Re-use in the garden

As experienced gardeners and composters the volunteers at Shropshire Master Composters have come up with some top tips to help us all to waste less at home and in the garden.

Did you know? With over 15 million gardens in the UK covering 270,000 hectares, gardens cover more space than all the National Nature Reserves in the UK!  They are a wonderful chance to help protect wildlife habitat. However your garden is also a great opportunity to help reduce your household waste and make innovative reuse of numerous items, for instance:

* You can use cardboard egg boxes in the garden to plant seeds in, you can plant out the whole seedling cardboard and all. 

* Buy a home-composter at reduced prices from www.getcomposting.com We find that simply by composting you can eliminate at least 50% of all your rubbish and turn it into a useful product for the garden. 

* Cut plastic bottles in half and use them in the garden to as a cloche to protect plants from frost.

 

* You can take old CDs to charity shops to be reused. However if they’re scratched up beyond us, you can still re-use them as bird scarers. Affix them to a bamboo cane and they will rattle in the wind to deter birds from nibbling at your crops.

* You can reuse old car tyres to make planters, stacked 4 or 5 high, and filled with compost they make a well insulated tub to grow potatoes in.

* Old carpets can be used to suppress weed growth. If you use old fashioned wollen ones they will eventually rot away but beware as many modern carpets are treated with chemicals and will not break down.

* Old yoghurt pots can be filled with beer to create slug traps to help remove this pest in an environmentally sensitive way

* Reuse broken ceramics at the bottom of a plant pot to help improve drainage.

* If you are buying water butts, compost bins, bird feeders, benches etc for the garden try to buy ones with a high recycled content as possible to help complete the loop and help create end markets for recycled materials.

* Expanded polystyrene cannot be recycled but you can make use of it in your hanging baskets etc this helps drainage in exactly the same way as broken terracotta or ceramics would but has the added advantage that it provides additional insulation too.