A little inefficiency can turn out to be a good thing!

On inefficiency in the garden and at the airport

There’s all manner of fancy pants compost making drums, rollers, boxes and barrels you can buy, but your colyoomist doesn’t bother with any of that clobber.

I’ve a bin in the back room for food waste, egg cartons and the odd shredded newspaper, while outside along the hedge there’s grass cuttings, garden waste and the compost itself. After mixing the three ingredients I cover it with a strong plastic sheet and let nature perform miracles.

Some say it’s hard to create enough heat unless you invest in some flash gear, but under the surface my mountain of damp grass cuttings is in a perpetually smouldering state (oooerrr missis! Behave!) Slap that unctuous black grey green sludge into the mix and we’re cooking with gas; just not sure which one.

However, after spreading last year’s compost on my beds and shrubbery, around the apple saplings and soft fruit bushes, I noticed that marigold and poppy seedlings were sprouting up.

Evidently those steaming clods of grassy goo hadn’t produced enough heat to kill the seed from last Autumn’s dead-heading. How bloomin’ splendid! Now the daring purple of the Snapper’s prolific perennial sweet peas are contrasted by a carpet of orange calendula below, courtesy of the inefficiency of my compost making.

Better still: under, up, around and into the apple saplings we planted three years ago are growing marigold and poppy, out of the mulch laid there to feed and protect the trees. Unexpected, free and beautiful: not a combination that often goes together, yet had I taken expert advice, there’d be no extra colour; no thrill of this gift from nature.

It has taken until this fourth Summer living here to finally be able to enjoy the work and love invested in this patch.

Staring back at me under an ever-increasing amount of weedy rubble is the black mypex sheet that should have been my veggie patch many moons ago, but no, I’m not going there. Instead of punishing myself for failing to build raised beds three years in succession, I harvest all our raspberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries.

Rather than feel perpetually guilty about what I haven’t done, I stare in wonder at the purple, yellow, red and golds in the shrubbery and drop my jaw in awe as I look up above me, where Oaky’s branches reach for the heavens.

When I first met him he was a one-leaf stick in a 3-inch pot. Now he’s an arboreal teenager, somewhere between sapling and mature adult.

For more about inefficiency – at airports – and honesty boxes see Charlie’s column in this week’s Tribune here.