The use of gaps in the garden. Referring to walkways, borders, weed barriers and rises.
The reasons why we have these divides is usually due to our interaction with the garden such as walkways to water and weed the garden or borders to shape the garden design or raised beds to contain soil and rest our cups of tea/coffee on.
This interaction reason alone is an excellent reason to have a ‘gap’ in the garden but is there more to it?
When building a garden very often we are building onto a pre-existing ecosystem. This includes a lawn, an area of overgrowth or even next to an area of growth like a hedge.
When building a garden you are either changing or combining with an area’s current ecosystem in order to be plant specific.
So in order to make a garden successful we can use ‘gaps’ to prevent the majority of invasive species we call weeds and pests.
In our typical gardens use a path and a raised bed as we find seeding plants do not reach the bed especially when cut by machine they are not spread onto the bed but the path. We also find one of the biggest garden pests, the slug usually travels over our woodchip path and gets turned around back to the grass as it prefers to travel less distance for food. We also have a border edging onto the grass which helps stop root growth under the path.
One of the main gaps/barriers we use is a lining and biodegradable material such as cardboard to initially stop weeds however still allow microbes and water to travel through.
Having gaps like these means that the main infiltrators to your garden may come from the air not the ground or from lesser invasive plants like a shrub rather than grass or weeds which should give the garden a better chance to flourish.
Treadit Gardens 