By: Blonde Two

May is a wonderful month, and the perfect time to do a bit of wild camping. As you know, our favourite Blonde wild camping location is Dartmoor but we are both very versatile and always open to suggestions. At present, during the coronavirus lockdown, our options are limited so we have been keeping up our wild camping skills by doing a bit of garden tent pitching. Whatever your location, there is definitely a nack to finding the perfect wild camping pitch, and of course, being the Two Blondes, we have a few top garden wild camping tips for you.

  1. Choose your garden – not difficult at the moment because it is rude to pitch your tent in your neighbour’s garden without asking. If you don’t have a garden, put a pot plant in your lounge and choose that instead.
  2. Get your tent/garden ratio correct – we have said this before but choosing the right size of tent for wild camping (even garden wild camping) is imperative. In the pictures above you can see how even small-when-folded tents can end up being larger than a garden. By the way, if you have a tent that is larger than Dartmoor, it isn’t a tent, it’s a stadium, and definitely not suitable for wild camping purposes.
  3. Select an appropriate garden wild camping pitch – please note, although aesthetically pleasing, it isn’t really sensible to have part of your flower bed, half a crab apple tree and three bees inside your tent.
  4. Pitch securely in case of bad weather – with garden wild camping you may have to step away from your usual peg and guy rope rules. Try to be creative, avoid pegging into concrete (because this is impossible) and tie guy ropes to… well anything really.
  5. Don’t be tempted to light the barbecue inside your tent. If it has accidentally ended up in there with you, you will have to strike camp before it is time to cook the sausages!

We can really recommend garden wild camping. It is great fun and uses up almost a whole few hours. We do have one request though, and that is that you stick to the leave no trace principal. When you leave your garden camp site, all trees, shrubs and children should be in exactly the state they were when you found them. It is definitely not a good idea to trim your bush in order to make it fit into your tent.

 

If you are interested, the tent used for this experiment is a classic. The 4-6 man Khyam Quick Erect Ultradome is no longer available but, back in the days of huge canvas frame tents, it certainly turned a few heads on campsite, especially as it fitted in the boot and we could have the main dome pitched with three kids safely inside in under three minutes. Amazingly after being in the loft since 2004, the Quick Erect system and all the poles still worked perfectly. Khyam still make Quick Erect tents, including campervan awnings. I would definitely like to try one of those and find out if they are still as good today as they were then.