Make a Metre Matter with Gardeners' World

* I was invited to the Garden Press Event, a one day show which connects garden product suppliers with garden media, I’ve also worked with the team at Gardeners’ World Live so I’m marking my blog posts from the event as 'Ad’ though as usual my views and opinions are very much my own.

Gardeners’ World is a bit of a national treasure isn’t it, or I think so at least. You’ll know that I love my visits to the the Live show at the NEC and I also love to catch up with Monty and the team when they’re back on our TV screens too. This year they have a campaign to Make a Metre Matter encouraging everyone to transform a metre of outdoor space for the good of the planet.

Whether you have an urban courtyard, small balcony, country plot or a community space, each of us making the most of one dedicated metre will have a real impact, and when you think about it a metre isn’t very much, but it can make an awful lot of difference.

As you’d expect every part of the Gardeners’ World brand will focus on their annual campaign - the magazine, the TV show, the digital platforms and live events, with Nick Bailey creating this year’s headline Show Garden at Gardeners’ World Live - but more on that later.

How you can Make a Metre Matter

There are loads of ways you can make a meaningful difference, whether that’s growing plants for caterpillars and pollinators, growing salad or vegetables to cut down a little on food miles and get a tastier crop at the same time, or creating a compost heap to boost your soil and help biodiversity.

The team at Gardeners’ World have plenty of ideas to inspire us which you’ll see more of in the coming months including how to:

• grow yourself a pollinator patch to support bees, butterflies, caterpillars and more,

• grow and harvest a summer of tasty veg using your square metre of space,

• boost biodiversity and welcome wildlife by making a small pond to make a big difference,

• save money on salad growing your own from seed,

• create an insect haven with log piles, habitat stacks and more,

• to get composting and boost your soil’s health with homemade compost.

Which all sounds quite tiring, but you don’t need to do it all! But there is a chance to win prizes when you register (before 30 September 2025) your participation at https://www.gardenersworld.com/win/make-a-metre-matter/

I’ve been considering what I could do in my garden, and while I do need a compost bin, that’s not what I’m going for as until I know more about what we’re doing with our garden I’m not sure where to put it. I do want to up my game on salad this year as we eat so much of it, and I’m always buying it. I like to have a variety of leaves and can quite often get bored with a single variety of lettuce, but then when I buy more than one it seems a rush to eat it - I can’t win! But if I were to grow more of my own then I could quite literally have my pick whenever I wanted, so I think that’s the right thing for me - though as before where to do this is an issue, so I think my metre will be across a number of pots, which may not be in keeping with the ethos of the campaign, but it’s what I can do and it’s way better than nothing.

Nick Bailey’s Gardeners’s World Live headline show garden, The Plant Based Garden

I mentioned earlier in this post that Nick Bailey is creating this year’s headline show garden and it’s going to be packed with ideas for transforming a metre of space, with ways to support wildlife, recycle and inspiration for choosing materials carefully as well as growing planet friendly plants.

Nick’s been involved with the campaign from the off and his garden with bring the Make a Metre Matter campaign to life. He’ll be including lots of interesting elements to the garden and wants to prove it possible to create a whole garden with only renewable resources. After the show in Birmingham the garden will move about 30 miles up the road to two different charities which are both focused on horticultural education. They are the University of Leicester Botanic Garden which is currently undergoing renovation so the show garden will add to their planting and resources, and the YMCA Leicestershire who have a big project engaging young people in horticultural careers.

And of course there’ll be lots of one square metre inspiration within the show garden, Nick said that the garden looks like a big Tetris game, but of course that it also has a cohesive design - and personally I can’t wait to see it first hand.

But until then I’ve my salad seeds to sort through and get planting - all the time remembering not to plant too many at once!

Bringing the bling to Zumba

I haven’t shared any pouches for a while, but don’t worry they’re still around - and the pouch love wait is over! Though today’s pouch is one that I’ve embellished rather than made myself.

At the start of 2024 one of our neighbours started a Zumba class in the next village, and so I’ve found myself heading along most Thursdays never having zumba-ed before - and quite honestly, I’m still not sure I’m technically doing it right, but it’s good fun and it’s a great group of people.

At Christmas our Zumba-leading neighbour held a fuddle for the group to celebrate our first year, which was a really thoughtful thing to do, and I think has helped cement the relationships that were already forming. We all insisted on helping cater the evening, as you would, and for a while our Zumba chat was the list of who was bringing what - and most importantly not to forget your slippers on the actual evening.

Now that’s my type of party!

Or fuddle. Not even knowing what a fuddle was, I’ve now been to two as my Sewing Group had one too. It’s a term I’d not come across before, and if you haven’t either, this is Wikipedia’s definition:

(UK, dialect, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire) A party or picnic where attendees bring food and wine; a kind of potluck.

But anyway, at the fuddle we all left with a Zumba pouch - imagine my joy, wearing slippers to a party and bringing a pouch home!

Embellishing my Zumba pouch

Obviously with twenty or so of these pouches now in the wild in my local area there was a high chance that some would make it to a Zumba class near me every week, and with them all looking the same that might not be the best move. So I decided some kind of customisation was required - and while I could have simply written my name inside, I decided to go bigger than that.

I also wanted to cover some of the text as that wasn’t for me. I know it’s fairly inoffensive, and more descriptive but I knew I’d be happier with just having the Zumba on my pouch - I can’t explain why. And I knew I had some sequins hanging around, like you do - and so I thought I’d put the mismatch of those together in ‘disco-type bands’ above and below the main zumba-ing figures.

This gave me the opportunity to test out my sequin applying skills, as well as my ability to thread teeny tiny needles - small enough to go through those tiny beads!

And actually it was quite a soothing thing to do. Before long I had two sparkly borders, which makes me smile - and then I remembered I had to do the other side too!

So now I have a bling inspired Zumba pouch, which definitely stands out from the others - and that’s mainly how I bring the bling to Zumba - my ‘moves’ mostly still need quite a bit of work, but really I don’t care too much about that!

Planning a greenhouse

At Gardener’s World Live last year one of the things I was keen to look at, apart from all the show gardens and beautiful borders, was greenhouses. We don’t have one here yet, and I’m missing it - pottering about at the greenhouse staging in the garage is ok, but the garage isn’t ideal for germinating seeds, and I really could do with a light, sheltered space for some of our plants to over winter to give them the best chance.

Not too big, not too small

I don’t want a huge greenhouse, though I’ve already doubled the size I first thought of! And I do want to integrate it into our overall garden design.

In our previous house I had the standard 6x8 aluminium Rhino greenhouse, and it was great - but as I’ve said my plans for this garden are a bit smaller. Originally I was looking at a 2x4 patio greenhouse, but given that it needs to be two foot from any boundary for maintenance, that seemed a lot of space for not very much greenhouse at all.

And so I upscaled my tentative plans to a 6x4 - but also preferring the black frame, rather than aluminium. Of course, all of this is just plans at the moment - though I did come dangerously close to buying one of the show greenhouses in one of the sales, but in the end I resisted as I wanted our plans to be a bit more developed first.

Testing it out for size

So would a 6x4 greenhouse work in our space? Well as there’s nothing else really in our garden, apart from the trellis around the heat pump and the small crab apple tree, the answer is clearly a yes, But would it work how I wanted it too, where I envisaged it - or would it dominate the garden?

I decided to try it out using bamboo canes and string. So this visualisation spent a fortnight or so in place in our garden last summer, and no doubt any neighbours that spotted it clearly must have thought we’d lost the plot.

But it worked, well visually of course, not as an actual greenhouse!

It was easy (and easier than it looks in the photo) to see its footprint, how high it would come up the wall, how far it would come into the garden - and most importantly, how dominant it would be from the house. Putting it directly opposite our lounge windows might not seem the most obvious positioning, but I’m hoping it will also help keep it tidy and on the prettier side. I fully intend to retain the greenhouse staging in the garage for the real functional work, and use the greenhouse for what it does best - providing a sheltered growing space.

Of course I spent the time that it was up, looking out of every window to check what it looked like from that vantage point - and I was happy, until of course my temporary structure collapsed a little. But by then it had done its job and confirmed this is the size and location for me.

Now only if the rest of planning the garden was that easy - but more on that another day!