On 14/07/2014 12:32, News wrote:
On 11/07/2014 16:05, Spider wrote:
I've never used these bags in my compost bins before because I didn't
really trust them to break down. However, on buying a new compost
caddy, I find there are some inside.
Have others here found that these bags degrade well (completely
disappear would be good), or do they persist in the outdoor compost bin
months hence, only to be picked out by hand while riddling the compost?
Other irritants of this kind are tea bags and the supposedly
degradeable jiffy-type fibre pots.
When I first moved here, the previous residents had obviously used
plastic sacks all over the garden to suppress weeds. The garden was
scattered with thousands of shreds of black plastic bag:~((. This is
precisely what I do not wish to find in my usually perfect compost.
So the question is: do they really break down, or don't they?
Thanks for your time.
Not 100% sure but I assume so. We've been using small pale green ones
in an internal compost caddy for quite a long time. Although they are
obviously quite visible when they first go in a new compost section, I
don't recall seeing any bits in the older heaps. So I think they do
disintegrate but I'm not sure as to exactly how long they take.
Re bags in the garden... How I wish our predecessor had used them.
There are two areas where he didn't want anything to grow. What was a
kids play area and a path through a little walk-through 'glade'. The
former area I turned into part of the vegetable garden; the latter I had
to attend to because it started sprouting masses of weeds.
In both cases, he had used sheets/rolls of roofing felt as the weed
membrane
(
By the time I was working on the areas, it had broken up into tiny
pieces - and when you picked one up it broke even further. A *lot* of
PITA work.
Thanks very much for your reply, Andy. It definitely sounds hopeful, so
I will give them a go and, of course, report back .. though that could
be some months hence.
I can appreciate just how fiddly your roofing felt clear up was. I
wouldn't have thought that roofing felt was enviromentally friendly
soil-wise, but I suppose people use what they've got to hand. I have
used hessian-backed carpet, but never the polypropylene kind, let alone
anything bitumen-y. I have more respect for my worms.
Thanks again.
--
Spider.
On high ground in SE London
gardening on heavy clay