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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: environmentally-friendly gardening

A (gardening) life less plastic

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by sallynex in gardening without plastic

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

environment, environmentally-friendly gardening, less plastic gardening, plastic

plastic1

How did I not notice this?

One morning towards the end of last year some time, I skipped in to my garden as usual through the little picket gate and pulled up short.

In front of me was not a delightful scene of bucolic beauty and calm productivity: but a pile of multicoloured plastic.

I have no idea why I hadn’t been able to see it before. There were teetering stacks of pots and empty compost bags; the greenhouse was festooned with bubblewrap plastic; plastic trays held my overwintering seedlings (themselves in module trays and pots of green, black or orange plastic).

eomv1

So productive… and so plastic

I looked down to the other end of my garden and it was almost as bad: cloches covered in clear polythene over bright blue hoops of plastic plumbing pipe; winter veg studded tombstone-like with white plastic plant labels and shrouded in plastic-coated insect-proof mesh; and empty veg beds neatly mulched with compost but then covered in sheets of black plastic to protect them from the winter wet.

It could be worse: luckily I don’t favour green plastic pea netting, or plastic ties for my plants. I tend to use wooden and metal tools rather than plastic ones because they last longer and are generally better made; but having said that, many of the impulse buys I’ve made in an emergency after losing yet another hand fork in the compost bin have plastic handles.

How did such a sea of plastic leak into our gardens? There was, I assume, a time when plastic was completely absent: I’m picturing a time of terracotta pots and slate labels, teak-handled tools and wooden plant trays. I think this is actually the fantasy garden we still picture in our heads: but the reality in the 21st century is so very different.

I hate the look of plastic: it looks cheap, and tatty, and artificial, the colours clashing and blaring next to the gentler greens and browns of nature. And I really, really hate what it does to the environment. I won’t start to lecture you here about the horrific sea of microscopic plastic pellets killing everything from fish to albatrosses in the Pacific Ocean; it is headed our way, too, as the fish we eat are increasingly infested with micro-particles of plastic too.

This is not one of those big issues we can’t do anything about and just serve to upset us, like climate change, the Syrian war or the continuing existence of Katie Hopkins. Actually, we gardeners are contributing, very directly, to the problem.

plastic3

These plastic pots will still be kicking around nearly half a millennium from now

I’d just like you to consider that the split plastic pot you threw out with the rubbish today will still be in the world when you are long dust. In fact it will still be languishing in some landfill somewhere when your grandchildren’s grandchildren have grown into adults and have children of their own.

It takes an average of 450 years for hard plastic to decompose. Just think about that for a minute. I can’t even imagine what the world will look like in 2467. Or to put it another way: a theoretical plastic pot thrown away (as it would never have been, as they didn’t then exist) by a gardener in the 16th century, when Elizabeth I was on the throne, before Shakespeare, before John Tradescant was even born, would only just this year have fully decomposed.

I do not want to be a part of this. It horrifies me that I have sleepwalked into such a state of affairs: when gardeners, who are closer to the earth and more aware of and able to tend to its needs than anyone else, should contribute so unthinkingly to its desecration.

So: this year I have made a new resolve. I will not buy a single thing for the garden which contains plastic. I will use what I have – as it seems a bit counterproductive to chuck it all out and so fill even more landfill with it – but I will not replace what breaks with more plastic. And I will start to think really deeply about how I use plastic in the garden: what alternatives there might be, and whether I can adjust what I do so that I garden more gently upon the earth.

I know it’s not going to be easy: I’ve done a little tentative experimentation over the last few weeks and it’s underlined for me just how dependent we have become on what is, undeniably, an incredibly useful material. Where I can’t find a replacement for plastic, I’ll see if I can find a recycled plastic alternative.

I hope to build everything I find out into a resource on this website, on a separate page, where I will pull together my thoughts and discoveries along with listings for suppliers and manufacturers who are producing stuff for the garden which doesn’t involve using plastic. With luck, it will be useful to other gardeners who don’t like the piles-of-plastic-pots look; at the very least, it should make my garden look a bit prettier.

I welcome any input from anyone who wants to join in. If you know of a good supplier, a technique, ideas or campaigners who might benefit from being included here I’d love to hear about them. Please post below or get in touch via Twitter (@sallynex) using the hashtag #gardeningwithoutplastic. Thanks!

 

Putting Biochar through its paces

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by sallynex in climate change, videos

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Biochar, Carbon Gold, compost, environmentally-friendly gardening, mycorrhizal fungi, peat, peat-free compost, seed composts

I’m mostly a peat-free gardener: life’s too short and the world too precious to ruin a peat bog for beans and lettuces, and besides I kind of accidentally started peat-free (long before it became a hot topic in gardening) so I learned to garden without peat without even particularly knowing the environmental implications. You do treat peat-free composts differently: they’re more open, for one thing, so I’m used to watering my pot-grown seedlings a little more often. I had a go at growing stuff in a peat-based compost once, just to see if I was missing out on anything, and everything drowned.

But that word ‘mostly’ is in there for a reason. I’ve never been able to escape the use of peat in seed composts: I’m kind of fussy about what I start my seeds in, mainly because it can be the difference between modest success and abject failure, so I’ve always taken the safe course of action and plumped for John Innes seed compost blends. These are soil based – but they also have a proportion of peat. I’ve not been able to find out what proportion (compost makers are notoriously cagey about exactly what goes into their recipes) though some John Innes style mixes give it at one part sphagnum moss peat to two parts loam. Still too much for comfort as far as I’m concerned.

I had been turning a blind eye to this, reasoning (slightly uneasily) that since I don’t use as much seed compost as potting compost in an average year it was only a small proportion of the compost I get through. I’ve been stewing up a plan to make my own as an alternative, but haven’t quite got the leafmould together yet (one year done, one year left to do) and I never have enough garden compost.

And then I came across Carbon Gold. It’s got two very of-the-moment things in it: the first is mycorrhizal fungi, which is to say types of fungal organism which can form symbiotic relationships with roots, plugging them in to the soil around them so they access nutrients and moisture better. And the other is biochar: basically, charcoal.

Biochar comes in soil improver as well as seed composts; it acts like a sponge in soils, absorbing moisture and opening up the soil (rather like any kind of organic matter). And best of all, it acts like a carbon sink – so you’re doing your little tiny bit to help the environment by gardening, instead of carving it up.

I thought all this sounded rather wonderful: so I decided to try it out for myself and see if it really worked as a seed compost (the acid test: whatever it’s got in it, there’s no point in using a seed compost if your seeds don’t actually grow in it). And I (or rather the hubster) filmed the results: click play for the lowdown, courtesy of the crocus.co.uk Youtube channel.

Getting militant

08 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

campaigns, environment, environmentally-friendly gardening, Heathrow Airport

Now, I’m generally quite a quiet person. I keep my head down, I work hard, I have fun with my kids, and though those who know me well are all too aware I have some caustically strong opinions, I generally keep them to myself: I learned the hard way, back in my far-away youth, that if you go around shooting your mouth off, you generally end up putting your foot in it – and that instantly renders you everyone’s least favourite person.

But when it’s on your doorstep, and when it’s affecting your quality of life, your neighbours’ quality of life and potentially, the future of your children, sometimes you just have to speak out.

So in nearly-middle-age I’ve re-discovered the student within and taken up my place on the barricades. I know I’m a little late joining the party, but I’ve finally signed up to the Air Plot campaign being run by Greenpeace against the proposed third runway at Heathrow.

So, apparently I now own a bit of a field next door to Heathrow Airport. I’m hoping it might be the bit next door to Alys Fowler’s allotment, so I can pop along and pick a cabbage or two from time to time.

What with Monty Don lending his support and the backing of one or two of us gardening bloggers I’m tempted to start shouting slogans. How about “Gardeners of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our planes!”

Ah…. Karl would be proud….

Recycled lavatories revisited

17 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

aggregates, environmentally-friendly gardening, gravel, recycling

We’ve had to pause in our pond-making activities (oh dear… another half-finished project…) since nine tons of aggregate turned up, was dumped on our verge and needed moving. Fast.

Unusually, considering the prospect of long hours behind a laden wheelbarrow is generally about as welcome as double-digging in January, I have been enjoying this immensely – largely because most of the nine tons is recycled lavatories.

I went on about this at some length a little while ago, as my conscience was savaged by the revelation that the ubiquitous, common-or-garden gravel we all splash about on our paths and drives is about as environmentally unfriendly as it gets. Always a woman of my word – when it (at last) came to the crunch and we’d got all the various bits of digging-out and wooden edging sorted out enough to actually order the stuff, I went for the recycled option.

There were many dire warnings from assorted relatives about how horrible it would look (I bought it, more than a little apprehensively, sight unseen) – but do you know what, it’s really rather nice.

This is the first patch we did, by the greenhouse, which if you ask me looks just like 10mm pea shingle. But look a little closer…

The stuff is full of little bits of coloured china. The kids are in heaven – they spent most of yesterday pulling out chips and washing them to make mosaics. And there’s more, though sadly, my powers of photography are not up to showing you. The best thing about our new gravel is that those glazed bits catch the sunlight (and car headlights at night) and glint like little stars on the path.

This is lovely stuff, and I shall never use anything else now. It goes by the rather prosaic name of Traxmax (the manufacturers are obviously not as taken with its prettier qualities as we are) and all our neighbours are fascinated – I suspect it will be all over this corner of Surrey before long. It’s even reasonably priced – no more expensive than ordinary gravel. Order it here – and spread the word. Your local landfill will thank you.

Recycled lavatories

19 Friday Dec 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Capel Manor, environmentally-friendly gardening, garden makeover, gravel, organic, weedkillers

The other week at my ever-challenging and interesting plant design course at Capel Manor, we got to talking about environmentally-friendly gardening.

Now, I’ll nail my colours to the mast here and say I’m not entirely organic – I’ve been known to spray bindweed with glyphosate when nobody’s looking, and my most heinous crime is to Pathclear my patio and driveway every year which I will no doubt have to account for in the afterlife. However – five minutes of talking to my very knowledgeable classmates has made me realise there’s rather more to it than that.

We were talking about gravel. I’ve got loads of the stuff here – on my driveway, on the patio, and under my cold frame. It’s cheap and easy as pie to use, I buy big jiffy bags of the stuff every few years or so to top things up, and until now I’d thought that was a relatively neutral material, insofar as I’d thought about it at all: the RHS promotes it as a good alternative in its “don’t pave your front driveways” campaign, after all, doesn’t it?

Not so. Marine-dredged gravel is the worst of all: “harvested” by something akin to Spanish trawlers only much, much more devastating. They suck everything up off the seabed to a depth of a couple of metres, killing all marine life that happens to be in their way, then they clean, grade and sort the gravel and spit back into the sea what isn’t needed. Incidentally smothering all marine life that happens to have wandered into the area in the meantime.

So – you avoid that like the plague, and source it as land-dredged gravel, right? Well – if you can get companies to specify where they get their gravel from – this is certainly better. But the amount of fuel it takes to suck the stuff out of the ground, sort, grade and then transport it where it’s needed requires a few aircraft-longhaul equivalents of carbon a throw.

This was all getting me in a real gloom. I was already having a conscience about using paving to hard-landscape the area around my shed and greenhouse (the garden makeover is proceeding apace, of which more later). It’s not just the (itself not very eco-friendly) paving: it’s also the sand and the cement-based hardcore I don’t like having to use. Now it turns out the so-called ‘better’ options like gravel actually aren’t.

The ‘green’ alternatives to gravel – bark chips, recycled tyres or bright blue recycled glass bits – are either too hippy or too horrible to contemplate. Or they wouldn’t last five minutes. And then I discovered the wonderful world of recycled aggregates.

This is basically some of our rubbish that would have gone into landfill but is instead crushed down and sold back to us as gravel-like surfaces for pathways and hard standing. Surprisingly, for what might seem like an obvious idea, it seems to be a bit new, so there aren’t that many people doing it yet. Long Rake Spar, in the Peak District, does a gravel made of crushed building materials that looks pretty good (and very like regular gravel), but the one I really like the sound of is sold as Traxmax. It’s ceramics, either tiles or bathroom suites (I wonder if it’s sometimes avocado-coloured?) taken out of the local tip, hopefully cleaned up a bit, smashed up into little bits and delivered in a big bag. The best thing about it is that because the original ceramic was made of clay, once it’s broken up it becomes a little sticky again – so when you put it down on your path and it rains, it bonds to itself and becomes a solid surface.

You get it from this company – the only supplier I could find – and it’s not even very expensive. There may be a catch: but I’m going to give it a go and I’ll let you know what it’s like. And anyway, I kind of like the idea of walking over second-hand loos on my way down the garden.

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