There is no "AWAY" in the phrase "thrown away"

This phrase is something I picked up from my one of my G+ people, +Adam Johnson. Its got staying power and pops into my mind surprisingly often.....

Its my garden day on Wednesday and I was pleasantly surprised to find a new pile of garden waste and five bags of leaves sitting next to my newish (and almost full) compost. A very welcome garden gift.

Huge pile of autumn garden waste

Five rubbish bags of  leaves

There's far too much stuff to put on the existing compost, its already taller than me, so until it shrinks a bit there is no room for more.
Well then!  Scrap todays leisurely path sweeping plan and find somewhere to put all this lovely stuff.

One of my other compost bins is nearly empty, there's just a one or two wheel barrow loads left in the bottom. It's easy to find places in the garden that need a compost blanket for the winter.

my barrow - full of home made compost

As I'm shovelling the last bit out of the bin I find these:

A shredded plastic bag and a yoghurt carton top.
Its the usual suspects.
Assorted bits of plastic.

This compost is over two years old, mostly everything has disappeared, leaving me with dark brown, sweet smelling, light fluffy home made compost.

Apart from the plastic that I didn't spot in the green and sticks that originally went in. 
Plastic doesn't disappear at all - the plastic bag is looking a bit ragged, but the yogurt top is still exactly that. A bright pink plastic yogurt top. Over two years later............

I pick them up and put them in my waste bag, also plastic and in my head a sad voice is saying : There is really  no "AWAY" in the phrase "thrown away". There is only putting this stuff somewhere else.
This bothers me.

I'm a sort of organic gardener, and I know I'm very lucky. I don't depend on growing my food to eat, I earn enough money to buy all my food but choose to grow as much as I can for the health benefits. 

I work in the city, inside all day and mostly sitting down. Growing my own vegetables provides exercise, the contact with nature, time to be outdoors, and truly fresh, chemical free food.  These all contribute to my well being.

I choose not to spray and I don't use any sort of chemical fertilisers. I share my home grown food with everything else that wants to eat it too. I delight in the insects, birds and animals that this encourages into my garden.

I've gotten over the need for perfect looking vegetables. I've learned that the strange shapes taste just as good as the perfect ones. I now know that odd shapes are normal and that perfect vegetable are the real weird.

But plastic really bothers me. Regardless of how hard I try, contact with plastics in food cultivation, storage and preparation is almost impossible to eliminate. 

It bothers me that the plastics I acquire and then throw away are not going to "go" anywhere. 

They don't decompose in the way organic substances do. We just get hide it away by burying them in the ground or burning them. 

In the ground, they'll be there for hundreds and hundreds of years, leaking unwanted chemicals and volatile gasses into the surrounding soil and water.

Burning them does the same only faster by dispersing the chemicals and gasses in unseen smoke.

It bothers me. 
Then

I go back to the job in hand and start a new compost. I put most of my gift in the bottom and then pile on all the fallen leaves from the paths.

The start of the new compost! 

I love leaves! There will be more next week, the oak trees have only just begun to shed their leaves. 

The source of that quote:  "there is no such place as 'away'" originated with Barry Commoner, environmentalist and socialist, as one of his four laws of ecology, published in The Closing Circle in 1971.  Commoner was a leading ecologist, founded the modern environmental movement, was a candidate for President of the United States, and edited Science Illustrated magazine.  He died in 2012, aged 95. 

The four laws are:

Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.  There is no "away".
Nature knows best
There is no such thing as a free lunch

https://philebersole.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/barry-commoners-laws-of-ecology/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Commoner#Four_Laws_of_Ecology
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444138104578030783002905480.html

My last minute spring bulb rush

SALE SALE SALE

I was in my local DIY shop earlier this week and spring flowering bulbs were on Sale.

Three packets for the price of one

The sale was so hard to resist - all those lovely bulbs reduced to a third of their normal price. OMG I could buy 30 bulbs for the normal price of 10.

Now a clump of 10 bulbs is beautiful, but three clumps of 10 will make real show!
Here's a clump of 10 red tulips in my garden last spring to whet your appetite....

tulips behind the broad beans

So I went shopping for glue and came home from the DIY Sale with 50 daffodils and 20 blue iris bulbs for my garden and 60 tulips for my next door friends garden.

Planting bulbs late in the year

This isn't the first year I have been lucky to bag a bargain, so I know that bulbs can be difficult to plant this late in the year. 

Here in the South of England it's is almost winter, and most of the garden plants have lost their top growth and gone to ground. This makes it really difficult to tell where things are already planted. 

In my crowded garden I'm bound to dig up something that is already loved, so I don't want to dig big holes for the bulbs. Things have been made worse by the weather, this autumns big rains have saturated the soil with water and my ground is heavy and soggy. Standing on the beds and digging would compact my already heavy clay soil and make a lot of mess.
I'm not downhearted though. Lucky me, I've planted loads of  bulbs late in the year and after now after lots of trial and error, I finally have the perfect tool for this job.

The easy bulb planter

This is a metal bulb planter and it works like a dream. Its a sort of oversized apple corer with a spade handle.

Full size bulb planter

  

In the past I've tried all sorts of hand held bulb planters, none of them were any good.

I found that after three or four bulbs my wrists would get tired. Hand held planters are hard work - bending over or kneeling and pushing on a hand held planter was tiring and time consuming.
So don't waste your money, if your planning on planting a lot of bulbs, skip the hand held planters and treat yourself to a great garden tool. Buy a bulb planter you can push with your feet and stand on.

Here is a close up of the business end. Like a good quality digging spade, mine has boot flanges which make it easy to push in with my wellies or boots.

The cutting end 

I place the planter where I want to put in a bulb.

Put my foot on the flange and push the planter into the ground, the same as using a digging spade. 

If it doesn't slide into the top few inches of the soil easily then I know there is something growing there already! I can move the planter a few inches where there is a gap.

My wellie on the push edge or flange

My planter is steel and has a sharp leading edge. If needed this will cut easily through most top growth of ground cover plants and small shrub roots. Bigger roots and really dry soil will sometimes take two feet on the planter and a good stomp down.

Pushed 7 inches into the soil

I try and be kind to myself and use the bulb planter after a good rain. It's much easier to push through damp soil than dry soil. 

If I'm planting in dry soil, I'll water the area I want to plant in before I plant the bulbs. 

Damp soil also helps the hole stay in shape long enough to get the bulb in. Dry soil often collapses around the hole.

Hole and the cut plug in the planter

A perfect hole - easy for me to get my hand into and place the bulb in the bottom the right way up. 

My hand placing a bulb in the hole

This is how the plugs of soil were coming out of the planter this afternoon. Just how I like them.

When the soil is damp like this the plug will stay stuck together and I can pick it up and push it back in the hole on top of the bulb. 

If I'm planting through weeds I'll push the plug back in upside down, which usually kills the weeds.

The soil plug next to the planter

Guaranteeing a good show from my bulbs

Flowering bulbs are not cheap - so I give them the best start I can. 

• I push the planter in as far as it will go - about 7 inches. (30cm). This is 3 inches (12cm) deeper than most bulbs like. 
• I fill the bottom three inches (12cm) of the hole with some good home made compost. Then I put the in bulb.  Three inches of compost in this size hole is two cupped hands full (my hands anyway). 
• I put another handful in the hole on top of the bulb before I push the plug of garden soil back in. 

The compost will give the new bulb some rich and light soil to root into and guarantees me great flowers for the first year or two. 

I like to dig 5 or 6 holes at a time in a loose circle, with a generous hole space between each hole. I think flowering bulbs look better in clumps than in lines. Near enough together that intertwining  leaves will help support the flowers in windy conditions, but far enough away from each other that the bulbs have room to grow.

I planted them all  - 110 bulbs this afternoon in three hours between the spells of rain and the early autumn sunset. Brilliant.

Its leaf fall time

I love this time of the year!  Cool and crisp air - the best weather for doing jobs that work up a sweat. 
My first job of the day is to get the big leaf rake and sweep the paths. Rotted leaves are garden gold, so me and my mate, Doug, have made a new compost bay to take full advantage of this season's bounty.

New compost walls - now what to put in?

Sticks and apples 

The base of my new compost - sticks and apples! The apples are windfalls from a local garden and the sticks will stop the apples just turning into a mush. Next up is all the leaves and dead stuff from around my garden.  Before I finish for the day I will cover this with an inch of soil to stop it smelling

The first days stuff - this will have gone down by 50% by next week

I love making my own compost, I already have two full bays made just like this. Both full and slowly rotting down to give me fantastic and free food for my garden soil.

Most years I make about two square meters (6 square feet) of compost and I can usually fill one of these bays in a year. All the green waste from my kitchen, the house garden and the veg garden goes on. Everything. Including sticks. As well as anything green from the neighbours gardens (I'm the local free and friendly green waste service). It saves me a fortune and makes my garden soil easy to work with and super fertile. 

This is my compost bays last spring, the two right hand ones are both full now, and I should be able to use them this coming spring. The left one is empty, but the pallets are rotted so I am going to replace them all sometime next year.

There is a lot of bulshit talked and written about composts - so here is my no bullshit guide to making great compost.

Pallets make fantastic compost bin walls. They let in some air and rain, keep the heap from falling over, and are generally free or low cost. Stand them on bricks so they don't touch the wet soil and they should last 4 or 5 years. Wire them together and keep them from falling over by driving a few metal garden stakes on the outside. No need to be too precise about it - the compost won't care.

The more sun your compost gets the faster it will "cook", but anywhere will do. All my composts are all in places where its difficult to grow stuff. Be prepared to water your heap it if you place it under a tree or it will take a very long time to rot down.

I use mine as a boundaries between me and my weed infested neighbours!

Size is everything! This size (using four pallets) makes the best compost. It allows me to put in loads of anything without totally filling the compost. Its a very stable shape and has enough mass to cook quickly, weather permitting - within a year.

Make sure your compost touches the soil (No brick or concrete base). All the creepy crawlies that you need to make the compost for you will magically appear on their own if your compost touches the soil.

Fill from the front. First make a wall about a foot thick in the front of the compost with whatever you are putting in. Compact it well by standing on it or hitting it with your spade. Then fill the back until its level with the front. Repeat. 

Everything will rot - so don't worry about putting in woody stuff. I put in all woody stuff that I can snap by hand, I break it up as small as I can be bothered. 
If your branches are too big to snap,  then put them in a pile on their own and then when they are totally dried out (takes about a year),  put a big piece of carpet on them and jump up and down to break them all up. Then they are ready to go in!

Firm it up, get on top and stomp it down. The compost will dip where some areas are rotting quickly and you can fill them up again.

Remember to water well in dry weather or all your worms will leave! A good compost, like the rest of the garden, depends on the weather. A good year with plenty of sun and rain will give a quick result! I water mine in the summer as if it is part of the garden. I put the hose on a small sprinkler and leave on the top for 15 mins.

Cover with a carpet, over the top and all the way down the front.
This stops weeds growing in the compost and keeps the moisture and the heat in.

One side of the compost will always "do" before the rest. Thats just how it is, and I've learned to relax about it. This is caused by the direction of the prevailing wind and rain and where the sun is the hottest. If some of your compost is not properly rotted, never mind. Just chuck it straight in your new one.

Take it easy - take the long view. I never bother to turn my compost. Its just too much hard work. I just wait longer and throw the unrotted stuff on the newer compost.

The key to worry free compost is to fill the compost as full as you can. Size matters, the bigger the heap the better it rots. Once its full, relax and wait. 
When it is down to a third of its full size, then most of it will be ready. Sometimes it will take a year, sometimes two! If its really dry and you don't water it - may be longer......... but in the end, you'll have a free heap of garden gold.

Free compost starter!  I invite all my male friends to pee on my compost. (if you are a woman, consider investing in a "she wee".)  Urine contains an organic nitrogen and all the trace elements and salts that plants need to grow well.  (You got a lot of them eating veg) Using  pee to seed your compost with nitrogen will rot it faster and save you flushing the toilet! 

I've learned not to worry too much about large bits in the compost. 
I only dig it into soil  where I am growing "above ground" crops (not root veg) Unlike root vegetables, these plants don't mind a few lumps in the soil.
Most of my soil will get one lot of home made compost a year. A layer two or three inches thick, depending on how much is made. 
Trees and fruit bushes get a few buckets full around the roots in the spring.

For those really keen gardeners - my organic matter is up to 7%. Which makes my heavy clay soil much lighter, well drained and moisture retaining. Better still, I no longer need to dig with a spade!  Instead I can turn the top 10 inches over easily using a fork. 

ps apologies to those gardening in a desert - I know from friends that this method doesn't work in very dry conditions with termites.


For those keen souls who have read this far :-) 
Here is a photo of my new compost after three weeks of leaves and garden clearing. When I get on top and firm it up it will compact by a third. It'll be full by the end of December and I'll put a carpet on top in late spring.