Christmas is increasingly less about the nativity and the season of goodwill and more about rubbish – rubbish music, rubbish TV, and piles and piles of packaging. It seems nothing generates waste quite like ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.
Cast an eye down any residential street and you’ll see bins brimming with discarded festive packaging that more often than not is much greater in volume than the item or items it contained. Some of it even ends up on the verge of a remote rural road.
While some of the waste generated will be recycled by your local authority, much of it is destined for landfill or to be exported for incineration. However, some of it can be up-cycled by resourceful gardeners.
With the exception of meat and potato peelings, pretty much all the organic waste generated from a Christmas dinner can be composted, though be aware that worm activity is minimal during the colder months.
Anybody with young children will likely find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of polystyrene employed to ensure – often cheap – goods don’t get damaged while in transit from the sweat shops of the Far East. The options here are sadly limited, I’ll concede, but a small amount of polystyrene snapped into tennis ball-sized chunks makes a useful crock substitute.
Crocks are broken pieces of terracotta pots or similar material placed at the bottom of containers to improve drainage. The non-biodegradable polystyrene versions serve the same purpose but are lighter, meaning your container is easier moved.
I’ve yet to discover a use for the large amounts of moulded plastic that accompany many Christmas gifts, and would therefore appreciate any readers’ worthwhile suggestions, but where I do excel is in the deployment of cardboard, a material that no gardener should willingly spurn.
This free and lightweight resource has two key applications. Plain brown cardboard and moulded pulp such as egg boxes, when shredded or torn into smaller sections, will help maintain the equilibrium in your composting process. Like leaf mould and straw, cardboard is carbon – or ‘brown’ – material which is essential for offsetting the effects of nitrogen – or green – material, such as grass cuttings, fresh manure and kitchen waste.
The right combination of brown and green material creates the perfect conditions for the micro-organisms to get work breaking down fresh waste and turning it into a dark, crumbly material that won’t be unpleasant to smell.
Waxed or laminated cardboard is less easy to compost due to the inorganic film that often covers it. However, its sturdiness makes it ideal for laying flat on ground you’re planning to reclaim. This ‘lazy man’s mulch’, will suppress weeds and ensure any goodness in the soil isn’t washed away over winter by rain. Come the spring, the film that remains can be easily gathered, while the rest can be composted.
It can also be deployed in this manner on ground that’s already cultivated though is best suited to the veg patch, where beds are ordinarily symmetrical and easily covered. Advocates of the no-dig method would lay sheets of cardboard before covering them with other organic material, such as home made compost, in an approach dubbed ‘lasagne gardening’.
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