As a biologist, I have always been interested in everything that jumps, flies, crawls, swims, flutters and hums. In recent years, the plant kingdom has been of particular interest to me, especially since a multitude of native plants attracts wealth of animal species. When we moved to our place in the Condroz in 2020, our garden was a tight lawn with a few fruit trees. On the west side, the garden is bordered by a beautiful old beech 'Ferraris' forest, and at the back it borders a meadow with beautiful views.

The ideal planting season is coming up! Trees add enormous value to your garden. A tree is more than just one plant, it is like a mini ecosystem in itself. Trees provide shelter, food and nesting opportunities for numerous animal species. Birds nest in their crowns, owls, squirrels and bats shelter in trunk cavities. Numerous insects eat leaves and lay their eggs on the leaf, a twig or under the bark. A tree is often overgrown with lichens and underground a fungal network surrounds the roots.

The days are beginning to shorten, the temperature is dropping, winter clothes are coming out of the closet, most plants have finished flowering, and the tree leaves are changing in color and starting to fall, ...... autumn is at our doorstep! This blog gives you insight into how you can prepare your garden for winter while caring for biodiversity, soil life and plants.

A garden to enjoy, feast, stroll, eat, garden, read and play .... It's all possible. Do you like a sleek or lush garden or a combination of both? Do you like to roll up your sleeves to garden or would you rather host friends for a tasty BBQ or chill in the hammock?

If you have a difficult soil like ours - a shallow stony soil or a sandy soil with almost no humus layer - in which plants struggle to take root or thrive, there is a creative solution to make your own fertile soil. It is called lasagna gardening or sheet mulching and can be done in the vegetable garden, in a plant border, but just as easily directly on the lawn or in a raised bed. Continue reading to find out more and get started yourself!

When, like us, you have the privilege of enjoying a large garden, it seems logical to share this green oasis with others. Of course, all our family, friends and neighbours are welcome, but I am more talking about a unique co-habitation with our native biodiversity. A shared garden is great and at the same time a guarantee of wonder, discovery and fascinating wandering through the seasons.

Every spring in our garden, we look forward to seeing how our flower meadow evolves. For the most part, we let it grow long and mow grass paths within. Every year we hope for more flowers and colour. In some patches this works out fine, in others less so. Would you like a flower meadow too? Read more about our experiences of the last 3 years here.

My partner Frank is fascinated by the principles of permaculture, focusing on self-sustaining agricultural systems. The design works according to the principles of nature, creating a resilient (mini) ecosystem.

Without a doubt, our pond is my favourite spot in the garden. I revived an old wooden cast-iron garden bench and that is where I go to chill, muse, read, and above all, observe all that goes on in, on and around the water. It still exceeds my expectations.

A hedge or hedgerow is the most environmentally friendly fence for your ecological garden. It can be a nice way to create zones in your garden. Moreover, it’s beautiful, green, inexpensive and grows naturally. A hedge mainly consists of a mix of shrubs and bushes planted close together.

Today, we like to zoom in on the 'Curious Noses in the Garden' campaign with the garden dataloggers. A fascinating project in which measurements of temperature at different depths and soil moisture were taken in 5000 gardens in Flanders in 2021 and 2022. This citizen measurement campaign was created to find solutions to the vagaries of climate and its impact on our gardens.

Thanks for participating in our survey "How ecological is my garden?". Almost 200 participants completed the questionnaire. The scores vary widely, from a low score of 4/20 to an average score of 13/20 and high or near maximum scores of 17 to 18/20.

Autumn is the ideal time to evaluate your garden. What are you still missing? What could be improved? How can you add more variety to your garden? Frank is fully committed to ecological vegetable gardening, while I focus on creating as many habitats as possible for biodiversity. We did not have a dry stone wall yet, which attracts certain wildlife and can be substrate for specific plants. Fresh herbs are of course the real seasonings in the kitchen. You can never have too many of them. That's how we came up with the idea of creating a spiral herb garden. Curious? Be sure to keep reading!

Do you have a garden where you want to welcome more biodiversity? This way your ecological garden will contribute to a green network where nature can thrive and for you to enjoy it. Do you want to know how well your garden currently scores? Take our mini test and receive the 10 eco-garden tips!

Autumn is the ideal season to get started with the organic material that the garden offers us in abundance. This biodegradable ‘waste’ is ideal for improving your soil or giving it another useful purpose in the garden. There are endless options to get creative with it.

In these times of climate and biodiversity crisis, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. These are phenomena on a global level and of such an order of magnitude that the battle seems already lost in advance. We, as individuals, appear to have no control over this. Yet, you can have more impact on your immediate surroundings than one would at first imagine. It pays off to start small, even in your own backyard. And it's healthy and fun too! Curious? Then be sure to read on.

Like any biologist, I am fascinated by biodiversity and always like to know which species I have in front of me. Because the kingdom of fauna, flora and fungi is so infinitely large and my time and patience limited, it is impossible to delve into all groups. Fortunately, there is the free photo recognition app Obsidentify.

The showpiece of many gardens is a sleek lawn, with 100% fresh green grass. To maintain such a billiard cloth, it is often watered, fertilized, limed, scarified, treated with herbicides and mown very frequently. In most of our gardens more than half of the area is lawn. That's a lot of open space when you add this up.

If you want to accommodate a wide variety of pollinators in your garden, be sure to provide enough food. For our butterflies, bumblebees, bees and hoverflies, this means offering a diverse menu of nectar and/or pollen for as long as possible, ideally from February to October. A bloom calendar is a good way to visualize the supply of flowering plants in your garden throughout the year.

The more native plant species in your garden, the more animal species they will attract. The reason is simple. Native species have been naturally present here since the last Ice Age. After 10,000 years of co-evolution and coexistence, our animals and plants are fully adapted to each other and interdependent. They need each other and seek each other out. These species are also best adapted to our climate and more resistant to diseases.

A pleasant winter job in the garden is the construction of a dead hedge. It really belongs in a natural garden, because a dead hedge is a complete ecosystem in itself. It is an ideal resting place for numerous insects and spiders that find shelter here. These in turn attract birds in search of food. Some birds and mice make their nests between the branches and there are even some butterflies known to deposit their eggs on dead branches. Amphibians, grass snakes and hedgehogs use dead hedges for hibernation. As time passes by mushrooms, mosses, ferns will grow on the hedge as well as other plants that sprout from seeds brought by the wildlife. A dead hedge will quickly result in lots of new life in the garden.

IMBY stands for ‘In My BackYard’. It is intended as a positive initiative, as opposed to NIMBY 'Not in My BackYard' where projects of public interest are considered necessary and relevant, as long as they are not in our own surroundings. We are currently facing a biodiversity crisis. The nature reserves in Belgium occupy less than 3% of our territory and cannot possibly cope with this crisis alone. Gardens cover 10% of the total land area in Belgium. If everyone were to adopt a few biodiversity-friendly measures in their own garden - no matter how small - this would contribute to a larger green network where nature stands a chance.