by Emma Cooper

Created on: February 15, 2008

The are three reasons why it's important to recycle and compost in the garden. The first reason is that it's the best thing for the garden. If you have a kitchen garden, and harvest vegetables and herbs for the dinner table, then you're constantly removing fertility from the garden when you pull up your crops. Even if you have a strictly ornamental garden, fertility is removed when you prune back woody branches, dead-head flowers or pull up tired annuals at the end of the season.

Chemical fertilizers aim to replace the plant nutrients that we remove - but they don't replace the organic matter that has been lost from the soil, and so over time the quality of the soil (and the life force of the garden) diminishes. The only way to maintain your beautiful garden in the long term is to return as much of this lost fertility to the soil as possible, by composting as much of your kitchen and garden waste as possible.

If you have a shredder then those prunings can be transformed into wood chips, great for keeping paths neat or as an attractive mulch for the borders. Softer plant material, those dead flowers and annuals and all those grass clippings, can go onto the compost heap. It's no more effort to pile them there than it is to put them out with the trash. A few months later and your compost will be perfect for improving the soil in your garden beds.

Putting a small container on the kitchen counter makes it easy to collect and recycle all those bits and pieces of kitchen waste that could be composted - vegetable and fruit peelings, coffee grounds and filters, tea bags and kitchen paper that has been used to wipe up spills. Empty the container into the compost bin regularly and you'll be returning fertility to the garden - without stinking up the kitchen.

Once you've mastered the art of composting, you'll be on the look out for other things to compost, and other ways of doing it. A worm compost bin is great if you have a large volume of kitchen waste to process. You'll turn it into a nutritious liquid feed for your garden or house plants, plus a small amount of super-rich compost that's perfect for hungry plants like pumpkins or fruit bushes.

The second reason that recycling in the garden is important is that it's good for the planet as a whole. When you compost your waste at home you're saving it from rotting down in a landfill site, where it's likely to be producing methane gas and contributing to global warming. There are other items you can divert from the trash into

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