Recycling in the garden and a pet poo composter

I seem to have spent hours in the garden and not really made much difference but we're still working on the infrastructure which is time consuming in small areas so doesn't necessarily make a big impact.
I did a bit of tidying up, moving some of the overgrown self-seeded rocket for the peas. The rocket definitely earns it's keep and the flowers have been on every meal for weeks. The chickens were quite happy to get the last bedraggled remains of the plants.

The peas are in, a couple of different varieties- Roveja (a soup pea), a yellow mangetout I saved seed from last year and Jessy, a sugarsnap pea. I labelled the rows with cutlery from a meal at a festival last year-

I've just realised I've spelt it wrong. Jessy, not Jesse...

I cut down some comfrey to make plant feed, partly because the plant under the young pear tree was getting slightly out of control. 

I grow Bocking 14, a sterile variety that is still useful to bees but doesn't self seed so is a bit easier to manage than other varieties. I think the jury is out about whether plants are really nutrient accumulators but I think it certainly can't do any harm so I'm carrying on. I tend to use comfrey and or nettles but other pernicious weeds sometimes get added to drown them before composting. 

I got given an old (non-electric) tea urn years ago,  a giant tea pot with a strainer in the middle, so I make it in that.

Comfrey tea anyone?

Photo of Zak by my son (I think...)

I have an ongoing dilemma about the waste that our dogs create. In our previous house I made my own dog poo digester from a plastic dustbin that I rescued from a skip and it was great although it did fill up very fast with 2 dogs. I used bokashi juice instead of septic tank starter which made me very happy and it did rot into something dark, crumbly and not at all smelly (although I still wouldn't have used it on my vegetables).

I planned to do the same here but digging the pond and the hole for the horseradish has made me decide I really don't want to have to dig two dustbin-sized holes in the clay. We also have drainage pipes in which will (fingers crossed) one day drain into a large pool at the bottom of the garden. Finding somewhere out of the way, possibly under a tree, that wasn't near the flow path of the water in those pipes wasn't simple.

I had a flash of inspiration and realised I was making life far too difficult for myself in order to satisfy an urge to close a loop in the garden (waste food into bokashi, juice into digester, compost from digester onto fruit trees and shrubs, waste from the fruit back into the bokashi...)

I still have the plastic compost daleks I was using before my wooden compost bays. We also have cats who use compostable cat litter (either pellets from wood dust or homemade from recycled newspaper) which is another disposal dilemma. 

Ta da! Dalek set up under a hedge (too many roots to have dug there) where it will be out of the way and can take the dog poo AND the cat litter. And no new plastic in the garden.

I'll add greens like lawn clippings from time to time, and I can still add some contents from the bokashi bin to speed things along. Eventually I'll plant a nice shrub in front of it to screen it a bit but it's in a bit of the garden I havent really got to yet. The digging in front is spoil from the wild life pond that is still a work in progress. It's not as close as it looks in the photo and the screening shrub(s) should also soak up any excess nitrogen from the composter.

Compton Wynyates from Windmill Hill

While it's been nice we've tried to do some more walking. All fairly local but a change from the usual routine walks we do to exercise the dogs. Youngest daughter came on one with us last weekend, with beautiful views and wore her new-to-her walking boots.

Last summer some neighbours cleared out their shed and these walking boots were destined for the skip. The same size as my youngest's feet and her boots had just fallen apart fairly spectacularly (they had to be taped together mid-hike!). They'd been worn twice.