Garden doctor: bin or burn?
Tom Brown looks at the best way to get rid of your garden waste
If you’re like me, by autumn you’re itching to start cutting back and clearing. But after a hard day’s pruning, raking and weeding, as you stretch your aching back and sip your tea, you’re faced with a mountain of clippings, leaves and plant debris. So what to do now – compost or burn it? Most garden waste carries pests and/or diseases to some degree – think black spot on rose prunings, aphids on dahlias or rust on leek foliage. Is torching the lot the only fail-safe solution? Or will chucking it on the compost heap do the job? And if so, will home composting suffice or do you need to go industrial scale? Then there are the ethical implications: what’s greenest, what’s kindest to the environment, and what’s safest for the wildlife around us? These are all big questions for another feature. Everyone loves a bonfire! They are unarguably a good way to destroy pests and diseases, and there are no laws against having them in your garden, as long as you’re not causing a neighbourhood nuisance or burning materials that will cause pollution or harm people’s health. However, if excessive smoke drifts across a road and is considered a danger to road users, you could be fined. Also, before you set your prunings ablaze, spare a thought for our much loved yet sadly declining hedgehogs. They often take refuge in piles of twigs and vegetation, especially in autumn, so if you’re building a bonfire, do so on the day you’re going to light it, and check for prickly stowaways. But is an occasional bonfire really a sensible and sustainable way to manage your garden waste? Certainly not compared to composting. Compost is the ultimate in recycling and the foundation of a thriving garden, turning naturally decomposing plant material into an excellent soil additive and improver. The heat generated by microorganisms during composting in an active heap is critical and can destroy most plant diseases, weed seeds and garden pests – making the resulting compost safe to use. Look for individual advice on disposal if a disease is prevalent in your garden. For example, material with club root, honey fungus or phytophthora root rot should not be placed in a home compost heap. If you’re short of space, take garden waste to your local recycling centre or tip. The material is shredded to accelerate the composting process and machines turn the waste to aerate it, adding oxygen and increasing the activity of the microbes, fungi and invertebrates, which all help to turn our garden castaways into ‘black gold’. The high temperatures achieved by these industrial-scale methods effectively sterilise the compost, which is then screened and sieved. That said, you can still make perfectly good compost at home. As at the amenity sites, heat is key. By shredding, turning and aerating regularly, your domestic heap should reach high enough temperatures to sterilise most common problems. Garden waste is at its most abundant at this time of year. If you choose to burn it, be courteous and mindful of wildlife and your neighbours. If you prefer to compost, be sure to turn up the heat, and enjoy what can be an incredibly rewarding process, especially knowing that sustainability is at the heart of your thriving garden.