Weeding the Web

Gardening with Dogs - or Dealing with Doo-Doo

One of my first ever blog postings was about composting for dog owners. Clearing up after your pooch in the garden isn’t nice, but it has to be done. Certainly, when I had a terrier, there was no way I was ever going to get him to poop somewhere appropriate on demand (or do anything else on demand, for that matter).

One option is the Pet Poo Loo Wormery that I mentioned, but here’s a report from Marion Owen of PlanTea who visited City Farmer, a demonstration garden and compost site run by Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture in Vancouver.

Their solution has been to build a sunken DIY dedicated composter, keeping it sweet with a septic tank additive. It’s certainly popular. Presenter Mike Levenston reckons that, with 40 million viewers of his videos, plenty of these exist around the world.

City Farmer also provides instructions in words and still pictures (not to mention an insight into what happens in Calgary when the snow melts - ugh!), but see the video below for a quick explanation, and the one beneath for a visit to Sharon Slack, that's been working well for 15 years!

Wine bottle water feature from Style Gardens: a DIY garden project

NB April 2016 Links to stylegardens.co.uk no longer exist, so I've removed them from the post below. 

Phew! Gorgeous day! And if there’s one thing to make you feel cooler, it’s sitting by water. Not to mention relaxing beside it with a glass of wine.

But what to do with all those wine bottles? Well, this idea from Style Gardens helped them to win Gold in the Royal Welsh Show in 2000 and nicely combines Adam’s ale with the nectar of the gods. 

Style Gardens’s website is, frankly, a puzzle to navigate, not least because all the pages seem to have the same address, so I can’t link you straight to the relevant pages. Find photos and description of the prize-winning garden and water feature under Garden Design on their Ideas page (see tabs along the top of the screen), and instructions on how to make it under Garden DIY on the Ideas page (you’ll need to click through a few more pages from there – just follow “projects”).

It is worth a mooch round their website, though, if you need some ideas and advice on garden design. Here’s an example: “One thing you learn when studying garden design is that circles ALWAYS work well... A circle is a very strong, geometric shape, and it 'draws the eye', as the jargon goes, meaning that it encourages the viewer to focus on the internal space, and makes it possible to ignore unsightly surroundings.”

Good. I’ve just decided on a round paved area in the middle of my vegetable patch!