The Ethical Gardener

A big part of why we garden is to nuture our own private piece of mother earth, be it for ourselves, our families or wildlife.

We as a people are becoming more and more aware of our impact on the environment and take steps towards lessening this on a day to day basis.

Horticulture, despite it being good for the soul and our immediate environment, is generally terrible for the wider environment.

While it can be generally difficult to be completely green when creating and looking after your green-space, here are some ways in which you lessen your impact and garden more ethically.

We start a short series tackling 5 big issues gardeners wrestle with, starting with the dreaded 'P' word.

Plastic

Every year in the UK, an estimated 500 million plastic plant pots and seed trays are sold.

Moreover, they are still made from a wide-range of plastics including black plastic which remains rejected by recycling facilities due to sorting and reprocessing equipment being unable to detect the colour.

With such a quantity of this plastic destined only for landfill what can we do to limit our impact?

1. Recycling by re-using

As gardeners we acculumate an array of containers of all shapes and sizes. The best way to avoid buying and disposing of our pots is to reuse them. When a pot becomes available, give it a clean and store it in readiness for its next occupant.

2. Recycling by returning

If you are like me, you will have amassed an alarming collection of pots from your trips to the nursery and the odd supermarket plant purchase.

If you begin to struggle for space and have more than you could ever need, consider taking the pots back to your local nursey.

Many garden centres and nurserys are totally aware of the issues surrounding this prolific material. More often than not, recycling areas or bins are provided for you to drop your unused pots off where they can be processed or re-used on site.

3. Recycling other packaging

In our general shopping we come into contact with dozens of different recycable materials, a few of which are ideal for use in your garden for growing seeds or taking the place of standard plastic containers.

Common cardboard items such as toilet roll tubes are ideal for starting off seeds which enjoy a deep root run such as beans and sweetpeas - but there's nothing to stop you from using them for other things as well. The best thing about these is that when it's ready to plant out, you can bury the entire thing as the tube will conitnue to biodegrade in the ground.

Here is an old picture of our nerve centre which is comprised of purpose made seed trays & inserts, along with cracker and ice-cream tubs, filled with toilet roll tubes.

Plastic punnets and tubs make ideal seedtrays and containers, just make sure you pierce or drill drainage holes before use. You could for example make up for a chocolate binge and re-use your Quality Street tubs for salad crops which don't require a deep root run. Your empty compost sacks could be used to line unsealed constainers such as veg crates, or even as sacks again for growing potatoes.

Many of these are temporary solutions for edibles, and may not fit in with the visual you are going for in your green-space. There are ways of reclamining beautiful items from the home which can have a second-life as a planter. Your options are as broad as your imagination here. Whatever you choose, make sure it can stand to be wet and that it can drain properly.

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In all I believe that going plastic-free is a huge undertaking and I really admire anyone that works with this ethos.

It poses a significant challenge, particularly for an urban gardener with limited space and where you might be totally reliant on containers in order to grow. It's in these circumstances though that we can be most creative.

You may have to sacrafice aesthetic over function and accept the community garden/ramshackle feel, unless you are willing to invest in reclaimed materials which can look beautiful in their own right.

What we can all do, regardless of look or budget is take steps towards ensuring that we use what we have for the entirety of it's viability.

Later in this series we'll look at Peat, Pesticides, Fertiliser and WWW (Weeds, Waste and Water).

Look out for the rest of the rest of the Ethical Gardening series here.