Splott and Tremorfa gardening project, Growing Street Talk, has been celebrating residents’ blooming front gardens this August.
Keep an eye on their Facebook and Twitter feeds for the full list from their trundles around Splott, Tremorfa and Pengam Green and for handy hints to help you make the most of your front of house.
Curtis Hughes (https://www.curtishughesphotography.com/) has been taking some splendid photos for the GST Front Gardens Summer Celebration. Let Liz and Michelle know if you’d like photographer Curtis to come over and take some photos of your front garden. They’d love to hear from you.
Message on Facebook or Twitter or email growingstreettalk@gmail.com
Here are some of the sage tips so far (see what I did there!):
Front gardens are great for expressing your style with garden ornaments.
Front gardens are the perfect places to grow flowers for bees, wasps, hoverflies and other beneficial insects. Lavenders, violas and ivy, sunflowers, nasturtiums and thyme are all great. Summer is insect feast time but including plants like ivy keep the nectar going well into October.
Front gardens and house frontages are great places to grow culinary herbs like lush sage, chives and rosemary, peppermint, golden oregano, lemon balm and thyme.
Some lovely creative colour work can be done on seats, doors, railings and raised beds in front gardens – such a simple thing but good use of colour can make the whole garden come together and turn it into something quite special.
For heavenly hanging baskets, feature the star of the summer basket – the petunia!
Take a trip to Tremorfa folks – you’ll find some lovely flower borders there!
It’s amazing what you can get into narrow spaces. Lavenders can thrive in a very narrow bed.
So many pots with fabulous flower displays about! Statement pots packed with begonia & cordyline mixing lobelia, pelargoniums and petunias are fab! Placing these lovelies in your front yard makes all the difference to the streets where we live
We love wooden raised beds! Advantages: – You can make them to fit exactly into your small garden, they are easy to make, you can make them out of waste wood, you can make them deep which means you can have a big range of plants and you can paint them funky colours or leave them to be au natural.
Front gardens can feature creative uses of space. Hanging baskets on the trees and the ironwork, troughs & pots on walls, ledges and pavements – using the space to its fullest and providing colour and joy to boot!
Window boxes are excellent for brightening up the front of your house and show that even if you don’t’ have a front garden you can still be part of improving and greening your street.