Top Gardening Trends for 2024

If you want to give your garden a new look over the next 12 months, now is the time to start thinking about planting schemes and landscaping. Here Madingley Mulch, specialists in soil improvers in Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, identify some of the horticultural trends that are likely to prove popular in 2024.

 

Edimentally Speaking

Increasingly, gardeners are looking for plants that not only look good but which they can eat as well. The technical term for this is edimental: a plant that is both edible and ornamental.

Prime examples of edimental plants are herbs such as mint, rosemary, thyme, and oregano, which can all be used to give your meals extra flavour. You could also try drought-tolerant vegetables with plenty of foliage, such as rhubarb, Swiss chard, and asparagus.

 

Popular Pollinators

Surveys have suggested that as many as one in 10 gardeners are looking to increase the number of pollinators in their garden. This means planting plenty of flowers and shrubs that will attract bees, butterflies, beetles, and birds. These wildlife-friendly plants, such as lavender (pictured above), salvia, poppies, and sunflowers, will boost the ecosystem in your garden and increase its biodiversity.

 

Gravel Gardens

These are predicted to be big in 2024 because they are low-maintenance and are ideal if we get prolonged dry spells. Plants grown in gravel gardens will be encouraged to grow deeper roots, resulting in much hardier plants. At Madingley Mulch we supply a range of 10 and 20mm gravels at our Cambridgeshire base, more details of which can be found here.

 

Seasonal Changes

Gardeners will have to adapt to changing weather patterns as even in the last couple of years various climate records have been broken. In different months, it’s either been much hotter, drier, wetter, or colder than we might usually expect.

As a result, this may affect planting times, as well as the choice of plants. For example, do you need something that is drought-tolerant, or can cope with a lot of rain such as we have had in East Anglia recently?

It also means that, as well as potentially having your own compost bins and water butts, you will increasingly need to consult the long-range weather forecasts and be adaptable to changing conditions.

 

A Move Away from Peat

Another thing gardeners will have to adapt to is the loss of peat-based composts. The sale of these will be banned by the end of 2024 as part of the drive to cut our country’s carbon emissions to ‘Net Zero’ by 2050. Whenever peat is extracted from its natural habitat (and used in commercial compost) more carbon is released. To learn more about this, check out our previous blog post here.

So gardeners are having to turn to a range of alternatives including mulches, bark, and wood-chip-based products, along with other soil conditioners and improvers. We stock a wide range of these including Tony’s Tonic and Denise’s Delight, both of which are exclusive to Madingley Mulch.

These and many other soil conditioners and composts that we stock at our base near Cambridge will allow you to adapt to the changing climate. Mulches in particular suppress weeds and retain moisture well, meaning you can grow herbs, drought-tolerant plants, and many other species that wouldn’t normally flourish in your garden.

 

Soil Improvers in Bedfordshire from Madingley Mulch

As well as the soil conditioners and composts, we also have a range of other outdoor gardening supplies to help you stay ‘on-trend’ in the months ahead.

These include fencing panels, decorative stones and pebbles (some of which can also be used as a mulch), new turf, and high-quality tools to carry out all the weeding and planting you are likely to do. Check out the products and pricing in our online shop here.

We can deliver your order directly to your door (minimum order value £50). We now also operate a sliding scale of charges, more details of which you can find on this link. We have regular delivery runs to Newmarket, St Neots, St Ives, Ely, and the surrounding area, as well as to Cambridge itself.

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