Green ideas I have found easy, enjoyable and most importantly beneficial to my home.
Seed Saving is just a lot of lazy gardening! You have to be ok with having your vegetable garden looking a tad wild or overgrown at times- which is what true nature is, embrace it! Seeds from vegetables are ready for saving at the end of the vegetable’s life cycle. Each variety of vegetable will be different on how or when to collect seeds to grow new plants - google is always handy to be sure. Saving seeds for your next crop is returning to gardening how your grandparents did! There were fewer seeds from packets then! Some examples of how to save seeds are collecting pumpkin seeds and drying them on the window sill, squeezing your favourite tomato onto some tissues and storing them for next season. Leaving your broccoli plant (after harvesting the head), kale or bok choy ‘go to seed’ as the weather warms up you leave it growing in your garden bed. Each of these plants grows flowers/ or seed pods. Once the flowers or pods have dried out you can collect the seeds by hand. Or simply remove the plant and trash the seeds into the soil! It's all part of allowing the plant to complete its full growth cycle. A lot of flowers are similar in that seeds are collectable and viable from the ‘dead heads’ They will look dried out and once opening the dead flower head you will be able to see the seeds. My children and I have had a lot of joy in seed collecting and sharing. We often harvest a lot of seeds to share with friends, family and school. Gardening is that- sharing and gifting and once you begin you never know what nature gifts you may receive in return!
Composting bins are cost-effective, simple to use and stop food waste from ending up in a sealed ‘time capsule’ or landfill in our lovely country! Let's use our food scraps to create new soil packed with nutrients for your garden! The trick with compost bins is to add plenty of browns! These can be toilet rolls, torn-up newspaper or brown autumn leaves. layer your compost like lasagna. food waste, grass clippings any other organic material such as coffee grounds from your local cafe or bags of pony poo and even seaweed from the beach if you're super keen like me! Every once in a while, give the pile a turnover to add air and mix the layers. This speeds up the process. When done with the right ratios aim for 50:50 browns and greens and layering as you go you can get compost ready to use within 8 weeks! I have found having 2 compost bins great for my property. I fill one up and leave to ‘brew’ and then start on the next one. Rotating the use of each one and having the capacity of both bins has meant we can dispose of all our green waste on our property. I have also enjoyed emptying the bins and topping up all my garden beds with fresh homemade compost- saves money from buying compost in bags and a higher quality soil for next season's plants! Composting also means creating a circular system for your garden
Water Tanks are often heavily discounted through your local council and easily collected from the council themselves or your local library. Having a water tank can double as emergency water and garden use water for the summer months. My children also like to use the water for play in the mud kitchen or to rinse their hands when playing outdoors. My husband did a great job connecting our water tank to the guttering so we can collect the rainwater. So handy! With the water restrictions over the summer, I wanted to collect rainwater for the main purpose of watering my greenhouse. Being so hot in there it needs watering daily. I also bought another water tank to create my liquid fertiliser. When I first began gardening I would spend a lot of money on ready-made fertilisers until I realised I could simply make my own. The idea of soaking organic matter to create fertiliser began for me when we planted our food forest. As mentioned the soil quality in the area we panted hungry fruit trees was really poor. So high on my to-do list was to continue to feed my trees well. In my fertiliser tank, I have a heap of used ground coffee, a load of seaweed straight from the beach, comfrey picked from the food forest, lots of banana skins and some really old pony poo which was almost completely broken down in water over the previous year. Once I put all this organic matter in I used an old net and weight to act as a sieve or filter and pushed all the organic matter to the bottom of the tank which meant the tap worked perfectly and didn’t get clogged when using. Every once in a while, I will add more things into this tank and I plan to clean it out a few times per year as I see the need. The lid helps keep any odour or even the unpleasant look of this witchy concoction out of sight - which is needed. I like to use this fertiliser on my new seedlings growing in the greenhouse and my ‘high feeders’ such as fruit trees and plants or vegetable plants when beginning fruiting is about to begin.
