The alchemy of compost

It’s the time of year when, seeds ready, buds swelling and air warming, the growing season beckons. The ancestral memory stirs in our bones, drawing us outside into the garden. Though our ancestors would never have grown lupins or petunias – silly floozy bedding flowers that have no use at all. Being a permaculturalist, I like to eat my garden.

Each year before I plant I go through the ritual of emptying the compost heap on to the beds, to add to the soil that will feed my food this season. I’ve been hooked on composting since my twenties. It’s the ultimate closing of the life cycle loop, death feeding life. Like most living things, compost improves with age. What goes in the compost heap a mess of waste - vegbox peelings, Guardians, hair, hooverings, wood ash, old clothes, cardboard and whatnots from the bathroom - comes out sweet smelling, crumbly, fine soil.

My preference is for an open bin, about a metre cubed capacity. The compost doesn’t turn sour or smelly and you can make the bin out of natural things like pallets. As a result, I have a rat issue. I don’t say, Problem, because the rat is brilliant at turning the compost. But my neighbour’s son saw the rat climbing their back steps the other day. Sorry rat; you will have to die.

Insider information: for free composting advice contact the Compost Doctor

The rooks are nesting

I was passing time with a man outside Waitrose yesterday. I don’t know his name but I like being with him because he makes me speak honestly. When I ask him how he is he never answers, ‘fine’, and I only stop and chat when I know I have the time. Yesterday, he said he’d been thinking about things. I said I was loving the weather but I felt sad because it was too warm for February. ‘In the old country,’ he said – he’s Irish – ‘the country people had a saying: The rooks don’t nest before March, unless the first of March falls on a Sunday.’ (An odd saying, I know, but could you make it up?) He looked up at the rooks cawing noisily in the bare branches of the old Horse Chestnut. ‘Those rooks are nesting,’ he said. It did appear so; one of them had a twig in its beak.

I told him I was thinking of giving up Waitrose and all supermarkets - even the little I do shop there. Yes, he agreed, they’re a problem. The food they sell is all wrong. But, he said, he could get great bargains on food, especially meat as it is approaches its sell by date. He told me about the shelves, scattered about Waitrose, where the cheap deals could be had. He told me about his all-time favourite food and how the Waitrose version was so much superior than that sold by the other supermarkets. After a long pause (sometimes he gives me one if his poems) I bid him goodbye.

(Insider information: There is now a recycling bin on North Street for Tetrapak juice, milk and soya milk cartons)

Power - the new money

The flight pledge I took a year ago was, in retrospect, one of the best decisions I have ever made. Instead, I’ve taken up time travel, which is free and doesn’t require fossil fuels. These days, the future is my preferred destination, around the middle of this century. Sometimes I get off at the wrong stop, which is the hell of our own making, where the two-degree tipping point has been passed. This is the destination our compass is currently pointing to; I don’t like to visit that place very often. I prefer to spend time in the future where humanity has redefined what we mean by progress. George Monbiot’s fabulous think piece this week set the scene to THE conversation of the coming year - how will we move away from economic growth society to a life sustaining society? We need urgently to all start talking about this and imagining it, and making different choices, living it.

In my travels, in 2050, I see communities generating all their power locally, through community-owned Energy Services Companies. Money will be replaced with tradeable energy units, also owned locally. Money as power, power as power. We’ll grow food and make things again, including our own entertainment. We’ll have moved completely away from fossil fuels and learned to live within our planetary means. Weaning ourselves off our fossil fuel addiction is going to be fantastic news for our wellbeing as humans and for all beings on the planet. The future looks bright, if we get it right.

A new economy

Last week I attended an inspiring conference Be the Change. George Monbiot kicked off. The problems we are facing, he said, are because capitalism is dependent on an ever increasing supply of goods and services… which are based on finite resources. In other words, freemarket economic growth is incompatible with an environmental and social agenda. The billion people who can afford to drive a car have greater purchasing power than the billion people who are struggling to feed themselves on the very same staple foods we can now run cars on - corn and wheat for example.

This is going to be a huge debate in the year to come, I think, as the majority of leaders still say we can essentially grow our way out of our planet’s crisis.Next up was Stewart Wallis of the New Economics Foundation (nef). I am in love with this organisation and everything that comes out of it. We’re running out of planet, he said. And the poorest are suffering the most. In 1900 the ratio of poor to rich was 36:1. Now it’s 75:1. He talked about the moral economy and how it is the right of every child to be brought up to consider the needs of others. Interesting, and true. His solution was devolution to local energy, food and community power while maintaining a global perspective.Change happens, he said, when people power start demanding it. It’s got to start with us. Maybe this wombat can teach us something.

Money as powertool

I've got money on the brain these days. Money is like thought: what you invest it in creates reality. So when I do spend money these days, I like to think of it as a creative act: by buying from local food producers I am reconnecting the broken links between myself and the land. When I buy from people who make clothes and useful things I am supporting that person’s life. When I buy from local shops, even if the goods are not local I am helping rebuild our community’s economy or lifeblood.

Not that I do buy much these days: apart from food, one can live extremely well off the fat of our society’s excesses by harvesting skips, swapping with friends, buying second hand or using Freecycle. But the other day I did, after some thought, buy something new: a pressure cooker. It was, at £106 from Steamer Trading on School Hill, the most expensive thing I’ve bought in ages. A month on, this tribute to Swiss engineering is practically a member of our family. We can now cook rich meat stews or chickpeas for houmous in 20 minutes, brown rice in 10 and steam root veg in seconds. It’s a great investment that, the makers say, can pay for itself in six months through energy savings. Plus, unlike most bought stuff, it’s helping us do our bit for the planet.

Money is debt

I only recently realised, from watching this great video, that money is debt. The whole banking system is basically a pyramid scheme, based on a growing pyramid of debt. Our economy depends on people being in debt. It’s a finely balanced pack of cards, and we witnessed with Northern Rock what happens when the belief system around it collapses. The same could happen to our entire economic system, apparently. An interesting sentence stood out in one article last week: as people are starting to become more cautious, cancelling their credit cards and spending less, this is having a knock on effect on economic growth.

So, on one hand, the best way to increase personal resilience to cope with rising energy prices is to get out of debt, mostly by reducing our spending, and consolidating assets. And yet that act itself is almost unpatriotic in the possibility it could bring on economic downturn. Plus, the steady growth of our economy over the past decades has been underpinned by growth in the use of fossil fuels. Now we’re starting to realise that fossil fuels are making us sick, and that they’re finite anyway, and the oil prices are starting to go through the roof. This could get interesting.

Yet perhaps this is not altogether a bad thing. We all know that money doesn’t buy happiness. Change is happening anyway, so my feeling is, let’s be conscious co-creators of another, better, story.

Waste not want not

Nowadays I’m getting the strangest thoughts in the strangest places, like scrambled messages from a timeless radio transmitter. The other day the thought came to me that waste is an indicator of the level of dysfunction of a community or household. Packaged goods have usually been transported long distances, usually because of (too) cheap labour. They’re usually not fresh, or healthy, nor do they really support the local economy, whether it’s ours or a some distant worker’s. The waste becomes a pollutant and starts to accumulate at toxic levels in our, or other people’s habitat. The packaged goods may be cheaper, but at a cost.

Commentators like Monbiot write that we in the West have lengthened our supply chains so much that we can no longer trace our waste. Just as carbon dioxide emissions, and methane farts and burps emitted by cows are invisible, so are the ramifications of our actions, thus preventing us from having to feel any guilt. Perhaps it’s ever been thus.

A year on from our family’s zero-waste week, we had a dustbin review. It’s now almost entirely populated by plastic wrapping. Shops are quite cheerfully taking back our excessive packaging. We’re still plagued by those darn yoghurt pots and biscuit wrappers; maybe we’ll find an alternative. For now, plastics and fossil fuels cannot be disposed of without polluting. I look forward to a more enlightened time when we’ve learned to close the cycle, create a cyclical economy, get off oil etc and use all waste as a clean and healthy resource.