Bag A Thought

I like the inventiveness of recycling. Although there may be some pleasure in buying what you need, there is also a pleasant feeling of achievement if you have actually created something for yourself. If I have excess plants, they don’t go on the compost heap or wouldn’t if I actually had one. I am happy to offer them to anyone who can give them a home, and at the same time help in promoting ‘grow your own’.

My feeble attempts to have a clear-out in the home didn’t amount to much but it’s seed sowing time and I always sow more than I need and the cycle starts. Sow the seeds, keep what I need and re-home the rest elsewhere. Although I use growbags for tomatoes, I buy them only for their compost and put that into the large tomato pots. It’s quicker and easier for me to handle and making the assumption that the tomato growbags do actually contain the correct compost to suit the plants, it’s not an expensive thing to do.

I try all sorts of equipment, thinking that it will all make my life a little bit easier. It makes sense to use the side of the growbag to give better root depth, so I bought a holder for it.

It does work fine but I have no room in the greenhouse for it so that goes to grow other plants from amaranthe to sweetcorn. The next piece of equipment I bought for the growbag was the collars to make watering easier. I found no use for that, the drip tubes didn’t pierce the growbag and holes needed to be punched in first. It’s something which looks neat enough in gardening catalogues but it didn’t work for me. I had had enough of them lying around and was about to offer them to anyone else who might use them when a hibiscus shrub I ordered arrived. A tiny dried up looking twig with a bit of root in the end of it, ready to be planted out. Being a container gardener, it would have to go in a pot so I used one which I hoped would last it a long time. The downside of that is we have a lot of fiendish felines that lurk about waiting to make use of fresh soil, then I thought of the plant collars. It is absolutely ideal and will give the little shrub time to get established without disturbance, until it gets too big and I need to remove the collar.