Garden refuse.

Garden refuse.

Posted on 11 Oct, 2008 10 comments

Refuse.

Every gardener knows there are times when you have to prune and tidy up. Winter pruning of roses for instance, picking up branches and broken off limbs or flowers after a storm, even pulling up weeds from our flowerbeds etc. The big question then follows:”What are we going to do with all that refuse?” I’d like to get comments here, as I am interested to know what you people do with all that dead garden matter. I mean, you can’t simply chuck it in the rubbish bin now, can you?
When we lived on the farm I had at least 9 rosebushes in the garden. After nagging hubby for a long time, as the roses looked so poorly with yellow and brown leaves on and the odd bloom still hanging in there, he finally pruned them in August, which is our winter. He always said, that if you prune them too early, they will start shooting again when there still is a risk of frost. We had such a short winter season, the roses hardly stayed dormant for a month. So there I was, the tidy upper as always. I had a wheelbarrow ready and a pair of secateurs and was wearing leather gloves. I cut each long stem in smaller pieces so they would all fit in the wheelbarrow and then I wheeled it downhill to a huge pile of boulders, truly HUGE boulders, only a bulldozer could shift. They actually came outof our soil, where we put the housepad down. Well, these boulders had niches, crevaces and caves and in those caves I deposited my prunings. Now I was convinced they were outof anyones or any animals ( we had cattle ) way. Noone would step on them. Once a year, early spring I burned them in this “homemade” furnace, so as to create room for next years prunings. All other garden rubbish, like weeds, dead flowers, etc. I just threw in the paddock, because the cows just loved to eat them.
In the next garden in Darwin we had a daily gathering of palm fronds. In fact, every day I used to do the rounds to collect the branches, at least 20 a day. Nearly all palmtrees shed their fronds all year round and on a daily basis. They were often not easy to get at, as I had a lot of clumping varieties, these fronds just got stuck into the other palms. Often I reached them with a grassrake, just to grab them down a bit, then pulled them down. But there were of course also the fronds, which had fallen on the lawn and onto the borders. Often I found myself carefully pulling them out from inbetween the Heliconia rostrata’s, as I didn’t want to damage them. They also fell on the lovely plants, sometimes, well yes, these got squashed in the process.
All this rubbish I piled up between the shed and the Dillenia alata shrub/tree ( BTW these have hanging branches, once reaching the ground, shoot roots and become a new tree/shrub, hence the 5 meter circumference of tree ), until the pile got so high, we had to get the trailer out and load them on. The rubbish tip was only a few kms away and for residents free of charge. There was a recycle area for plastic, cardboard etc. and there was an area for garden refuse. In summertime it often got very soggy there and sometimes you couldn’t even reach the pile. So, getting rid of garden refuse was more a job for dry weather. The council would once in a while get a huge mulching machine out, mulch the lot and then load the grinded stuff on another heap, from where people could get mulch for their garden, all free of charge.
Here in QLD it is a different cattle of fish. For many reasons this is an expensive state to live in ( little did we know when moving here ), but even the green rubbish gets charged! Heliconia’s and gingers don’t mulch too well, in fact they stagnate or block up the mulcher. We haven’t got too many woody things, like large branches or trunks. So in the back of my garden now, I have two sections: one for small fry, like weeds of leaves and definitely no prickly stuff, and the other is for big rubbish and long Heliconia’s and gingers, devided by a fence.
Yesterday and today we did a lot of pruning. Especially along the drive in the front where there were a lot of overhanging grevillea’s and bottle brushes. We also pruned the bottom fronds of the African oilpalms, as hubby could barely walk underneath them again. Then I had collected a lot of Heliconia and Ginger plants ( well, brown and dead and too much overhanging ones ) leaves, so it was all loaded up and taken to the tip. Here, the tip is 15 min drive from us, and for each trailerload it costs us $ 7. It’s a disgrace, as it is all green stuff, which they will mulch and then sell to the public! So this weekend it costed us $ 14 to get rid of our garden rubbish.
Now I think it would be interesting if you all tell us how you deal with your garden rubbish. How much do you get? If you have a compost bin, like I have, is there enough room for garden rubbish as well? Not in mine! I have kitchen scraps of legume substance, cardboard from eggcartons, washed eggshells, fruit peels in there. Also some garden clippings from the lawn, to make it drier and not so smelly. No, there would be no room for plant matter from the garden in there.
How about you?

More blog posts by Marguerite