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Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel

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  Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel Before putting the garden to bed for winter, remember that something may already be sleeping in it. For generations, autumn gardening advice has often followed the same pattern. Cut everything down. Rake everything up. Clear the borders. Remove dead stems. Sweep the leaves. Make everything look neat and tidy before winter arrives. There is certainly nothing wrong with maintaining a garden. Paths need to remain usable, diseased plants may need removing, gutters need clearing and lawns cannot necessarily disappear beneath a thick blanket of wet leaves. But perhaps we have taken tidiness a little too far. What looks untidy to us can look very different to a beetle, butterfly, bumblebee, hedgehog or small bird. A pile of leaves can be shelter. A hollow stem can become a winter refuge. A seed head can become a food store. A pile of old logs can become an entire miniature ecosystem. Perhaps the autumn garden doesn't always need clean...
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What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser

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  What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser Every autumn, nature delivers tonnes of free soil improver—and we spend money getting rid of it. Autumn leaves can be irritating. They blow across the lawn, block drains, collect on paths, fill gutters and somehow appear again five minutes after you have finished sweeping. The obvious response is to gather them into bags, put them in the green-waste bin and let somebody else deal with them. But perhaps we should look at fallen leaves rather differently. A tree has spent an entire summer using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to construct those leaves. When autumn comes, the leaves fall naturally to the ground, where fungi, bacteria, worms and countless other organisms gradually break them down. In a woodland, nobody arrives with a leaf blower and a council green-waste bin. The leaves become part of the soil. So instead of asking: "How do I get rid of all these leaves?" perhaps we should ask:...
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More Rain Is Coming: Could Your Garden Capture 1,000 Litres Instead of Sending It Down the Drain?

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  More Rain Is Coming: Could Your Garden Capture 1,000 Litres Instead of Sending It Down the Drain? “The water you pay for next summer may be falling on your roof for free this autumn.” Most of us have become accustomed to thinking about rain as something to get rid of. It lands on the roof, runs into the gutter, disappears down a drain and, within a few minutes, we have forgotten all about it. Then six months later we can find ourselves standing in the garden with a hosepipe, using carefully treated mains drinking water to keep tomatoes, hanging baskets and vegetables alive. There is something slightly illogical about that. Perhaps we should start treating rainwater as a resource rather than a nuisance. And once you actually calculate how much water lands on an ordinary house, the numbers can be remarkably large. Start With One Very Simple Calculation Rainwater calculations are wonderfully straightforward. 1 mm of rain falling on 1 square metre = 1 litre of water. So: Potential wa...
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Repair It Before Winter: Ten Household Jobs That Become Expensive If You Ignore Them

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  Repair It Before Winter: Ten Household Jobs That Become Expensive If You Ignore Them A £5 Repair in September Can Become a £500 Problem in January There is a peculiar thing about household maintenance: the jobs we most regret ignoring are often the ones that originally looked too small to bother with. A tap drips. A gutter occasionally spills over. A door lets in a thin line of cold air. A little paint begins peeling from a wooden window frame. A thermostat behaves strangely, but only sometimes. None of these feels particularly urgent on a pleasant September afternoon. Then winter arrives. Rain finds its way behind the paint. Frost gets into cracks. The heating begins running every day. Gutters are overwhelmed by autumn leaves. Damp spreads. Pipes become vulnerable. A loose roof tile meets a December storm. Suddenly the five-minute repair has turned into something involving ladders, plumbers, builders and considerably more money. That is why early autumn is one of the best times ...
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Is Your House Secretly Using Electricity While You're Asleep?

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  Is Your House Secretly Using Electricity While You're Asleep? Your house doesn't go to sleep when you do—but perhaps more of it should. At three o'clock in the morning, most of us are using very little. We are not watching television. We are not cooking dinner. We are not working on the computer. The lights are mostly off. The kettle is cold and, hopefully, nobody is using the washing machine. Yet the electricity meter is still moving. Some of that electricity use is absolutely necessary. The fridge and freezer need to remain cold. A heating system may need to operate. Broadband may be supporting security cameras or other essential equipment. A home battery, inverter, alarm system or ventilation system may need to remain powered. But some electricity consumption is there simply because we have never thought about it. So here is a slightly different Going Green challenge: Find Out What Your House Is Doing at 3am Don't begin by buying anything. Don't order another c...
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