Living Greener: The German method to cutting down your rubbish waste

LAST week I wrote about building garden beds several metres long that would hold enough vegetables to provide a family for a year.

But what if all you have is a tiny amount of space? 

When living in the city, I had a space along the side of our building filled with gravel and got permission from the landlord to put a garden there.

She was happy to have a tenant beautify the place for free, and I was happy to indulge my hobby and use the space.

However, the space was along a wall, so it didn’t get much sun. It was also only two feet across, and about five metres long – a tiny space to grow veg of any kind.

It was also close to neighbours, who would not allow a compost bin. Importing soil was expensive, and filling it enough could run into the hundreds of euros.

Also, there was more gravel underneath, and I wasn’t sure what else, or what chemicals or metals might seep into the soil.

Also, I had lots of kitchen waste – cardboard, paper, vegetable scraps, peelings – that I had to pay money to cart away.

All these problems solved each other. First, I dug out the gravel so that I had a large hollow along the wall, and then I got plastic sheeting from the store and laid it down at the bottom of the hollow.

This kept water from draining away and kept water in the soil from getting contaminated with anything else in the gravel.

Then, I got paper bags from local stores and put all my cardboard and kitchen waste into them, and one by one, laid them down in the plastic recess.

When it was full of bags ready to decompose, I bought a small amount of soil from the garden store – about 20 euros – and laid it on top and planted there.

The effect was a cheap version of hugelkultur, a permaculture technique for building up the fertility of soil. Hugelkultur usually involves burying wooden logs under the soil and planting on top of it; as the wood at the centre is slowly consumed by fungi, it absorbs and holds dozens of times its weight in water, creating a reservoir for the plant roots around it.

As it decomposes, it releases heat, extending the growing season. Finally, as the wood breaks down into nutrients, its slow decay feeds the soil and anything growing on it.

In my case, burying paper and cardboard – pulped wood – accomplished the same thing. The bags soaked up water and provided drainage, so the soil under the plastic didn’t get waterlogged. It also allowed fungi to break it down into nutritious loam that fed the plants, and more quickly than logs would do.

One risk in hugelkultur is that the rotting wood might lock up nitrogen, so some rich source of nitrogen, like urine, is a good way to offset that problem. I will leave the rest to your discretion.

I was afraid I’d have to look for earthworms to put into the garden, since it was obviously cut off from any other soil – but no, they found their way in. I have no idea how they got there; did they smell the soil in the distance, somehow judge that it was better than their own patch, and make a lonely trek at night across city streets to get there? However they did it, they took up residence and began their valuable work.

I planted mostly herbs the first year. The parsley flourished, but parsley’s more fragile and warm-weather cousin, coriander never did; even when I took full-grown plants and replanted them, they died soon after. The mint and lettuce did well, but the chervil struggled until I gave up on it.

Since the space was halfway up a wall, I planted nasturtiums all along the ledge side, which would hang off the ledge, and peas all along the wall side, which would climb up the wall.

In this way I was able to use not just the space in the garden itself, but the maximum amount of space above and below. I also planted spinach, kohlrabi, and kale, all of which did quite well. 

All were ready to go in a few months, because the soil below the surface was filled with rotting material, I did not plant any root vegetables.

This technique cuts down on your rubbish bill, allows you to recycle most of your waste in a way that is much more efficient than using a recycling centre, and lets you create rich garden soil in a short time.