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!

Frank Marsland pointed out his new site http://www.organicportal.co.uk/. It is potal for all things organic. Seems almost too much information to me but Frank did point out the typo in the email on the Who am I? page.

I received an email from Jessica concerning SHI which is an organisation that works in Central America helping to restore rainforests and encourage sustainable land use. She also pointed out that Stonyfield are running a ‘Bid with your lid‘ promotion. I would take part but this is a US only thing I think. Stonyfield are selling products in the UK now and you can find out more here. Jessica has asked whether she could do a guest post so you might hear more from her in the future.

Today I received I press release from walkit.com apparently they have reached 1 million kilometres which equates to 10 tonnes of chocolate cake. They have 1 million kilometres of routes available from the site to Londoners only the moment. Each route includes an estimate of how many calories the walker could burn using the route – that’s where the 10 tonnes of chocolate cake comes from. Hopefully more cities will follow soon!

Lastly I received an email from a company called Midori who have create a game called Global Warning. I haven’t actually had a go of it but it seem pretty cheap to buy so it might be worth getting for ‘the kids’?

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!

Although I think it is probably true that it is not necessarily better for you. I think in some ways this misses the point though. Organic farming is good because it looks after the land and looks after wildlife as I understand it anyway.

If all farms were organic perhaps there were be fewer chemical factories producing nasty pesticides. Perhaps the decline in farming that is always talked about might reverse and create more rural jobs and post offices?

The fact that it has less chemicals in is an added benefit as far as I am concerned. I think the organic organisations miss a trick by not emphasising this enough.

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!

Anyway to follow up that post coincidentally I am about halfway through the sequel cleverly named More Scenes from a Smallholding. This is just as good and I can’t help daydreaming about cows or chickens living in my back garden. Unfortunately being realistic this not going to happen apart from my garden being to small my daydreams don’t really take account of the hardwork involved in growing stuff!