If you read this site regularly you will know that compost is one of my favourite subjects. Next week is compost awareness week running from the 4th to the 10th of May. There are events going on all over the country and it is being supported by celebrity gardener Charlie Dimmock. In my opinion you can never have too much compost so if you need to get a compost bin check out the site to where you can get cheap compost bins from. One of the added benefits of composting is that you put a lot of food waste in your wheelie bin it can end up quite smelly especially if you bin is only collected every too weeks. Composting this waste could make you bin smell a bit nicer.

It’s amazing how much stuff will fit into one compost bin. One week it will be almost full and as the composting process develops the bins seems to empty itself. I used to worry about what I would do if one got full up so I got another one. I have still never filled one to the top. Having two is good though as turning the compost i.e. moving the whole lot into another bin speeds up the whole process. I generally try and give mine a ‘stir’ with a big stick. I should probably get a compost aerator to do this – although the big stick seems to be working at the moment.

If you want to go a bit further and compost all your food waste including meat you need a bokashi compost bin. As I understand all you really need to do this is a compost bin and some bokashi bran. This video explains how to make your own bran:

I have watched the video but not tried the recipe – sometimes there is not enough time in the day!

I planted some salad crops, some courgettes and some herbs. I will be interesting to see which ones survive the odd hot and cold weather. I put a gardening tip my farther-in-law gave me into action. Instead of peat pots as shown in the picture I have started using old toilet rolls instead. You can cut them to the required length put them in your seed tray then fill them up with compost and plant you seeds in them. Then you can just plant them out and the toilet roll will degrade much the same as a peat pot would.

I am also going to look into build a bumble bee nest. There was an article in the Gardeners World magazine about how to build one using a plant pot and a pipe. I found this in the internet as Design 2, the pages also has some other ideas. I also looked on the Gardeners World website it self and found another idea for a bee hotel. If you lookaround the site there are some other ideas for attracting useful wildlife to your garden.

If you want to find out a bit more about why bees a good for you garden try the Bumblebee Conservation Trust it has lots of useful information about which plants will attract bees and about the problems bees are facing at the moment in the UK.

Apparently we waste up to a third of all food bought in the country. This campaign gives ideas ideas on how to reduce this waste. It has recipes, meal planners and tips on understand sell by and sell by dates. I have to admit we do waste food in our house hopefully it’s not a third of a food though. Any food waste that is suitable goes on the compost heap which I think is probably most of it. This makes me a feel a little less guilty about the waste but is does annoy me throwing away unopened packages of stuff!

For a campaign site this actually looks pretty useful to me – I am sure a will be referring to it regularly to get some ideas for not wasting food.

Anyway I was watching Gardeners World a few weeks ago and Monty Don explained the ins and out’s of making compost. The thing I had’t know was that you need to turn the compost to help break down. As I have to cone shaped plastic bins this isn’t that easy. As part of my winter/spring preparation I have managed to urn one into the other. You are supposed to do this every 5 or 6 weeks – I am not sure this is going to happen!

One thing Monty does say is that you can never produce enough compost. About a years worth of food scraps covered about a 5th of what I would have liked it to cover. To that end I have started adding more paper to the heap to try and create more compost. A compost heap is a great way to get rid of shreddings from when you have shredded bank statements etc. More secure than putting then in the dustbin too! A load of paper I put on the heap last year is now helping my plants grow. since I have been adding more paper I have noticed that the recycling bin seems a bit emptier which is good.

He also mentions green manures too. I have planted some field beans in one of my patches to provide this in the Spring.

If you still need to buy compost for your garden I have found a great place if you are in the Bournemouth/Dorset area. ECO recycle green waste to make variety of composts, mulches and other bits and bobs. It’s not too expensive either. This is where I topped up my supply this and no doubt will be dropping by there again in the Spring.

Usually in terms of growing veg Winter is a no-go for me but this year things are different. Apart from the field beans mentioned above I have some Spring Cabbages waiting to be planted out and I last week I planted some broad beans. A while ago I planted some garlic too so hopefully we will get some early produce in the Spring.

Strangely even with the baby I seem more organised than normal in the garden. Maybe I have reached the age where gardening becomes a bit more natural. It does seem that a lot of the best gardeners are quite old!

Something that I think we all should be doing. It’s easy once you have the composting bin. With all this talk about wasting food and reducing the waste going to landfill and the length of time between waste collections this is something that is really easy and really will help save the world.

Composting reduces the amount of waste going to landfill. Any food you do waste can be recycled in your garden – by looking at how much food you put on your heap you might start questioning what you are buying. It also gets over the the hygiene problem a bit by reducing the amount of tasty morsels that attract vermin to your bin. This assumes you are composting properly and not attracting the vermin your compost heap instead.

It’s very fulfilling putting home-made compost on the garden!

We have been having a bit of an ongoing discussion about recycling where I work after our local council changed the way the they do their recycling. The main point of contention is the bugged bin controversy. Our council is one of the ones that has bugged their new wheelie bins which is fine by me. The only problem I have with this is that they didn’t tell anybody that this is what they were going to do. If they had said that they were going to put a chip in our new bins so that they could weigh rubbish so that they could look into ways to improve the collection or even a pay to throw system I have no problem with that. But they didn’t and now upset residents have removed them or broken incurring more costs on the council and no doubt at some point our council tax will go up.

In the Real Story programme this week there were a few facts that I didn’t know:

1. Councils need to pay £18/tonne of rubbish to in landfill tax
2. This is going to go up £3/tonne every year
3. Councils have limits on how much waste they can put in landfills if they go over this figure they can fined £150/tonne

We received the Bournemouth Council mag this week as well. They mention the chipped bins, giving a brief explanation. They say that they do actually anticipate using them for a while as the bin trucks are not equipped to use them. I am not even sure it is legal for them to use them yet!

Once we get sorted it out will make our lives a lot easier as will not having overflowing recycling bins and the silly blue plastic bag lying around anymore. It will save us money on petrol too as we won’t need to go up to the dump quite so often.

I found an article about recycling the other day. It refers to a TV programme in which they say recycling doesn’t work. Here’s a link to a clip of the programme – it’s not particularly family friendly! This maybe true in terms of efficiency etc but I think that it’s the principle that is important. We can’t go on using stuff then putting it in holes in the ground (unless it’s been composted already!) – this might not seem so bad in the US but here in the UK land is not quite as available for landfill and nobody wants a landfill in their backyard.

You have to think about countries like China and India where they have huge populations. At some point they people are going to want all the stuff we have. If we don’t set the example of being serious about recycling and I guess in some ways reducing our consumption the waste produced by these countries will have a massive impact on the rest of the world.

The whole recycling system might not be efficient but really it is still in it’s infancy and hopefully retailers will get on the bandwagon and make their packaging more recycle friendly and people will demand more environmentally friendly packaging.

I think people sometimes miss the point with recycling it’s not just about separating the out the glass and paper etc. It’s about reducing your waste buying a particular product or shopping in particular shop.

It’s about reusing things, fixing things, taking them down to charity shop or freecycling them rather than dumping them in the bin.

It’s about setting up a compost heap in your garden and putting suitable waste on that so you can fertilize your garden easily and cheaply. Apparently 38% of all UK waste is organic waste that could be composted and contributes to creating greenhouses gases when put in landfill.

Once you have done those things then you can get down to sorting out the glass and paper!

The thing about all this stuff is it’s not rocket science, everyone can do and really there’s no excuse not to now – at least not Bournemouth anyway!

Or these resources might be helpful:

• Compost at Home
• Community Composting Network