanging baskets, bird tables, compost bins, arbours and trellis. For most of the projects you just need access to a handful of basic hand tools (no power tools are used) and some coppiced wood from a hedgerow or local woodland. If you just fancy having a go at green woodworking, check out local green fairs, festivals or country shows. There’s usually an opportunity to make something simple with a wood lathe. If you live in London get yourself down to the Woodland Wonders Fair at Kew Gardens held every May Bank Holiday, see www.rbgkew.org.uk/events.

Ethical choice: living willow

If you need a throne for your kingdom, how about a living willow chair? Better for the environment because you don’t have to use materials that have been shipped over great distances and processed using machinery powered by fossil fuels. Majestic and alive, like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, living willow chairs carry on growing, providing fresh growth every year for you to trim and use for other willow projects such as basket making. Be careful where you plant it, though. Willow roots are notoriously aggressive and willows drink a lot of water. They’re fast growing and are good for helping to reduce the moisture content in wet soils. They will compete with vegetables so don’t plant too close to your crops. You can also make living willow hedges and arbours. Jon Warnes’s book Living Willow Sculpture is an excellent place to start, as is www.thewillowbank. com. The Willow Bank is run by Steve Pickup, one of the country’s most experienced willow growers and weavers (see below). You can pick up a bundle of willow cuttings ready for planting, a set of instructions to make your own dome and an extra DVD if you need a little bit of visual stimulation.

Buying garden furniture

Buying stuff can be fun too and there are so many nice pieces of beautifully made, sustainable and ethical furniture out there, it’s a shame not to support the suppliers if you’ve got the spare cash. Individually made items tend to be more expensive than the sort of factory-made furniture you can buy in chain stores, but you can guarantee what you’re getting is unique. Agricultural and smallholding shows, green fairs, festivals and other events are always good places to find locally made handcrafted wooden furniture. Websites such as www.allotmentforestry.com, www.coppice-products.co.uk and www.greenwoodcentre.org.uk offer courses and directories of people making and selling handmade wooden furniture.

In Wales the Welsh Timber Forum produce a buyer’s guide to buying (www.welshtimberforum.co.uk). If you go down the mass-produced route always look for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) symbol (see page 48), but also check whether the finished product has been made in Britain. Sometimes wood is shipped from Scandinavia to China, turned into furniture and shipped back again. This all seems a bit crazy when British-made furniture grown from UK or European wood is available. A UK or European product also gives you certain guarantees about the way the workers are treated. (See also pages 26–29.)

What is the FSC?

The FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) ensures that natural forests are conserved, that endangered species and their habitats are protected, and that forest workers and forest-dependent communities are respected. Unlike other certification schemes, the FSC was set up independent of industry and has broad support from conservation groups, indigenous communities and forest product buyers. It gives equal decision-making rights to economic, social and environmental interests in its governing structure and standard-setting process. It is the preferred standard for gardening organisations such as the RHS and conservation bodies like The World Wide Fund for Nature and the RSPB. At www.fsc-uk.org, their buyer’s guide includes a league table of mainstream retailers who stock FSC furniture. Top (A) ratings (100 per cent of furniture FSC-approved) go to B&Q, Asda, Wyevale, Tesco and Marks & Spencer.

The rainforest in our gardens

Felled timber from rainforests is often mixed with other fibres and hidden in chipboard products or turned into garden fencing. Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots, which means they are wonderfully species rich, and their destruction can lead to the extinction of whole species. There are only 60,000 gorillas left in the world and 5,000 are lost every year as their forest habitats are cleared. At this rate they will be gone within twelve years. We can help by avoiding products that may contain wood from felled rainforests. Always look for the FSC label. The Greenpeace online Garden Furniture Guide is the most comprehensive guide to finding FSC-approved garden furniture products: www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests. Think about contributing to some of the charitable organisations that buy up areas of rainforest to save them from logging (try www.rainforest-alliance.org). Boycotting is more effective if it is backed up with positive action to preserve and protect.

It’s impossible to list all UK manufacturers of ethical garden furniture but here are a few for starters: www.britisheco.com, www.handmadehammocks.co.uk, www.hammocks.co.uk (Fairtrade hammocks from Mexico), www.pendlewood.com. I also liked www.tinglondon.com who make stylish hammocks out of recycled seat belts. If you look at only one website check out www.reelfurniture.co.uk, an imaginative company making entirely handcrafted furniture from old cable reels. Visit www.rd.se and www.purves.co.uk for cardboard seats, www.readymademag.com for plans for a turf sofa, www.salvo.co.uk for salvage merchants, and www.reuze.co.uk, www.marmaxproducts.co.uk and www.theurbangarden.co.uk for information about recycled products; www.ethical-junction.org is a general link to sites for green and ethical products. Enough already!

Shed’s dead

I’ve never been a builder. My knowledge of carpentry is small. My aptitude for construction minimal. At school I got a U at woodwork, despite the fact I skipped PE for two years to take extra lessons. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, I think I’m going to build my own shed. This isn’t a temporary thought: this is a long-held belief, stretching back a decade. One of the reasons I chose the garden I have now is the potential for it to house a shed on stilts. A shed on stilts! As if the task of constructing a shed on flat land wasn’t hard enough. Nevertheless at some point a shed will be built and I will do the building. Why? Because really I want to build a house, and building an eco-shed is the first step.

Why ‘shed’s dead’?

Apart from wanting to reference Bruce Willis’s performance in Pulp Fiction, why have I called this section Shed’s Dead? After all, a shed is a wonderful thing – probably the closest thing gardeners have to a cultural icon. It’s a triumph of simplicity and efficiency, combining as it does several important gardening functions within its four thin walls. Being a simple, effective place to store tools is probably the least important job it does. Most non-gardeners wonder what the allure of the shed can be: it’s such a drab, soulless-looking place from the outside. Step inside, however. and you’re immediately in another world. A place where a deckchair, a bottle of wine or a flask of tea is always close by. Where a wind-up radio can be kept wound and primed for a Sunday afternoon of Gardeners’ Question Time on Radio Four. Where the world and its wife can just go and play somewhere else, quite frankly.

I don’t just want a shed, I want a home office with a wood stove and a place to sling a hammock if I feel like sleeping over.

So why would I wish the shed dead? Well, I think we can do better. The first clue came midway through the last paragraph. Why are sheds so drab and soulless? Look at any of the seemingly endless number of shed websites and you will see the same bland carboncopy boxes coming up again and again. They don’t give any clue to the personality of the owner. They don’t blend in with a garden. They don’t add anything apart from convenience to a space. No character. No inspiration. No sense of imagination. A shed is a thing to be hidden by plants, to be shoved into the corners of a garden, to be rendered invisible if possible. Or in the worst gardens, just placed without any thought whatsoever so it sticks out like a tower block amongst tiny rows of terraced-house vegetables. A towering example of mass-produced modernity.

All this could be forgiven if sheds met high environmental criteria, but unless you buy an FSC-approved shed you don’t really know what you’re getting. Buying the average shed is a journey into the unknown. Imagine you’ve just created your beautiful eco-friendly garden. Everything’s carefully laid out to be pleasing to the eye and the soul. And now you need some storage. Well, the average shed is just not doing it for me.

The company Forest Garden supplies DIY shops and garden centres with wood products for the garden, including sheds, using timber cut from FSC-approved UK forests owned by the Forestry Commission. Look out for their label and visit www.forestgarden.co.uk/stockists.asp for the nearest place to buy. Also try www.grange-fencing.com for timber sheds and summerhouses. B&Q and Focus both sell FSC-approved sheds. Try www.greatlittlegarden.co.uk for a range of European-grown FSCapproved timber products, as well as www.simply-summerhouses.co.uk. There are now a number of recycled plastic sheds on the market. Look at: www.langhalegardens.co.uk, www.hudsonwright.net/plastic-storage-sheds.htm, www.heskethsplastics.com/recycled.htm.

What I haven’t said yet is that I don’t just want a shed, I want a home office with a wood stove and a place to sling a hammock if I feel like sleeping over. My shed will have star-gazing windows and a balcony. A hot plate for making tea and a little mouse-proof store for provisions. I imagine my shed will be a little like old Ratty’s house in Wind in the Willows, only with a loftier view. Occasionally I’ll get a visit from Mole and we’ll take a picnic down to the lawn. Nasturtium flowers will hang down from small wooden pots and I shall graze on the peppery leaves. From the balcony I will be able to survey the weed situation in the whole of my garden with a small spyglass, like a sailor looking out to sea for a sight of the enemy. It’s a fantasy, but, if you haven’t got a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

I started having my shed fantasy way back at Robert Plant’s place when my friend Kevin Beale built one of Britain’s first straw bale buildings: a garden shelter constructed with bales, reclaimed timber, secondhand pallets and lime render (an eco finishing material). It’s the first time I’d ever watched a craftsman at work. Building was a logical step-by-step process. But it was also an art form. The shed was finished off with sculptured lizards climbing down the corners towards the soil. It gave me a privileged close-up view of the art of making something out of nothing. Shed Zeppelin was a fairly bulky number – never use straw bales in a tight squeeze – and it lacked the finesse other materials would have allowed, but it was made on next-to-no budget and worked. It’s still there on Robert’s farm, even though the rest of the garden has sadly passed up the stairway to heaven to that great allotment in the sky.

Ethical choice: materials to avoid

Avoid using materials like PVC, vinyl and other non-recycled plastics. They each take a lot of energy to produce and they create harmful chemicals. Cindy Harris and Pat Borer, authors of CAT’s The Whole House Book, state that the avoidance of PVC is now ‘virtually a hallmark of green, environmentally sensitive building’. They also note that MDF (medium-density fibreboard) has been dubbed the ‘asbestos of the 90s’.

So what’s the alternative? The ecological shed

The first alternative to the dead shed is not to have a shed at all. If you just want somewhere to store a few tools, perhaps a lovingly constructed homemade waterproof box will do. The second is to buy a bespoke shed made to your specification, and the third is to make your own.

To give you some ideas I’ve enlisted the help of architects and eco-designers Jenny and Mehdi (www.jennyandmehdi.org). Jenny and Mehdi spend a month most summers creating the garden for Greenpeace at the Glastonbury Festival. This is always a showcase for low-impact, beautiful spaces made using reclaimed and organic materials. I’ve had the pleasure of helping them construct one of their garden structures – a cordwood wall using natural clay and cut logs of English hardwood. On a burning hot Glastonbury day I had the coolest feet in the field, treading straw into wet clay to form the principal bonding material for the wall.

The process of working with natural materials is much more pleasurable, fun and creative than working with bricks and concrete blocks. Jenny and Mehdi are fantastically imaginative people, able to combine a love of organic spaces with the practical know-how to do the building work themselves. In their treehouse described on the following pages, we have tried to put together a package of design ideas for different-sized gardens and different budgets, but what the three of us feel is that you can take any of the elements that we describe and adapt them to your own situation.

At the heart of Jenny and Mehdi’s philosophy is the idea that the word ‘organic’ should refer just as much to the structures of a garden as to the plants. My only regret with this section is that it cannot go deep enough. Structures and plants need to mesh in a garden to create total atmosphere. It would have been lovely to give you a step-by-step guide to how to make this happen, but there just wasn’t the space. I hope though that there is enough here to inspire you to look deeper. And see what’s possible with a little thought and understanding.

Shed cred – welcome to the treehouse

Shed Zeppelin replaced an old caravan. The caravan was ugly and badly insulated. There was no fire and in the winter we shivered around a gas cooker, grilling tomatoes or cheese on toast. Kevin’s straw bale structure was a luxury apartment compared to this. It was big enough to function as store room, mess house, meeting place and, occasionally (more in the summer than winter), crash pad for tired gardeners with early morning duties to perform. It was a good multi-function space for the whole year.

Jenny and Mehdi’s garden structure in Kay Zitron’s garden in Aberdovey is quite a different affair. Not at all chunky, it shows off the elegance of wood in an open summer stage topped with a curved roof garden and complemented by an enchanting (noises off) room for grandchildren. Kay wanted a structure that would connect an existing patio to a courtyard garden below, that would give her panoramic views of the Irish sea, that would allow her husband to do his office work outside during the warmer months, and provide a place for her grandchildren to play. She also wanted something that would give her the feeling of being in a treehouse.

Although I don’t imagine many people will have the space or time to take on a project like this, it shows off all the main features of ecological design extremely well. It provides an example of a small shed project (the children’s room), which is feasible in any small garden, and a larger open structure that would provide shelter with a minimum of materials.

Let’s take a quick tour. Entering the garden courtyard you are immediately struck by the drop from the house to the garden. Before the structure was built the only way to get to the garden was down a set of old concrete steps. These did not sit well with the rest of the garden.

The solution was to incorporate a new set of steps into the overall design, to take people from the house, through the stage area and down to the garden. The whole structure is made out of green oak, which means it has been used freshly cut. Green oak lasts for decades without artificial preservatives and is extremely strong. Other woods, such as hazel, become brittle within a few years and cannot be used for this sort of structure. Most manufactured and homemade sheds are made out of seasoned wood, timber that has been left to dry for at least a couple of years. Green oak has a high moisture content and dries in situ. This means it shrinks on the job so you have to allow for this process. The green oak used here was cut to order from Powys Castle and sawn locally but there are numerous suppliers around the country. The structure is held together with green oak pegs too.

The stairs are shaped inwards at the top to create a sense of being drawn towards the rest of the structure. Standing at the bottom, it almost feels like you are climbing into a painting by Escher.

The stage is a triumph of space saving and space enhancement. It is supported on four posts of green oak placed on four concrete pads. Because the load is borne by these four stilts there was no need to lay trenches for concrete foundations. This saved on labour, energy and materials. The stilts also freed up the space underneath the structure (for shade-loving plants, and a cool place to sit on very hot days). The structure itself is a vertical space for plants, with climbers trailing up to the roof. In a sunny, south-facing garden this is a perfect place to grow sun-loving fruits and maximise your home harvest.

Climbing to the top of the stairs you can turn left or right. Take the right turn and you come to the stage, but let’s take a little detour first. Stroll along the boardwalk under the clematis bower a moment and you’ll come to a small handmade wooden door. Open it and you enter the children’s playroom – a magical little space with a unique view of the garden through a square window. It’s made using a green oak frame and topped and sided with oak shingles cut by English company Carpenter Oak. To ensure

Ethical choice: the benefits of green oak

Green oak is used in ecological building not only because of its strength but also because it is a home-grown resource. Oak woodlands are a natural feature of the British countryside and provide valuable habitats for wildlife. A single oak tree can host hundreds of different species of wildlife and the loss or decline of many species in Britain can be directly linked to the loss of oak woodland. Oak woodland can be managed sustainably so that any trees felled are replaced by new trees. Oak has been an undervalued resource in the modern age because of the availability of man-made resources for building. By using green oak you can help to provide an economic reason for keeping old woodlands alive, protecting them from the bulldozer. Of course, there is a balance to be struck with the use of woodland resources – demand for oak should not be so great that it encourages unsustainable practices. Green oak is not the only timber that can be used to make sheds and other garden structures. Larch is often used for garden construction, and this is grown widely in the UK. Other woods suitable for heavy construction include beech, pine and Douglas fir. These are conventionally grown in plantations, which are less valuable habitats for wildlife. Whichever wood you choose to use for your shed look for the FSC symbol and, whenever you can, buy from local woodlands or plantations.

complete protection from the rain, a single layer of breathable waterproof membrane has been placed beneath the shingles.

Leave the room and go back along the boardwalk and you come to the stage. This is topped by an amazing parabolic curved roof, an inspiring twist of a roof that really makes you feel as if you’re in a unique space. The stage is all green oak, apart from the balustrades, which are made out of locally cut hazel with the bark stripped off to make them last longer. The balustrades are fitted in a pegged frame. The pegs can be removed, the frame dropped and the hazels replaced every ten years before they begin to rot. The green oak will not rot. It does not need weather-proofing with a chemical treatment, lacquer or paint, which is not the case with the kind of softwoods normally used in manufactured sheds (another environmental saving).

The frame for the stage was made flat on the ground and raised with block and tackle, just like the famous barn-raising scene in the Harrison Ford movie Witness, except without the costumes. Jenny and Mehdi’s friends came to help, pulling the frame up by hand and inching it into place. A frame-raising is a real cause for celebration, a staging post in the building process. It’s a joy you just don’t get with concrete blocks.

Planting the roof

Leave the stage through the far entrance, head towards the house, turn round 360 degrees and look back. This should be your first glimpse of the amazing roof garden that tops the whole structure. Rolling along the twisted roof like the sea, plants rise and fall on waves of soil bedded on top of a hidden waterproof membrane. On one side a cascading rosemary sits proud to the bow, drooping purple flowers over the grey oak boarding. This is a rural garden but a roof like this could grace any urban shed or house. Not only does a roof garden provide vital garden interest in otherwise drab city streets, it soaks up some of the rainfall and absorbs airborne particles, helping to prevent flooding and reduce pollution.

And there we have it. A multi-functional covered space that combines all the elements you would expect to find in a handcrafted organic shed. It’s made from a renewable resource cut locally, constructed with a minimum of ‘unnatural’ materials (a few stainless steel screws and ringlets, concrete pads and waterproof membranes). The structure fits the space perfectly, drawing the two levels of the house and the courtyard together while creating new garden space on the roof and around the frame. And finally, the clients’ brief has been met: great views to the sea, a home office with electricity and broadband, an adaptable social space and a secret little room for the grandchildren.

Ethical choice: straw bales and other natural building materials

Straw bales are an agricultural by-product, the left-over stalks from the grain harvest. Bound together into square bales they form a tight building block. These are assembled in a brick pattern and staked together with connecting hazel rods to make a wall. They are then rendered with a lime plaster to keep the straw protected from the weather and attack by rodents. Interest in straw bale building has grown as the search for more sustainable building materials has widened. Other natural materials of interest to the eco-builder are cob, rammed earth and stone. In low-rise buildings all are a viable alternative to concrete, which uses vast amounts of energy to produce and is generally less pleasant to work with. CAT’s website has a wide range of publications on all these styles of building (see www.cat.org.uk) and its courses department runs several natural building courses throughout the year. These include Timber Frame Self Build, Straw Bale Building, Cob Building, Building with Earth, and Natural Rendering – Clay Plaster. If you want to make your shed out of recycled pallets, check out www.summerville-novascotia.com/PalletWoodShed for a pictorial record and explanations of the building process. And it costs less than $100 (around £54). Also check out Kevin Beale’s factsheet from CAT, ‘How to Build With Straw Bales’, and www.strawbalebuildingassociation.org.uk.

Other ecological considerations

Jenny and Mehdi’s structure is very much designed for summer use. If you want an all-year-round space, you need to think of your shed more like a miniature version of your house. Eco-homes use a range of techniques to make the most of natural heating and power sources and you can mimic these for your micro-house. Passive solar heating, the process of bringing more heat from the sun into a building, is a must for reducing winter fuel bills. At a basic level you can achieve it by giving your shed space large, south-facing windows, accompanied by smaller windows to the north. If you want to make the most of passive solar features I’d recommend getting hold of a book like CAT’s The Whole House Book. It’s packed full of useful information about green building materials and design features, most of which can be put to good use in a small structure like a shed or summerhouse. If you’re treating your shed as a stepping stone towards buying, making or renovating your own eco-home, it’s an essential purchase. The Whole House Book recommends the newer type of heat-loss-reducing glazing known as low-e glazing. It will also tell you what levels of insulation you require, and what heating options are available.

Kevin Beale (who built the straw bale shed on Robert Plant’s land) is now working on a home office in Snowdonia that includes a woodchip boiler. A woodchip boiler, although more expensive than a conventional solid fuel woodburner (for solid fuel systems check out www.solidfuel.co.uk and www.stovesonline.co.uk), is more environmentally efficient because the rate at which the fuel is burned can be controlled and so less fuel is used. Woodchip or wood pellet can be made from recycled wood waste and comes in bags. This makes fuel storage less of an issue. However, a woodchip boiler needs electricity to run a fan and a thermostat to control the burn rate, so you’ll need a power source.

You could generate your own power at home using solar PV systems or wind or water turbines, but it’s easier to switch to a green electricity supplier and buy renewable energy through the national grid. On a global scale it’s much more efficient to buy from a green supplier through the national grid than to install micro-power systems in every home. Check out www.foe.co.uk for supplier comparisons.

There are some situations where it will pay to go with your own system. Renewable energy systems are useful when the cost of linking to an existing power supply is prohibitively expensive. If you’re connecting your shed to the house electricity supply the work will need to be completed by a certified electrician. CAT has a whole range of renewable energy books and factsheets, many of which are available both as downloads and in paper form. They will tell you how to assess your power needs, choose the right system and get one installed. Visit www.cat.org.uk/catpubs.

Wind turbines are less efficient in built-up areas: they are best sited away from buildings, woodlands and other obstructions on flat open ground. I’ll touch on water collection overleaf but collecting water run-off from a shed roof will save time and money.

Shed’s atomic dustbin

You never plan to turn your shed into a miniature landfill site, but that’s what happens if you don’t de-clutter. Old bicycles, unwanted tools, half-full cans of oil, batteries, random bits of plastic and metal, plant pots, and so on – most of these things can be taken to your local recycling yard and disposed of safely. Phone your council to check facilities. There are also a wide number of individual recycling initiatives for specific materials and unwanted products: www.reuze.co.uk is the best place to start looking.

Since 2003 a number of pesticides have been withdrawn from sale. Any left-over products should have been disposed of by 31 March 2004. If you inadvertently keep or use any withdrawn chemicals you may be prosecuted. Products might include:

 Moss and weed killers for lawns and paths

 Treatments for removing algae from decking and patios

 Ant, cockroach, fly, wasp and aphid killers

 Slug pellets

 Mice and rat poisons

 Anti-mould and fungus paints

 Timber treatments

If they are more than three years old, all of these products could contain banned chemicals, such as:

 Dichlorprop

 Dikegulac

 Resmethrin

 2, 3, 6-TBA

 Tar acids

 Triforine

If anything in your garden shed is labelled as containing one or more of these substances, dispose of it safely with your local waste disposal authority. It is illegal to dispose of garden chemicals down drains, sinks or lavatories.

Non-permanent structures

A shed need not be a permanent space. There are some very fine temporary structures that can serve the same purpose: yurts, domes, tipis and benders (a very cheap structure made from cut hazel rods and a tarpaulin cover) being just four examples. A bender is the easiest to make, but not necessarily that pretty if you’re using an old tarp. You’ll need some flexible pieces of hazel, 21/2 metres or longer. These are pushed 30cm into the ground, bent in towards each other and tied together to form a frame. More pieces of hazel are then placed across the bent poles around the outside of the structure to support it – cross bracing. Waxed cotton tarps are quite ugly but readily available and cheap from army surplus stores. The look of them can be improved using paints. Alternatively, order a specially cut piece of fabric from a nomadic tent supplier – the sort of material that would cover a tipi or a yurt. DIY domes can be made from recycled broom handles or cut hazel, assembled in a geodesic shape. A factsheet explaining how to make one is available from CAT, either as a download or paper copy. Also available from CAT are factsheets explaining how to make tipis and yurts. One of my favourite shed books is Shelters, Shacks and Shanties by DC Beard. Written in 1914, it is a classic of backwoodsman self-sufficiency, full of ideas for easy temporary structures the like of which you would find in some long-forgotten US frontier town or forest in the Mid-West. It’s perfect for some unusual back garden projects, particularly for children in need of a den.

Butts and bins

Every gardener needs a compost bin. The most obvious solution is to make your own and there are various simple designs out there, all utilising a variety of recycled materials including reclaimed timber, pallets, chicken wire and old tyres. You can see various prototypes at the CAT visitor centre and at Garden Organic (HDRA) in Yalding, Kent. Also check out www.gardenorganic.org.uk/factsheets/gg24.php. This webpage provides a simple DIY bin design and you can also order a paper copy of the factsheet.

CAT found compost bins performed best when they were open to the elements, so that air can circulate and water percolate. See page 96 for more information.

CAT sells numerous compost bins, www.cat.org.uk, as do Wiggly Wigglers, www.wigglywigglers.co.uk, and many others. Look out for those made from reclaimed or FSC-approved timber or recycled plastic: www.greatlittlegarden.co.uk, www.forest garden.co.uk and www.grange-fencing.com. The Tank Exchange, www.organiccatalog.com and Blackwalls Ltd all sell water tanks made out of recycled material, while www.plantstuff.com sell ex-distillery oak barrels. The following companies sell trellis, planters, cloches, wildlife homes, etc., made from recycled material: CAT, Planet Friendly Products (+44 (0)1453 822 100), www.marmaxproducts.co.uk, www.intruplas.com, www.arborvetum.co.uk, www.linkabord.co.uk, www.gardena.co.uk

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