When planting trees on a lawn, it's not always easy to maintain a neat area of bare soil around the tree base. Bare soil around the base is essential when it comes to feeding the tree (by top-dressing with an appropriate compost ), especially in its early years. The solution to this that I've adopted is Everedge Tree Rings , which have proven easy to use and perfect for the job. To illustrate: here's one of my immature trees before a tree ring was fitted. The process of fitting the tree ring is wonderfully simple: initially you put the tree ring around the tree upside-down so that you can use it as a template to guide your edging spade as you cut a neat circle. Then yout flip the ring over and drive it in to the ground using a mallet (and I use a piece of timber as well to distribute the load across the ring). The result is very neat, as you can see. This is how two of them look a couple of years on. Top-dressing the trees with compost is easy and keeping t...

The question of whether or not to have lawn edging at all was a source of some debate between myself and Mrs H - but now we're both definitely firm converts to both the aesthetic and practical benefits. We have beds that drop from the lawn, so the style we wanted was the type that, when looking from the lawn side, no edging is visible (if you like it's the lawn edging equivalent of an "infinity pool"). The product we chose was Smartedge Black Lawn Edging  and the following brief blog describes how this novice fitted it and shows the result (including how the bed and edging have matured). We'd been creating beds from scratch and the first bed I did was in the same year that we'd created them (hence why the planting looks a little sparse). The picture below is of the first bit of edging I tackled - as you can see there was the potential for a nice smooth curve but it was all a bit scruffy. As I understand it, the Everedge metal edging  we sell on Gree...

It's that bird feeder time of year again folks, so here are a few pics I took last year - can you identify them all? Of course you can buy a great range of bird feeders and bird food at Greenfingers.com - and I know our feathered friends will be grateful if you do. This visitor doesn't come to the bird feeder, but I thought I'd throw him(?) in as a bonus!