Country Life

Gardening without plastic

ON the whole, I’m proud to be a gardener. My carbon-offsetting tree planting rivals that of an oil executive. Growing fruit and vegetables eliminates food miles and saves artic-loads of single-use plastic. But how I get there matters, too. I want to garden without guilt, leaving no trace—no whiff of petrol, no wrecked habitats, no scrappy broken plastic. The old habits have to go.

Ditching the lawnmower was easy: I never was a fan of the Saturday-morning mowing ritual anyway. If you have a large lawn, it sucks up too much gardening time, but now there’s a good

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