It was a lovely day, but I had been extremely busy, it was already half past two and I realised I hadn't collected any twigs nor taken the dogs out. The plan was to do a dog walk and collect twigs on the way round, neither had been done but as every multi-tasker, ADHD sufferer knows, there is no such thing as doing one task at a time.
So off I went in the car for school pick up, parked a mile down the road and walked the dogs to the school. Picked up my youngest and came up with a really fun game of picking up unusual twigs on the way back to the car. Every child loves to collect sticks so why not use that enthusiasm and have an extra pair of hands to collect double the twigs.
I am not advocating you pull twigs off trees but we all know how brutal the storms have been in the South West so there is quite a lot of fallen twigs that appear to be of no use to anyone and just compost down into the ground.
Now if they compost down into the ground why not take them home for your own compost? Or indeed what my plan was, take them home to put in the newly built raised beds.
To fill a 3mx3m raised bed is roughly a ton of compost which will need to be topped up a few weeks later as the compost settles. I manage to get a ton of compost from a local place for £45 delivered which isn't bad at all but you are still looking at around £60-£65 to fill one raised bed. I have four that I have recently set up in my new garden so you can see how this can quickly add up.
So I have layered the bottom with cardboard. Most of us have things delivered these days so we have boxes. I had a huge stack of moving in boxes piled in the garage from when I moved into my new house last year and they cost a fortune so didn't want to just chuck them out. But you can use cardboard from anything. Cereal packets, shoe boxes, cartons, food boxes, even pizza boxes!
On top of that I put a layer of twigs, grass cuttings, raked leaves from the Autumn goes in as well, veg peelings, egg shells. And finally my compost which really reduces the amount of compost I need to use per bed.
If you are doing this to plant straight in you will need to use the bed for above ground veg. Carrots, swede, your parsnips, turnips will need to have had the bed rotting down over the winter before using. Although I will explain how I plan to sow my carrots and parsnips this year to avoid the split roots in a later blog post.
Anyway give it a go. At the end of the season when you are getting your beds ready for Winter, start again piling in your grass cuttings, veg peelings, egg shells, cardboard and cover ready for the following spring. Year on year you will use less and less compost and save money. We all like to save money! And as I said rope the kids in too, even the dog, my two little dogs love carrying a stick or two home.
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