Recycled coffee bags

Hello Friends,
Well here we are, second day of Spring, & that glimpse of sun at the weekend has faded back to dismal chilly grey. Plenty of signs of spring in the garden, though, including much amphibious activity in our wildlife pond.

We didn't have any tadpoles last year because a heron fancied a bit of froggy caviar & that was the end of it. All of it! The first tadpoles are just hatching now. The snowdrops have been replaced by narcissus, & I've been busy clearing & replanting my flower borders, making use of all the free self-seeded goodies, such as primroses, foxgloves, aquilegia & verbena bonariensis. 

The veggie plantlets are doing well, but it's still too cold for them in my unheated greenhouse unless they are well wrapped up. I use an old long muslin curtain & plastic bottle cloches to cover them on chilly days, as this lets the light through, but they need an extra layer at night for at least a couple of weeks or so I decided to try making an 'emergency' blanket from recycled coffee bags. I'd heard organic gardener Bob Flowerdew talking about this a while back on Radio 4's gardening programme. Here at the People & Cats Republic, we try to recycle as much as possible, & I do think there is a personal responsibility to think about one's household waste stream, especially for those traditionally non-recyclable materials which are regularly bought & consumed. Ground coffee bags fall into this category. We are both coffee gannets, & unless one buys the more artisan/farmer's market-type coffees, the packaging is usually plasticized film bags which are not accepted in council recycling collections.

OK, plenty of materials. The next job was to turn the bags inside out so that the shiny silver inner is on the outside. Some brands of coffee bag have a much duller grey metallic inner, so I rejected all of those because I wanted this project be reflective for additional heat & light.

This is an emergency blanket 'layer' for baby plants. It doesn't need to win any beauty contests, so all I did next was staple the bags together. I didn't cut them open. I kept the double thickness because even with my limited scientific thinking, it seems that the bag would trap a layer of air & additional insulation. Once I'd constructed a large enough sheet to cover my current batch of seedlings, I tested it out. The seedlings were moved from an upstairs windowsill above a night radiator to our chilly conservatory (unheated when not in use), & covered with their new shiny emergency blanket.

Even cloched as they are with plastic bottles, etc, aubergines, chillies & tomato plantlets can wither in the night-time chill of our conservatory. An early next morning check-in found them still upright & as happy as could be expected. I am now adding coffee bags to this so that I end up with a blanket which will cover the whole of my greenhouse bench. Yes, I could go to the garden centre & buy a big length of horticultural fleece, but there are many things I'd prefer to buy, & there's such a satisfaction in re-purposing rubbish into useful items, both keeping it out of landfill & fulfilling a gardening need. 

I was planning to take a new up-to-date photo of Albert Whiskers today, to include in this blog post, but he's disappeared! He went off in a huff  about an hour ago, because he accidentally gobbled some some of the meat he's been wilfully refusing to eat for the last two days & I think he's really mad with himself. I'd already re-chopped it (fellow cat-owners will know about this) & mashed it up with a spoonful of water in case it was getting dry. No luck. I then tried the often successful 'Dreamies' method: 1) Human shakes the 'Dreamies'. 2) Cat comes running. 3) Two 'Dreamies' are implanted vertically deep into the offending meat. 4) Cat eats 'Dreamies' & meat. 

Well, at first, he wasn't going for it. He studied his bowl in forensic detail before managing to extract one 'Dreamie' while barely touching the meat. Pleased with his ability to see through my cunning plan, he went for the 2nd 'Dreamie' a little too quickly, had a tiny taste of meat, & before he knew it, he'd gobbled half the bowl. Oh yes, Me - 1, Albert Whiskers - Nil. He stomped off through the catflap shortly afterwards & hasn't been seen since. I suspect he is restoring his sense of self-worth by marauding some of the smaller neighbouring cats. So no new photo to share.......

........but here's an old one which never fails to make me smile. 

Hope we see some sunshine soon. Happy gardening......if that's your thing. 

Until Easter,

C x