Sustainable gardening: 10 ways to recycle

Trust gardeners love making compost – we have compost champions in all corners of Scotland! We regularly use our home-made compost for potting on older plants and certainly for mulching borders, where it can help keep weeds down.

Why buy it in when you can make it? It also avoids sending green waste to landfill (where it leaks methane) – win, win!

Leaf mould is a particular type of compost made only from leaves. We gather them from lawns in autumn and pack them down into a dedicated compost bay or into a large mesh ‘basket’. Then, we let time and nature do their thing. It’s also great fun for younger members of your family to help with this task.

By the next year the leaves will have broken down into gorgeous material for growing, so prized it is sometimes referred to as black gold! Give it a go – the longer you leave it, the better it gets.

If you can’t make your own, then some local authorities turn domestic green waste into compost that you can get from your recycling centre.

This is a great initiative but it needs to be used with care, as the quality depends on what your community may have put into it. Sometimes the compost includes the odd brick or bit of metal. It’s usually best kept for planting, but not for sowing or potting.

If you’re short on space but still keen to get involved with making your own compost, you might consider a worm bin. A few of our gardens are giving this a try.

In a process known as vermicomposting, selected species of worms are used to convert kitchen and green waste into a nutrient-rich organic fertiliser, which can be put to use in the garden.

You can re-use those tough bags from growing media and bark, again and again and again, in the garden for all sorts of things:

• Opened up, they can be a mulch or a place to neatly drop a pile of soil.
• If you cut some drainage holes in the bottom, you can use them to turn autumn leaves into glorious leaf mould, or to grow potatoes.

If you feel they look a bit scruffy, try turning them inside out so the plain side faces out!

When it comes to needing new plastic pots or trays, do you really need to buy them – or can you get creative with some recycled alternatives? Row upon row of uniform pots in a glasshouse or polytunnel can satisfy a liking for order, but old yoghurt pots with a few holes cut into the bottom can do almost the same job.

Consider buying or making wooden seed trays – an idea from the past – which can be re-used year after year; a few Trust gardeners do this and find they work just fine for germinating seeds.

Cardboard tubes from kitchen and toilet rolls are good for sowing too – especially suited to starting sweet peas. You can even make your own paper pots from newspaper.

A lot of what we buy for our gardens comes wrapped in plastic or other packaging, much of which can be directly recycled with domestic waste.

But if our plants come in pots, we try to re-use them again and again. You might also give some to a friend or a local group who can use them. It is also becoming easier to recycle them – even if they have to be stored up for a trip to the local recycling centre.

Cardboard from big boxes makes an amazing mulch, especially if you take the plastic tape off and spread a few centimetres of herbaceous shreddings, woodchip or even grass clippings on top. This helps to weigh it down, discourages weeds and encourages the worms to work hard. Thick layers of newspaper work in a similar way.

This is a good technique if you feel you have lost control of the weeds in a border or veg patch. We find a lack of light helps weaken even tough weeds – and the soil seems to soften over the season, making even deep-rooted weeds easier to remove later on.

It’s easy to forget on rainy days that water is a precious commodity for us all, including in a garden. It’s well worth collecting rainwater from shed and glasshouse roofs into a water butt for use on drier days. If you’re on metered water, it saves money – but it also cuts down the amount of treated water being drawn from the mains, and so helps save on the cost and effort that goes into bringing that to your tap.

Use a watering can instead of a hose, and avoid using sprinklers if possible as they can be quite indiscriminate and easy to leave on by mistake.

If water supplies are short, water from your shower or bath is safe to use on garden plants, although best avoided for edibles.

Considerate planting also helps to save water. If you have areas that are regularly dry, choose plants that naturally like that environment, rather than fighting against nature and creating a high demand for watering.

Applying a mulch in spring when the ground is damp can help keep moisture in the soil into drier seasons too.

Pots on patios can help soften the look of hard landscaping and may be all you have space for, but if you use larger pots and put several plants in together, that can help cut down on watering. Try to position any pots in a spot where the rain can reach them, not too sheltered by buildings and overhangs.