A-Level DT project A Green Garden

Hey, I am a keen 17 yr old gardener and I'm starting upper sixth in the next week. I have chosen a project for my product design course that is finding a solution to help people use/make recycled biodegradable plant pots for there gardens. I just have a few question I would love it if loads of people could answer/discus.

1. I know that the newspaper plant pots(home made) exist but I wanted to know if anyone had used them and what there problems/benefits are?

2. I know from my own research that peat is running out (only 6% of UK’s former peat remains) and I wanted to know whether other gardeners have opinions about using peat pots?

3. Do you, as a gardener, really care about how environmentally friendly your garden is?

4. Would you be willing to spend extra care/time planting if you knew it would benefit the environment(both locally and worldwide)?

I think that's all I wanted to say. Thanks

David

 

P.S. I use the same plastic seed trays (bought), plastic pots (3,000 second hand ones from mass bedding at local 'stately home' gardens, other free used pots & pot trays from garden centres, and re-use bought plastic cell tray inserts to destruction (sometimes probably beyond where most people would bother by utilising their frailness to aid plant removal and salvaging reusable bits and again using this to my advantage to help separate/identify different seedlings/plants in different pieces of cell tray all sitting in the same seed tray. When something is no longer serviceable it's recycled. I also re-use my plant labels to destruction (bleach removes most marker pen inks, but not pencil - and I re-use bleach).

 

1. Tried newspaper pots once. They went mouldy, but to be fair that was probably down to my lack of experience at the time. I kept the soil to wet and kept them too warm.

2. I used peat pots a few years ago. They were ok, but a novelty. They didn't prove very helpful.

3. Yes.

4. Everything I do in the garden is done with nature in mind. Thinks don't always go to plan, but the important thing is to keep trying.

As an aside, I tend to sow seeds in plastic plant pots nowadays, and pot on to larger plastic pots and buckets.

That doesn't sound very eco, but lets way up the real facts (ie not the headlines).

When I've just eaten a yoghurt, I win a brand new small plant pot ideal for seeds. When I buy a plant from the nursery, win another new pot. These plastic pots can be used over and over again. In fact over the years I've accumulated hundred if not thousands of plastic pots, and haven't had to buy a single plant pot for years and years now. Nor have any of my family and close friends, because over the years, as we share plants with each other, pots get passed about and so we all accumulate plenty

Ok, they are plastic, which means they were made using limited resources. But lets consider biodegradable alternatives. Lets say just for now that they are made using sustainable resources. Energy is still used in their manufacture, and of course they have to be shipped from where they're made to the consumer. They are 'use once' so new ones have to be made and shipped all the time, hence they are not as sustainable or eco as we're led to believe.

Ok, so we were talking about newspaper pots. Presumable from newspapers that we accumulated anyway, so making pots out of them is just a way of using them instead of binning them. I guess that's great if you get newspapers anyway, but increasingly we don't. The newspaper will be around for a long time yet, but technology is replacing them, and of course newspapers have to be manufactured just like everything else, using up resources.

As a final note, remember the little eco proverb that so many lose sight of: Reduce, reuse, recycle. Or to elaborate, first priority should be to reduce our demand on things in the first place. Where we can't reduce in one area, try to reuse stuff for another job. Only when we can't reuse something should we look at recycling it.

 

1. I know that the newspaper plant pots(home made) exist but I wanted to know if anyone had used them and what there problems/benefits are?

As others have said mould can be a problem and there are other ways of recycling newspaper.

2. I know from my own research that peat is running out (only 6% of UK’s former peat remains) and I wanted to know whether other gardeners have opinions about using peat pots?

Don't use peat for the reason you give and also because I'm a bit of a tight wad and loo/paper towel rolls are just about as good.

3. Do you, as a gardener, really care about how environmentally friendly your garden is?

Very much so.

4. Would you be willing to spend extra care/time planting if you knew it would benefit the environment(both locally and worldwide)?

Do it all the time (we're a pair of tree huggers) and local benefits add up to worldwide benefits.

I think that's all I wanted to say. Thanks

Best of luck !

 

1 I haven't used anything else for years and have never had a problem with mould.

The benefits: free - since I never buy a paper (read the ones delivered to work) I use the 'freebies' put through the door or those donated by neighbours. You can make them any size you want/need. You can pack twice as many in a seed tray as you can conventional pots (straight cylinders as opposed to 'cone' shaped plastic/terracotta pots). They dry out less quickly than conventional pots and it's easy to see, by the fact that the paper is moist, that the whole root ball is damp.

Problems: paper doesn't always rot down as quickly as it might (if I use it for say lettuce, you pull up the lettuce and often get soggy newspaper remains on the roots and in the soil. You do have to be quite gentle handling them when wet otherwise they're inclined to fall apart. Oh, and your hands go black making them!

2 Never used them.

3 'Really care'? Well, I try to keep the use of chemicals and pesticides to a minimum, although admit to using growmore, slug pellets and weedkiller (on a gravel path). I guess I don't actively encourage wildlife, but I grow a wide variety of plants most of which are highly attractive to insects.

4 I think I already do. I'm pretty environmentally aware. I avoid unnecessary plastic whenever possible - hell would freeze over before I bought plastic pots and tend to use garden centres/nurseries whose plants are sold in pots made from coconut shells, grain husks etc., (they break down in the compost heap within a few months), 2ltr plastic bottles become mini-greenhouses, any polystyrene I might get is used as drainage in the bottom of pots and plastic containers (such as those with lids you buy fruit in), also become mini-greenhouses. I do have 8 compost bins, so recycle about 90% of household food waste, plus of course egg boxes, loo and kitchen roll tubes, cardboard and newspaper, all of which goes on the compost. I seldom buy compost, peat based or any other, and if I buy wood (to make the aforementioned compost bins for example), I do actively seek to use reclaimed wood or recycle some old bit of furniture. If that's not a viable proposition, I do seek to buy wood from sustainable sources.

Trouble is, even though I may do all that, I live in a rural community with indifferent to non-existent transport links to 'the outside world', so I guess what I'm doing is probably offset by the need to use the car to get anywhere (discuss )

Hope that helps

 

Really appreciate all the feedback

Think I might try to grow some plant in newspaper pots just so I can understand the problems and the benefits.

Thanks again,

David