Nothing beats growing your own food or creating a backyard oasis to relax and entertain. But keeping a garden tidy takes effort.
Here are our top tips to keep your garden clean and tidy all year, including the most sustainable and convenient way to get rid of garden waste.
1. Garden a Little, Frequently
Gardening is good for both physical and mental health. Getting out in the garden has been shown to lower stress levels and blood pressure, it provides physical activity and it can lighten your mood.
Spending time in the garden is good for it, too. Setting aside a few hours each week for garden maintenance will help your garden thrive. A small amount of weeding, watering and pruning to promote new growth can help you keep on top of garden tasks and prevent the spread of pests and diseases.
Dedicating a small amount of time each week to keeping your garden organised can prevent you from feeling overwhelmed by gardening tasks. Clean your tools after each use to extend their lifespan and return them to their home once you’ve finished.
2. Get Into Sustainable Gardening
It’s easy to have a sustainable garden once you know how. Gardening sustainably is better for the environment and it can even help you save money.
Regularly spending small amounts of time in the garden (See Tip 1) helps foster sustainable practices like using fewer chemicals in your garden, saving your own seeds and creating your own compost to improve soil health.
Start a compost pile, plant more flowers to encourage insects, learn about your soil type, reduce your lawn size in favour of drought-tolerant native plants, keep mulch topped up in garden beds to prevent weeds and save water by installing tanks and you’ll be on your way to a more sustainable garden that practically looks after itself!
3. Garden With the Season
Some garden tasks are best left for another day—or even another month or two. For example, trying to grow vegetables like broad beans during summer just won’t work.
In fact, in most parts of Australia, the heat of summer means it’s not a great plant for any new planting or pruning. Sure, get out into the garden in summer to water plants and harvest summer fruits, but avoid pruning as this encourages new foliage that’s easily sunburnt.
For flowers and vegetables, research their ideal growing season and what suits your climate and prepare for each new season accordingly. In late winter, when cool annuals have finished, it’s a great time to use gardening downtime to prepare the soil in garden beds by adding organic matter, ready for planting out in early spring.
4. Do a Spring Clean
Spring is the ‘growing season’. It’s when your garden will begin to come alive. Use this time to apply fertiliser with slow-release nutrients to fruit trees and flowering shrubs, remove spent flowers from winter-blooming plants, divide perennials to keep them looking healthy and lush, apply mulch to garden beds and any bare patches of dirt to keep weeds down, and get your garden clean and ready for summer entertaining.
Pressure wash paths and outdoor furniture, give trees and shrubs a maintenance prune to help retain their shape and remove winter weeds.
5. Prune at Least Once a Year
Pruning trees and shrubs is necessary to prevent them from becoming ‘leggy’, where they lose their shape. It encourages plants to produce new growth so they remain thick and lush. Pruning at the right time can result in more flowers and growth, but prune at the wrong time and you risk cutting off flower heads and inhibiting growth.
As a general rule, it’s best to perform a late-winter, early-spring prune as plants enter their growing season. When it comes to pruning fruit trees, a summer chop inhibits growth, so it can be helpful to keep a tree to a manageable size, while a winter prune promotes growth.
Be sure to equip yourself with the correct tools to avoid damaging your plants and choose a skip bin to dispose of your cuttings in the most sustainable way possible.
Why Are Skip Bins the Best Way to Dispose of Green Waste?
When you choose a skip bin for your green waste, it can be reused by being turned into mulch and compost. This means it won’t go into a landfill, where it produces methane gas and is unlikely to break down. Therefore, skip bins are the most eco-friendly method to dispose of your garden cuttings, grass clippings and other green waste.
When you hire a green waste skip bin through Best Price Skip Bins, you can rest assured you’re getting the best deal possible. It’s also convenient, as you can order online and have one at your home the next day—guaranteed!
After a day in the garden trimming hedges, pulling weeds and mowing the grass, you can sit back and relax as someone else takes your green waste away for you, saving you the trouble of disposing of it.
To keep your landscape tidy and free of dead branches, leaves and old chip bark, call Best Price Skip Bins today on 1300 791 132 or visit our website and enter your postcode to order a skip bin in 3 easy steps.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I put green waste in my general waste bin?
Everything in your general waste bin is sent to landfill. This is bad for the environment as green waste can be reused to make mulch and compost. When sent to a landfill, green waste is compressed so it doesn’t get the oxygen it needs to break down quickly, meaning that it emits methane and carbon dioxide.
What happens to green waste when you put it into a skip?
Green waste is delivered to a commercial composting facility where it can be turned into products that improve soil health, such as mulch, or potting mix.
What are some other ways to dispose of green waste sustainably?
You can add weeds to your compost bin or make use of them to make your own fertiliser. You can also use the ‘chop and drop’ method where you leave cuttings on the soil surface under plants once you have trimmed them. However, this can make your garden look rather messy!
What can’t go into a green waste skip bin?
Although they are also derived from living matter, some things shouldn’t go into your green waste skip bin including soil or dirt, large tree branches, trunks or roots, and untreated timber.