Recycling to recycle
It crowned many a sardined mile as we trundled the pre-fledged family to remote cottages and coastal retreats, but the trusty roof rack had spent the last quarter century suspended from the garage ceiling. It was starting to rust and serving no useful purpose, so it was either terminally skip-bound or off into the unspoken garden to mechanically pupate.
Coincidentally, our mark one leaf-mould maker was leaning precariously, and was well overdue for modification to match our shrinking statures and shrivelling strength. This structure was also a legacy from the days of childhood captivity, when our fawns had been provisioned with a pair of quarter-size soccer nets with posts and crossbars hand-fashioned from two-by-two-inch timber.
Leaf-mould, the beloved secret gardener told me, makes especially fine mulch. As described in Leaving, the unspoken garden is generously embraced by sycamore, elder and others, and has three fruit and two hazel trees within its boundaries, so we have plentiful autumnal fabric.
We could just have purchased another plastic compost container to add to the three wise bins that process our vegetable food waste, lawn clippings, former flowers and unwanted herbage, but it is more fun to construct something unique, and there’s added joy from making a recycling structure from recycled components.
The roof rack alone would not suffice, but we also had two steel bench ends along with some gabion wire mesh panels salvaged from the mark one moulder, a handful of shelf supports, some old greenhouse shelves and the skeleton of an ironing board. Dry fallen leaves are almost weightless but when compressed and wet acquire deceptively crushing obesity, so the roof rack and bench feet need to earn their keep. We cracked open the nuts and bolts, snipped off some garden wire and four hours later there she stood.
We constructed mark two wider and not as high as mark one, to make it easier to load, and we incorporated a handy front flap to ease emptying. The ironing board height-adjusting handle made a useful release catch. After slapping on some Buckingham Green paint left over from the garage window frames, she stood proud as a panda – ready to ingest an arboricultural bellyful.
Meanwhile, in other unspoken garden news…
Following on from our last missive Hoe-digger’s Hog, we are delighted to report that our trail camera is still catching images of a hedgehog some seventy-five days after we released ‘Crissy’. We can’t be sure it is the rescue hog that we cared for, but even it isn’t, it is good to see we still have an urchin frequenting our foliage.
We have also snapped footage of a couple of foxes, one with a white tip to the tail, and one with no tip at all. The half-tailed one is keeping her distance but the full-bush bearer checks in now and then.
uneasywords 