I’ve been doing a bit of reusing and recycling this week in preparation
for seed sowing. It sounds simple to put
a few seeds into containers but I have a lot of preparation work to do
first. Firstly I have to get into the
garage and find some plant pots and propagation trays; this means having to do
a job I have put off since moving house last October...tidy. It isn’t just a tidy up though, on a scale of
1-10 this is a big 10. All winter the
family have been rooting around the boxes and containers looking for things and
as the boxes are emptied they are seldom packed up again, things just get
thrown everywhere. Add to this the dogs
making beds out of our winter coats and the guinea pig throwing straw about and
it’s a pretty bleak scene.
Emerging
Three days later and I have emerged from the garage. I have four piles of things. Keep and reuse,
recycle, charity shop and burn in the fire.
The ‘keep and reuse’ pile ranges from tools to old bits of carpet, which
is quite straight forward. The recycle
and charity shop boundary is a bit vague though. Some of the recycling things like old metal
will be going to the recycling centre but things like clothes are a different
matter. I have the choice of dumping my
three bin liner bags full into the clothes bank at the recycling centre,
sending them to the charity shop or taking them to a place on the Springtown
Industrial estate in Derry where I can get 60p per kilo for clothes and shoes,
and 20 per kilo for old bedding. I don’t
need to tell you where they are going. The charity shop will be getting my old
video tapes and a few ornaments.
Old cooker
The old gas cooker in the corner of the garage needs to
go. All of the connectors would decay
quickly if not used so I need to find a new home for it. Scrap values for anything metal are very high
at the moment so I could take it to the scrapyard along with a couple of old
car batteries I have, but the cooker is only about 6 years old so I want to find
a home for it. I did try advertising it
for sale on
Donedeal a month or two ago but got no response. I remembered a set up called
Freecycle, this
is a worldwide group where you can give away or ask for things you need in your
local community. We have two groups
locally in Donegal and Derry and there is also an offshoot of the scheme called
Freegle which formed after the UK Freecycle split from their American founders. I joined the Derry group and put the cooker
on it. Within an hour a very nice lad
had collected the cooker and said he would make good use of it, now I am not
sure if he meant because he was going to use it or take it to the scrapyard and
get a few euro for it. I didn’t like to ask.
Cleared
The garage is clear and I resume my search for the pots and
propagators only to realise that I have left them all behind in the old house,
which has been totally cleared. Oh well,
it’s not like I am potting on an industrial scale so the old dog chewed pots we
have blowing around the garden will have to do.
As I was organising the garage, Julie was buying some vegetable
seeds and also managed to get pea, beans and courgette seeds from her dad who
always has some left over after planting. We don’t really have a workspace for potting
up the seeds so I made good use of the top of an old chest of drawers that I
haven’t chopped up yet for burning. With
the use of an old fence panel and a branch I lopped off the sycamore tree I
quickly make a very sturdy work table in the garden that is ideal for potting
up and housing the seedlings. Hopefully the dogs will keep of it for long
enough to let them germinate.
I realise now though that we haven’t really got a place
ready for the vegetables. We have a
small section cleared of weeds and old roots but the soil is quite poor. I did remember to bring large bags of compost
from the old house so we can dig those in soon; we also have fresh compost in
the bins that we can put in trenches for the peas and beans to grow on. It’s all “Just in Time Management “in the
garden at the moment which is expected as it’s our first year in the new
place. Exciting stuff!
