Martin and Hazel Frost Our Life in Argentina

Many years ago when I was young, free and single and living in my flat in Baldock, our hair-brained local council, trying to encourage recycling, offered all house-holders in our area a plastic garden composter.  Then, a few weeks later, they came round and delivered everyone a brown plastic wheelie bin, so that the council could take away our green waste i.e. the stuff that we were already putting in the composter… see what I mean?  (And today, the same council who had so much money to throw around that they could duplicate their recycling schemes, still doesn’t manage to include cardboard or plastics in their doorstep recycling collection, but we digress).  Loony councils apart, that compost bin was a simple and effective piece of kit, and since composting isn’t a very culturally Argentinean thing to do, I’m unlikely to find anything similar around here, so I made one, out of an old plastic drum, the like of which litter many builders yards in Argentina.  Clean it up a bit, attack with junior hacksaw, and voila! 

The top is at the bottom, so the worms and insects can do their stuff.  The bottom, now at the top, has been mostly cut across to make a lid, still attached at one side.  Compost is extracted through the flap at the bottom.  It has an added bonus that the dogs can no longer eat the compost heap, I’ve given up trying to explain to them that they’re not supposed to be vegetarians.

The garden’s doing really well at the moment, partly because the weather’s been cold so the weeds aren’t yet rampant.  I have four vegetable beds, like these… 

which between them are home to peas, radishes, lemons, parsley, laurel, oregano, mint, lavender, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, and beetroot.  I have one bed which is currently empty, which I tried a little stubble-burning trick on yesterday;

which seems to have worked quite well, apart from the bit where I scorched the wall, so that is now ready for some summer planting; tomatoes, peppers, not forgetting those chillies.

I’m not a great grower of flowers, mostly because they’re not (usually) edible, but I put these in under the kumquat bush;

and they’re doing really well, so I’m about to put a few more in around the orange tree.