Natural and Organic Food

Welcome back to the organic food blog that is in need of some new posts, I believe! Ok, well, to get the ball rolling once again, I thought a good way to do that would be to mention something that is useful in the garden and can be a part of your garden recycling program, which is really the making of your own compost. the tool in question are the extremely handy garden pruners!

Garden pruners are used for a variety of jobs in the garden not least of those being the regular pruning of shrubs and woody plants that are either getting to big for their place or need pruning to encourage lots of new, bushy growth, or to make more flowers or fruits.

When I have nothing better to do, I also use my pruners for cutting up longer woody stems into shorter ones for scattering on the compost heap in amongst all the other garden and kitchen waste. This helps to vary the material in the heap and also creates more small pockets of air to help the bacteria do their job of breaking down the plant matter into usable compost in a few months time.

Ok, this was never going to be a long post but its important to know that there are many things you can do in your own garden that will result in less waste being sent to landfill and more natural goodness for your own soil where you will grow, hopefully, your own fruits and vegetables in order to take a step back from the chemical laden produce that turns up in your local supermarket or even your local farm shop.

Remember, even organic farms are permitted to use certain pesticides ad chemical on their produce and it is a rare farm indeed that uses none whatsoever. If you have one of those near to you, then you are very lucky indeed. Otherwise, make a point of growing at least some of your own food without any chemicals to give your body a chance to stay as free of agricultural chemical residues as possible. And get your own garden pruners out and get on top of things!

If you’re looking for a little more reading matter on this subject, here’s a decent article that expands upon the benefits of a good pair of garden pruners!

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food

My previous post here at Organic Sanity, looked at solar lighting and how it makes a lot of sense to install solar panels on your roof if you live in a sunny climate. In this article, I’m going off on a tangent away from cutting waste to look at another environmentally friendly method of producing power: biomass.

Biomass is another word for anything that has once lived such as that which has been created from plant matter, or produced by a process of photosynthesis using energy from the sun. In ordinary speak, that means wood, coal, peat or similar that will burn. This doesn’t include oil or its derivatives as we know them, such as diesel or petroleum, plastics etc, although we’ll get onto them in a minute.

A biomass power plant is one that can produce electricity from burning stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill site, thereby helping to cut down on land pollution while benefiting society by producing some of the power it needs. That power produced in biomass power plants displaces some of the power that would otherwise be produced by oil, or coal fired power plants or nuclear power plants, thus similarly cutting down on that variety of power production.

So what can go into a biomass power plant?

Well, the easy stuff is paper, cardboard, processed woods such as chipboard, medium density fibreboard (MDF) and pretty much anything else that will burn and would otherwise have ended up polluting the land in a landfill site.

Some of the more unpalatable substances that biomass power plants can use which greatly benefit the environment are things like sewerage effluent, animal manure etc which is obviously better burned and the pathogens they carry killed in the process than them ending up in rivers and the oceans.

The gases that are produced by the combustion of these waste products are also collected to be re-used as fuel for further power production, so very little is wasted in a biomass power plant.

So you see, biomass power plants do a great deal of good whilst producing the electricity we need by recycling waste products and making good use of them in the bargain. That’s good for us, good for the environment and good for the future of our planet that we should all be investing in.

Terry Didcott
Natural and Organic Food