Gardening with waste

For the past 20 years, we have been building with construction waste, way before I knew of the term circular economy. It was just what we did. Our original Skip Garden, based on the King’s Cross Estate back when it was a construction site, showcased this by turning  skips into productive gardens; making polytunnels with the old water pipes, planters with railway sleepers, scaffold boards and pallets; glasshouses with old sash windows, walls with clay dug out under our feet; and containers were turned into educational spaces.  Since the Skip Garden, we have kept on developing this way of building in all of our gardens, from the Story Garden and Floating Garden in King’s Cross, to the Paper Garden in Canada Water, and now with our first permanent garden that we’re building.

Skips and polytunnels at the old Skip Garden

The last Skip Garden and public café

Paper garden’s Yurt

Floating Garden’s planters

When it comes to gardening, our focus has been on food growing, and on feeding the soil, aiming to create the richest possible soil for the plants to thrive. So it was a bit of a revelation and an inspiration to visit John Little’s place in Essex, where so much of the focus is on growing plants using construction waste as the growing medium, and to see such a thriving biodiverse space. 

John showcases how varied topography and different low nutrient soils, both on roofs and on the ground, create a mosaic of habitats which in turn attracts wildlife and a range of rare species. He mimics what takes place on brownfield sites, where you have a diversity of structure, topography, soils and substrates, such as some tarmac, some gravel areas, some structures, some brick walls, some brick rubble, some concrete, some puddles, some pockets of topsoil and some scrubby vegetation, all providing different habitats for wildlife.

Nicole and Carley with John Little in Essex

Gabion wall

I loved how effective some simple changes in the landscape he’s created were, such as:

Having a mound of bricklaying sand in a sunny space - the sand having come from the expansion of the closest A road. When we visited in September the mounds were buzzing with 100s of ivy bees. I have never seen so many bees in one place. Supposedly all the bees we could see buzzing excitedly were male bees waiting impatiently for the female bees to come out of their holes for matting. At other times of the year the mounds of sand become home to other solitary bees

Dry stone walls and gabion walls - all made with construction rubble and with some added bamboo and wooden sticks to attract insects and bees, and even with some old blocked up pipes sitting at the top to create small stagnant puddles to attract dragonflies

Dragonfly pool

Vertical clay walls and vertical dead wood - both key in providing habitats for bees and invertebrates that live in the bark which when it rots creates space for different invertebrates and fungus and so on. 

Using construction waste instead of topsoil - some of the growing mediums that John was experimenting with included: crushed up ceramic from things like toilets and sinks; recycled sharp sand; and crushed up demolition waste such as brick and concrete. All of these materials would otherwise go to waste and from all of these beautiful flowers were growing

Whilst we will always continue to grow food and grow trees and therefore focus on richness of soil in these areas of the new garden, I am also looking forward to implementing the learnings from our visit to Essex and apply reusing local construction waste not only in how we build our structures, but also in how we grow our plants and create a diverse mosaic of habitats.

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Notes from the Garden