VAL BOURNE’S GARDEN WILDLIFE
Val discovers why modern tea bags won’t rot down
“We’ve gone back to tea leaves”
MY drug of choice is tea, hot and strong, and I like the North of England brand named after the county of my ancestors. I’ve been adding the bags to the compost heap for many a year, but like some of our readers I’ve realised that the bags aren’t rotting down. The Best Beloved has had to pick them off the vegetable plots and allotments.
While at the Malvern Spring Show in Worcestershire, the Gloucestershire Organic Gardening Group displayed some information put together by Garden Organic, which was previously the HDRA (Henry Doubleday Research Association). It says that many bags “contain a small amount of polypropylene, which helps with the sealing and tying of the bag. This will not break down in the domestic compost heap, and indeed particles will remain even after commercial ‘green-waste’ composting.
”Some brands use a polymer fibre derived from plant starch called PLA. This starch is often sourced from genetically engineered crops. This will eventually degrade in the home compost heap, but it takes some time.”
Garden Organic suggests emptying the tea from the bags and separating out the leaves – as if we haven’t got enough to do. We’ve gone back to tea leaves, and perhaps fortune telling will follow.
The tea companies are working on their bags, but they are aiming at biodegradable and that hints at heattreated systems. The new ones will still not be compostable in most cases. Only Duchy Organic and Pukka tea bags contain no plastic and will therefore rot down on a compost heap.
It’s made me think about plastic, because I’m old enough to remember the days when pots were clay, seed trays were wooden and washing-up bowls were enamelled tin. If you bought a plant it would be tapped out of its clay pot and wrapped in newspaper. Wooden seed trays, incidentally, grow bedding plants far more effectively than plastic because they hold warmth and water.
The compost heap is an important feature for green gardeners and mine has a stand of ‘Bocking 14’ comfrey close by. This is chopped up and layered into the compost heap every now and again to speed things up. This Russian clone, collected from Henry Doubleday’s garden at Bocking in Essex, doesn’t set seeds so it’s highly useful in the garden.
Doubleday (1810-1902) was a failed entrepreneur who imported as many comfreys as he could in order to patent a glue from the mucilaginous roots, for affixing postage stamps. Someone beat him to it, so he concentrated on comfreys instead.