The weather’s going pear-shaped on us here, so we have to do what we can, when we can. The past couple of days we have been doing this and that. The outside of the garden fence is a strip of soil which every gardener is expected to keep clean…or should I say, “tidy”. There is a large leeway on what that means. We once had a certain type of iris planted there, but discovered that the weeds between, behind and in front of them went wild for the time that the irises grew and bloomed. It just got way too messy. I finally began strimming the strip, first around the iris plants but that did not look good at all— a skinny stem with an unkempt bush of diverse weeds at their bottoms. Right then, nothing for it but to strim, irises and all. I did it a few times a season and it looked very tidy indeed, especially during the hot, dry periods. A couple of days ago my Bride suggested that we just schoffel the strip. The plan was to give it a deep schoffeling and pick the weeds out. Then repeat this so often as necessary to keep the weeds limited to a subterranean milieu. Well, can’t get it all; however it is an acceptable improvement. We have been taking a large amount of “baddies”” away up to the club’s weed-dump compost piles and the municipality’s composting dump. It was time to do something. We always divide our cleaned debris into goodies and baddies. The goodies, we compost in our two bins, the baddies (serious weeds like bindweed) we take to the council’s collection location as well as the club’s huge square containers. It is great having these places, but it takes time to drive out to the council collection point and we can only take our stuff to the club’s place every two weeks, at a certain time. Our solution was to just build a third compost area on our garden for baddies. Of course this meant there would be costs. We had some metal gauze, but we would need some rootcloth for the bottom and sides of our structure. Also it would cost us a whole stand of the pink Japanese anemones. The stand would have to be removed…the entirety of it. The Bride kept talking about where we could plant a few roots. There is no place. Our gardens are over-organised and planned-out. We had to find four poles to use as the bin’s corners. We checked our used pole collection. Finding four the same length was not simple. The measuring, the cutting, the securing…it made us ask ourselves what we had baygun on. Here’s the result. Albeit a bit blurry. A bit closer by gives a better idea. We left one end open to add to and eventually remove the composted baddies. We are so impressed with our simple structure that we do not call it a compost bin…we call it a “BAY”, a compost bay. Who’re the happy gardeners then. The canals are cleaned on our side, but not on the railroad’s side. I was waiting to see if they would do it in time to post along with this thread. Sadly it has not yet been done. Looking the other way: Well fellow gardeners, I am going to end this with a piccy of our last rose of the season. Too bad it’s raining, there are still things to do. Maybe tomorrow. It is nice having a lazy day off at home though.
Garden looks good Sjoerd. I like your idea of separating out the goodies & baddies. We just throw our baddies in the woods to the side of our community garden.
Chuckle Cayu— they may grow back to haunt you again. Haha. we can take our refuse to the central composting site on our allotment complex every other week. They close it in the winter, so instead of carting it off to the municipality collection point, we thought we’d just begin one ourselves for the baddies. Our composted baddies will never go into the veggie plots just to be sure. They will be returned to the flower and fruit tree plots from whence they came.
