What do you do with your garden waste?

[TeaandLemonDrizzle]

Stupid question but what do you do with your gardening waste as I’m fed up of going to and from the local tip?!

Are there other options? I’m thinking grass and bushes/weeds.

It's fab stuff isn't it. We have a lot of deciduous trees and they shed tonnes of leaves - takes me and DH three weekends in Nov to collect them all - some get piled straight on the borders and some into our leaf mould net, which is 4 x 1.5m stakes knocked into the ground in a square with heavy duty plastic netting round them. We pile the leaves in there up to the top, squash them down a little and as the rain and frost get to them they sink to about a fifth of their volume. I use the supply from April onwards and then fresh supplies arrive each November.

the sweet smell and texture is awesome!

We have a three bin compost system. So there’s usually one composted to use, one composting and one to add to to.

A couple of (not very good, sorry!) photos of leaf mould net, and two-bin compost heap from old wooden pallets from the local builder's merchant.

The 2nd photo is the "before" one, as we'd made a smaller one but it wasn't nearly big enough and collapsed after a couple of years.

We have a garden bin but it only fits a small proportion of our garden waste.

We have quite a large garden with lots of trees (mainly from my neighbours' side) and the leaves are endless. We have a bonfire once or twice a year for the bigger stuff like branches.

I have a gardener who puts the leaves and grass cuttings on a compost heap but we rarely seem to get to the decent compost stage. And when we did, it was rubbish quality (my son happened to be doing a science project on compost).

You will never have to queue at the tip again.

My brown bin subscription is one of my luxuries. The rats just made beds in my compost bin.

I'd consider feeding it to my cat... he seems to eat all the plants around the house, so clearly he's trying to go vegetarian.

I'm a fan of composting, but I appreciate that pile could get BIG!

@MereDintofPandiculation Thanks, you make it sound straightforward. DM has a compost bin she doesn’t so maybe I will borrow that as a start. I don’t think we’d have room for 3 in our tiny garden.

It just seems crazy to me to take all that green waste which could be turned into beautiful compost and simply throw it away. Even worse, to pay to throw it away. And then pay out more money each year to buy compost or mulch.

Our council empty the garden bins into a big compost heap and then bag it up and sell it .

Well I suppose that's equivalent to taking your spare apples to a community run juice press and then buying back your own juice.

Our council charge around £25 for collection the green waste (not ours, obvs!), they make it into compost, and in the council tip there is always a huge skip full of lovely compost, you can have three bags full free, so we get some some every time we go.

i have a green bin for garden waste and also for food waste, we get small bags for the food waste provided by the council. The bin is collected every week throughout the year at no extra cost.

So, an excellent service but reflected in higher council tax bills than in neighbouring areas!

I have two brown bins for garden waste, £30 each p.a. Emptied every four weeks for nine months of the year. It is turned into free compost at the tip.

I originally intended having a compost heap, then found that I simply couldn't keep up with the deciduous trees and the need to control our neglected overgrown garden and large front hedge. The bin service is a huge help.