I find myself spotting waste material from time to time, particularly pallets, I probably drive my wife nuts, driving around admiring discarded pallets. I am lucky, my workplace location is over an agricultural garage, they regularly receive parts for machines on pallets which they mostly discard. Occasionally I take the car trailer to work when I see some worthy of salvaging. Last summer we managed to make two potting tables and a back-yard gate from repurposed pallets.
Today, we managed to pick up some very handy hinged frames, I have no idea what they contained in their previous life, but we brought them home and have repurposed them into raised beds. We had almost no work to do. We stapled some lining to the inside of the frame and dug some of the ground within, filled with our own homemade compost, mixed with soil a small skim of peat compost and the chicken manure pellets and Voila! A raised bed and home to 12 strawberry plants, runners from last year. I’d guess a total financial investment of buttons, only the bit of lining a few staples the peat moss and the chicken manure pellets cost us money. The plants were free pf charge too, my ever-diligent wife carefully saved the strawberry runners last winter, despite my protestations at the time, telling her she had enough of them, when in fact it was I who had enough while holding a bucket of wet miserable looking strawberry plants one cold miserable Sunday in January. I am sorry darling.
A milk container (above) and egg carton (below) being repurposed to house seedlings. I have spotted empty loo rolls being used for the same purpose.
I mentioned above homemade compost, over the past number of years I have been piling a mound of lawn mowing’s at a regular patch at the end of the garden, not intentionally, but over the years this mound has been the go to point for all past garden clippings, various weedings and some ash from our wood burning stove all sorts but particularly material that would decay. Have almost never put kitchen ‘brown’ waste in this.
I had a plan this year to move the mound to a more appropriate area (to make room for some raspberry canes), I dug into the pile and was surprised and pleased to see reasonable looking compost instead of the pile of sludge I was expecting. It looked good and nutritious, if you were a plant looking for a source of nitrogen. This pile is now serving as a compost base for all our ‘beds’ this year.
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