Saturday, June 04, 2005

Waste not, want not - published May 1, 2005

Good soil is essential to being a good gardener. If you like you can spend your hard earned money buying good soil or, with a little time and effort, you can create your own with the waste you naturally accumulate.

Composting was one of the many topics discussed at the latest meeting of the Green Thumbs and Greenhorns Garden Club. It was pointed out that tons of good soil goes to the dump every year because we don’t take the time and effort to compost. Discussion continued into the different kinds of composting containers as well as what to compost and what not to put in the pile.

This is International Compost Awareness Week (May 1-7) and if we were in St. John’s we could visit the Botanical Gardens and take advantage of workshops and demonstrations they have set up on the topic. Thanks to technology, even though we can’t visit in person we can visit through the internet and learn about composting. Type the following link in the search bar of your internet browser and you will come to page one of a leaflet all about composting - http://www.mun.ca/botgarden/plant_bio/compost/pdf/ . Continue through the leaflet by clicking on the page numbers on the right hand side of the page. You’ll soon find out the benefits of composting and the fact that it’s not as complicated as you may believe.

The next meeting of the Garden Club is scheduled for Sunday, May 15th at 2:30 p.m. at Camp Mettabesic. Be sure to come along. In the meantime, if you have pictures of your garden you wouldn’t mind sharing we would really like to be able to use them to make a display of the gardens in our area. You can email pictures to me at greenhorngardener@yahoo.ca or drop them by my house at 4 Fosters Road. I can make copies of them so that you can keep the original.

Happy gardening, and remember put that waste to good use so you won’t be in want of good soil.

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