Tom Massey’s top tips to boost your garden’s biodiversity
Husqvarna has teamed up with biodiversity expert, Tom Massey to help transform your garden into a thriving natural habitat
Print17 May 2024
Husqvarna have partnered with Tom Massey, a garden expert in biodiversity, to bring nature back into your garden through diversity to help your garden thrive in a natural way.
Leaving an area of your lawn to grow long will be beneficial to wildlife and have a positive effect on biodiversity. However, there are ways to speed up the process and further boost biodiversity in your garden.
Here are Tom’s top 10 tips on how to give an immediate boost to biodiversity in your garden.
1.) Maintain your zone
Removing all clippings after cutting will reduce fertility of the soil, encourage flowering species and hinder grasses from dominating.
2.)Replace lawn with wildflower meadow turf
A wildflower meadow can be achieved with the use of a meadow turf product. Simply remove the area of your lawn you want to convert and lay the meadow turf. Look for a product with plenty of different species for added biodiversity.
3.) Select best plants for rewilding
Adding a more diverse range of plant species to your garden helps create a biodiverse haven. Pollinators and other invertebrates benefit from having a wide range of native and non-native plants.
4.) Add wildflower plug plants to speed things up
Plug plants can be purchased inexpensively and added to the zone. Getting them to grow is simpler than with seeds and yields quicker results. Aim for 5-10 plants per square metre.
5.) Add bulbs
Bulbs are an inexpensive way to enhance diversity. Try to plant bulbs that bloom one after the other, with new flowers showing up as the old one’s fade.
6.) Be playful with long grass
To make your rewilding zone more interesting, you can introduce purposeful design – e.g. leave ‘islands’ of grass around trees, or create pathways through long grass to open areas. Get creative, resize and reshape.
7.) Benefit from parasitic plants
Yellow rattle can help weaken grass dominance allowing other species to establish. It can help to open up an area of long grass for other plants to establish. Approximately 0.5 grams per square metre is needed for a successful establishment.
8.) Avoid chemical pesticides and fertilisers
To encourage wildflowers and reduce the dominance of grass, infertile soil is preferable. Consider using homemade compost, or organic feeds such as seaweed based fertilisers for your garden.
9.) Add diverse habitats to encourage pest-predators
By leaving areas of shelter, e.g. long grass, artfully stacked logs or a small pond, you can encourage predators like toads in. These predators keep potentially unwelcome visitors such as aphids, slugs, and snails at bay.
10.) Harvest rainwater
Consider harvesting rainwater to reduce pressure on main supplies and also reduce the cost of your water bill. This can be as simple as diverting down pipes into water butts, or you can go further by installing a full rainwater harvesting tank system.
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