Spent most of today in the garden. I had seen a while ago the following message on the Brighton Free Cycle Network/mailing list.
"Hi we have a constant supply of good quality horse manure, ideally we would like someone with transport to remove it on a regular basis, we do not care what you do with it once taken away!!! It does not matter how large or small the amount you take at a time.
Please ring Carol or Russ 01273 301820 / 07801890989"
When I first rang up, Russ asked "How many tons of shit do you want?" I wasn't quite ready for that. I asked back "How many do you have?" He quickly replied, "Well, we have 10 horses which do nothing but eat and shit all day - come and take as much as you like."
So today my dad and I turned up at the stables, shovelled shit into 7 large tubs (see picture below) and brought it home in two car journeys. We dug large pits in our garden, filled them in with manure and then covered them with the displaced top soil. Hopefully it will help make a bumper crop of lettuces, courgettes (two varieties), carrots, mange tout, broad beans, spring onions, parsley, melons, cucumbers, spinach as well as various types of flowers (including sunflowers and poached egg plants) when we plant them out.
(In the picture, I'm at the bottom of the garden in front of tulips, daffodils and two tubs of horse manure)
In the end, we hardly made a dent on the amount of manure they had to give away. Although 5 other people from the freecycle list are picking up manure semi-regularly there still seems to be an endless supply. Apparently people from the allotments normally come later in the season with trailers and take most of it away.
Anyway, the moral of this story is that Free Cycle Networks are amazing. Due to Free Cycle I got to meet and talk to some people at a stables; spend some quality time with my dad finding the stables, shovelling, gardening and generally laughing about shit; and recycled manure for our garden which would otherwise be left unused (instead of buying compost from a garden centre in non-recyclable plastic bags, some of which comes from peat bogs which - according to Friends of the Earth - results in beautiful wildlife and habitat being destroyed as well as hampering the bogs global cooling effects).
Previously, I've gotten a bike from the network and given away a motorcycle helmet. The freecycling (or regiving) economy is truely thriving in Brighton! It's brilliant that so much great stuff is being kept out of landfills - and not just in Brighton. According to wikipedia, Free Cycle has reached 50 countries and involves over a million members in over 3,000 groups worldwide!
Anyway, am off to sleep as am exhausted from today's physical labour.
Posted in Day to Day Life | Environment ed's blog | 2481 reads
Submitted by ed on Sat, 2006-04-22 23:46.
