Recycling Garden Waste In Bromley

Posted on 09/03/2015

Ways To Add Nutrients To The Soil Safely And Efficiently

Instead of hiring someone for garden waste removal in Bromley, you can easily recycle the plant material debris within your own garden by putting them in the compost pile and using them as green manure. However, that is not the only way you can renew your soil. Here we will tell you about other ways to add nutrients to the soil safely and efficiently.

Green manure
After you have harvest the last of the vegetable crops and before the frost creeps in, plant a few rows of soil sustaining cover crops such as legumes, grasses etc., even if you don’t intend to use them as food source. Clover and cereal rye can last you the winter with very little garden maintenance needed. Before spring comes in the BR1 area and it is time for you to plant a new crop, cut back the plants and mow them into the ground. Then turn the remains under and allow the composting process to proceed in situ. Meanwhile, the foliage and roots of the leguminous plants will improve soil texture and fertility as they decompose.  

Cover crops are a gardener’s friends in that when living, they prevent soil erosion, provide weed control and when dead, they add to the mulch in the soil and provide most of the nutrients needed by plants. Besides, they are useful in a lot of other ways as well. Brassica and mustard, for example, provide biomass and also help in keep pests and diseases in control. Grasses add organic matter to the soil.

Speeding up the process
It would be tedious if you were to pick up each plant by hand and chop them up before you add it to the compost pile or over the flower beds directly. Instead, you collect them in a pile and run them over while you are lawn mowing. This is a very useful step to shred huge loads of plant waste and mix them at the same time. However, you will have to do some primary sorting – remove the bigger, woody pieces before you put the lot under the blades.

Is compost the same as mulch?
It is understandable why you may confuse the two when you are gardening for the first time, but mulch is a lot less decomposed than compost. Compost is also a finer texture and more soil-like than mulch. If you want to create mulch in Bromley, you should compost the leaves in a separate pile and use them when they are partially rotted. Leaves make better mulch so shred them with a mower when they are dry, then moisten the pile slightly and sprinkle some soil or old compost. You can either sprinkle them directly over the beds or keep them in a bag for the whole of winter, let them rot and use them in spring.

Vermicomposting
Gardening experts swear by this method to be the most suited when it comes to recycling food waste or house garden clean up for apartments in Bromley, BR2, which lack the space to compost in. This is basically using worms to break down your green waste as happens naturally in the soil living network. It is faster in producing compost and the whole set up requires minimum maintenance. However, the only drawback to this method is that the worm species used are very invasive and can become harmful if let loose on the outside.

If you don’t have time to recycle your garden waste you should start looking for a professional gardening service in the BR1 region. Gardeners will take care of dead plants and even plant new flowers and grass.