Most of us love our gardens, some just to look at and some to get more involved with! In the first of a series of articles for Tu B’Shevat, our very own JVN award winning horticulturalist, David Levy, who has transformed and maintains the shul garden, talks about gardening and how we can all make it even greener!
Eco-gardening, well it’s just gardening in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way.
So, starting with the lawn and depending on the size of your garden if you have quite a small manageable space the old-fashioned push and pull mower is the most eco-friendly one there is. Yet on the other hand if you have a tennis court size lawn or larger then it is obviously going to be a petrol or electric mower, the latter being more eco-friendly
Of course you could go the whole hog and invest in a robotic electric mower. Lester and Jenny Wagman love theirs (named Andy the Landroid)! It starts out at pre-programmed times (it knows to take a rain check after precipitation) and returns itself to its base station when its batteries need recharging! It charges from solar panels during the day and cuts daily through the growing season so the cuttings are tiny and just fall between the grass blades. It also means no gardener’s van or petrol mowers and as you probably know, 2-stroke engines are dreadfully polluting and inefficient.
But if you do have grass cuttings after all your hard work mowing the lawn, where are you going to put them? Most of us we have council supplied garden refuse bins or bags that get collected. This is certainly better than driving to the recycling centre yourself. But the more Eco adventurous you may want to start a compost pile at the back of your garden, providing you have the space. Or get a compost bin in which to collect various items from grass cuttings, weeds, flowers or even cardboard, paper, and newspaper.
You could also discard old fruit and vegetables in the bin but be careful as this might attract unwanted vermin. Maintaining a compost bin is relatively easy but you must periodically rake it over so that everything mixes in okay. You would be surprised how much heat comes off of it, and after a good nine or 10 months you will have your own home-made compost for putting on your flowerbeds.
Just on a footnote, flowers for the Shul. I couldn’t help but notice for the Rabbi‘s induction in November the floral arrangements were amazing yet from an eco-point of view I would have been surprised if any of the cut flowers were homegrown. Much more likely is that they had come from much further afield and been brought to the UK by air freight. In the unlikely event that they had been home grown they would have been cultivated in a very warm heated greenhouse, which wouldn’t have been very eco-friendly at this time of year either. Obviously home-grown colourful flowers are limited in this country from November through to the end of March so maybe in future we could look at more sustainable options?