Greener pastures
● When shopping for the garden, save petrol on unnecessary trips by making a list and doing one big shop in spring. Buy large packs of things you use lots of (liquid or soluble tomato feed, general fertiliser, potting compost) and store in a dry shed. Roll the top of an opened bag of compost down securely when you’re not using it.
● Buy secondhand gardening tools where possible (find them on ebay, in junk shops and stalls at plant fairs) and use good-quality hand tools instead of powered ones.
● Look out for people locally with unwanted gardening gear or even sheds and greenhouses to dispose of cheaply or for free. Find them on cards in shop windows or on the grapevine at gardening clubs. Or visit freecycle.org, where people give away things to anyone who’ll take them away.
● Reuse bulk fertiliser tubs round the garden as weeding buckets when they’re empty. Wash out old but serviceable plastic flowerpots and seed trays, and scrub used plant labels, then reuse them. Greengrocers sometimes dispose of plastic crates, which can be useful in the garden.
● Reuse household packaging in the garden. punnets make good small seed trays, plastic soft drinks bottles can be cut up to make funnels. Cardboard tubes from the middle of kitchen paper, tinfoil and toilet rolls make good fibre pots for raising sweet peas.