Making the garden grow

                                THE COMPOST BINS
Another tub of compost was added to the garden today. Its taken a liitle longer to process during the colder months but still light years ahead of the time it took to get compost from waste in Scotland. We are adding quite a lot of lemon skins now, our soil is very alkaline so we are trying to even things out. If you pop some soil in a jar with vinegar you just about get an explosion as the alkali material reacts with the acid of the vinegar. Our flower bed in the back garden is really starting to look good. Much of this thanks to Johns hardwork, I am more of an "artistic director"  dont you know. Hey they also serve who only stand and wait!

Our next door neighbour was fascinated by our compost making system, sounds posh, in fact its two black dustbins that have holes drilled in them. Serefino was throwing vegetable waste on his garden one day so John showed him what we do. Its really necessary to try to improve our soil as it is poor and does not hold moisture well. Its also means we recycle all the kitchen waste, less for land fill too. We had also been putting some of the wood ash from the stove on but now know this is not advisable with our soil as it can raise the PH and prevent the plants from taking in any nutrients that are available. The other great thing about making your own compost is that it comes free and is not damaging the natural landscape elsewhere.

Peeing in the garden

Recently we have been looking at various methods of being environmentally friendly, one issue is the waste of water, we already are careful, not leaving the tap running while showering and brushing teeth and reuseing what water we can for watering the garden. One big usage  is flushing the toilet, each flush uses approximately 8 litres of water, this can be reduced by lowering the ball cock, but even more by less flushing, most people flush the loo after having a pee, using 8 liters of water to move something that is 95% water and 5% other elements.

So our urine is a valuable resource, it is an extremely good garden fertiliser, containing among other elements, nitrogen, sodium, potassium and magnesium, it can be applied diluted or undiluted to the soil around your vegetables, shrubs and potted plants, and is a tried and tested method of fertilising.

It has been proven that vegetables and plants fertilised with  human urine grow bigger and are healthier than compared to untreated greenery.

It will surprise many to know that urine has actually been used as a crop fertiliser for thousands of years, particularly in Asia, but also widespread around the world, it is only because of our hygiene obsessed culture that we have stopped using it as a fertiliser and even view its use as uncomfortable or disgusting. Urine from a healthy person is actually nearly completely sterile. and only starts to turn to ammonia after around 24 hours of standing and therefore should be used before then.

Even after 24 hours it can be put onto your compost heap as an excellent accelerater.

Our garden in Blanca is very sandy with very little humous so we create as much compost as we can with garden clippings, leaves and kitchen vegetable waste, to dig into the garden to help it, but from now on, I shall also be useing my pee to fertilise the garden and also get the compost heap going. So we may be saving between 50 and 80 litres of water a day (and the water bill! ) at the same time.