Nearly every street corner here has recycling and waste bins, which are entirely necessary to keeping the house as cockroach and fly-free as possible and smelling sweet! Partly this is because the sewage pipes here are too narrow to take anything except human waste - so no toilet paper or sanitary products can be flushed unless you want to really piss off your neighbours and/or have a flooded toilet. Every bar, restaurant and public restroom has little bins beside the toilet facilities for the disposal of toilet paper, but obviously in the mostly warm weather you need to empty these regularly. Hence here the large wastebins in every residential area are emptied daily. This system of sanitary waste disposal would never work in the UK, where in some areas the council only collect household waste once a fortnight, which inevitably attracts foxes, mice, rats and insects in hordes over the summer - not to mention the rancid smell!
In addition to the main waste bins there are paper, plastic, tin, glass and oil bins, so every morning this is my first destination. However, apart from a few wine bottles, water bottles and jars, we have very little to throw away now, thanks largely to our compost and stackable garden project. We also try to be imaginative and find an alternative, practical use for as much packaging and waste as possible. Hence our first seedlings were planted in used egg cartons in shallow soil ready to be transferred to the larger planter and then to the stackable garden. After the seedlings are ready to move to a planter, the egg cartons are then shredded and put in the compost, ready to decompose and provide the rich earth for the next planting stages.
Following much research on the internet we discovered almost everything in terms of food and paper waste can be composted. Hair from your hair brush (although probably not if you use lots of hairproducts), the contents of the vaccuum cleaner, dead leaves, crushed egg shells, vegetable and grain scraps, used kitchen towels and napkins, bbq ash, rice, stale bread, toilet rolls, shredded junk mail ( not the glossy kind),pizza boxes, milk cartons, wine corks, nail clippings, tea bags, coffee grounds, old wine, beer (not that I tend to waste much of this!) and even urine (although we haven't tried that - yet!) So I keep a sealed compost bin in the kitchen and most of the vegetable ends and egg shells go in here ready to be moved. The important thing is to keep the dry matter (paper, dead leaves, dried garden waste and grass equal to the wet matter - the fruit and veg scraps. We've re-purposed some of the storage containers from moving here and now they are compost bins, soil bins and sand bins kept outside in a dark utility room. Pretty much the only thing I can't recycle are meat, chicken and fish bones and left-overs, but these can all go to make stock for soups, sauces, gravies and stews.
Creating the stackable garden itself was the most fun and a feat of constructive ingenuity; although as it involved use of power tools, I mostly watched as Dominick did all the hard work. This is where I learned one of my first new words of the language - FERRETERIA, absolutely nothing to do with small furry animals, which was my first guess. This means literally ironmonger, or hardware store, the kind of shop that is almost extinct in the UK and US, overtaken by the larger monopolies who have enormous warehouses on the outskirts of most towns. In Fuerteventura, these mainly family-run smaller enterprises are almost as common as supermarkets, selling everything from pegs to lightbulbs and power tools and an invaluable resource for us.
We used a new plastic household dustbin, which I used to pack items to ship over and then turned out to be far too big to use as a bin here, given you can't keep waste in the house more than a day. He used a stanley knife, hairdryer and a scrubbing brush with the bristles ripped out to cut 3-5 inch slits in the sides of the bin (depending on what veg or herb you plan to grow in that area), then drive pockets into the plastic using the heat from the hair dryer and the wooden brush handle as a wedge (but any piece of wedge shaped wood would work). Unfortunately the first few didn't come out so neatly, as the hairdryer couldn't get the plastic hot enough to bend easily, so we bought a heat gun (See power tools picture above) and this made the plastic much more malleable. After a couple of nights work we had the stackable garden shell.
Next, another visit to the ferreteria to get the items to craft the irrigation system. For this we needed a length of hard plastic pipe (like the kind you use for guttering and drainage), a small saw to cut it to size and an electric drill to make holes at regular intervals around the pipe, for water to seep through to the plants. Once the irrigation funnel was ready it was placed in the centre of the bin (not forgetting a few holes in the base of the bin for air and water circulation and drainage). We placed soil around the pipe to pack it in tightly and then last of all a midnight jaunt to the sand dunes to collect a storage box of sand. The pipe in the middle is filled with sand and this prevents rainfall and water from deluging the multiple plants, slowly filtering it through to the roots from the holes along the cylinder.
And this is the end result, or should I say the beginning, as we haven't gotten to the final planting, growing and harvesting stages yet. The compost will take about a month to be ready and we will slowly start adding it to the stackable garden to enrich the soil. In the meantime Dominick planted some seeds in egg cartons and chatted to them regularly in the hope they would grow. Much of this is trial and error, learning what works and what doesn't according to the climate and resources available. One thing we did not take into account is that the tapwater here is desalinated sea water and still very salty and so tap water can't be used on the seeds, and therefore disappointingly nothing sprouted in the first week, despite the glorious late autumn weather. The second week we had tremendous rainfall and the agg carton got swamped and most of the seedlings washed away. However, I rescued a couple of sprouting seeds and put them in a larger planter, we kept them out of the heavy rain and only used bottled water for additional watering. There are never frosts here or any snow so there is no danger of them freezing and dying, but the wind is a hazard and can over-turn them, which has happened once, so you do need to keep an eye on the weather, which can change from sunny to stormy in seconds.
So now we have our first tiny emerging crop of organic salad onions, spinach and various herbs - all of which are quite difficult to get hold of here or don't exist at all. It will take time, but we hope to be able to grow enough to supplement our salads and veggies without resorting to imported frozen stuff from the mainland or farther afield. It's great if you are short of space and can be done indoors on a smaller scale using water bottles and containers as long as you get some natural sunlight through your windows.
If you have a similar project and any ideas please share!
Apparently it is a public holiday here today - so Happy Spanish Constitution day to you all!
This was also painted by Tracey and is now serving as a curtain in my kitchen to protect the passing kids on their way to school from seeing my naked breakfast making! I love the stained glass effect I get in the morning when the sun shines through it.
