Gardening 2025

Have been enjoying the garden, helped by the [feels extravagant] purchase of a Niwaki hori-hori, which has made weeding slightly less onerous. I'm genuinely pleased with it (though need to have a "no drunk gardening" rule with it.)

Not having loads of success getting things growing this year - I wonder if I've bought shit compost (I definitely bought one bag from a supermarket).

Really enjoyed visiting a nursery in St David's, Wales, where it felt like most things had been grown in-house and were a bit behind what you'd find in many garden centres and all the better for it.

Yeah, I recognise that sense of buying stuff grown in greenhouses and it reacting badly to being left/planted out. I guess that's experience?

I've never wanted anything so instantly as that hori-hori! (I'd not heard of it before.)

I welcome this thread. I have recently acquired a garden for the first time in my life including a lawn, a shed, a lawnmower and actual plants. I’ve also learnt the lesson that supermarket compost is substandard (this one has petrol odour). I’ve also decided I like visiting garden centres, but only really if they have a cafe. My main challenge has been foxes defecating on the lawn.

I am a major crank about yard and garden stuff; I foster gently guided chaos and keep it very close to natural/organic.

I go through spurts of wanting to grow foodstuffs, with a functioning herb garden some years and occasionally a vegetable or two. This year we are working on a no-till lasagna bed, with a focus on native pollinator-attracting and bug-repelling plants.

I resist buying bags of soil, mulch, bark, compost. To the extent possible all the yard waste stays where it is (insert cranky old-man-yells rant here about the model where you pay people to take your leaves away and then pay people to bring you chopped up leaves. Nature did fine with recycling in place for millennia before gardeners, hmph.)

Anyway current stuff includes blueberries, blackberries, rosemary, basil, parsley, oregano, sage, mint.