Recycle your Christmas tree – you'd be amazed how many uses you can find for it around the garden. Once you've packed the decorations away for another year, get to work with a pair of secateurs and a shredder and you can transform your tree into a garden feature. Here are a few ideas:
Mulch: Christmas tree needles and shredded branches make a great mulch around acid-loving plants like rhododendrons, blueberries or camellias. Strip the branches and spread as thickly as you like on the surface of the soil.
Fedges: Drive pairs of short stakes into the ground along your boundary, then cut off the branches and lay them between the stakes, wedging them in tightly to make a fedge – a cross between a fence and a hedge. Add other prunings and woody garden waste through the year to make it nice and dense.
Wildlife habitat: Now all you've got left is the trunk, saw it into equal-length logs and stack in a shady corner to make a woodpile. As it decays back into the landscape it becomes a welcome home for insects, toads, frogs and beetles, who love the cool, damp, shady conditions inside.
