Gardening without plastic

There is a lot of talk about being sustainable, but what actually works? Sally Nex has been experimenting and reports on her finds

- Sally Nex

ON the whole, I’m proud to be a gardener. My carbon-offsetting tree planting rivals that of an oil executive. Growing fruit and vegetables eliminates food miles and saves artic-loads of single-use plastic. But how I get there matters, too. I want to garden without guilt, leaving no trace—no whiff of petrol, no wrecked habitats, no scrappy broken plastic. The old habits have to go.

Ditching the lawnmower was easy: I never was a fan of the Saturday-morning mowing ritual anyway. If you have a large lawn, it sucks up too much gardening time, but now there’s a good excuse not to submit to such slavery.

When grasses grow long, they provide habitat for all sorts of tiny creatures, from ground beetles to solitary bees, and you suddenly discover how many nectar-rich wildflowers (previously known as weeds) are lurking beneath the sward, waiting to pop up and surprise you. Goodness, bees and butterflies do love a dandelion.

Mowing paths down the side and clearings into the middle reminds you it’s still a garden (and takes a fraction of the time); one big cut, usually done in August, will keep more thuggish weeds at bay. My lawn, if that’s what it is now, is now full of flowers; I am hoping, one day, for orchids.

I’m also evicting the plastic. Wooden seed trays (I bought mine for a pound a piece on eBay from a chap called Andy in north Wales) are as easy to use as plastic, as are clay pots and Vipots, made of rice hulls. Single-use biodegradable pots, buried with your plants, take minutes to make from newspaper or cardboard, but it’s quicker to buy fibre pots, made from wood pulp or compressed cardboard.