Outwitted and outrun.

We are being outwitted by a small furry creature with a brain smaller than a pea. Our resident mole has been meandering around near the cottage for a couple of years, throwing up mounds of soil and dislodging paving slabs in an area that visitors don’t tend to linger in for long. It’s been a bit annoying at times, but outweighed by the gentle entertainment to be had from tracing his route each morning and imagining his solitary, dark underground labours.

But now that he has ventured into the open garden and under the lawn, the balance of his presence has tipped towards his becoming seriously troublesome. I am no longer amused. Last week he meandered alongside the pond (I could tell, because the Equisetum hymenale were no longer vertical), across a lawn path and into the scree bed, throwing mounds of earth up onto the newly cleaned up gravel. That was bad enough, but this morning he went a step further and headed for the open lawn. Peter has set traps (which he has tunnelled around), blocked his path, dug down ahead and behind him to no avail. Today he chased him straight down 2 feet into the lawn, only for him to dart off sideways seconds ahead of Peter’s shovel. We could see the earth being kicked out behind him as he headed due north in a narrow horizontal tunnel deeper than the length of my arm. He’s a wily creature. Peter is ruefully acknowledging that he has met his mole-match. But really – we have to catch him, dead or alive.

The garden is almost clear and ready for its spring mulch. For the past three years I have used Chester’s finest homebrew – Gowy Composting Facility’s composted green waste. It is lovely dark crumbly stuff, still smoking on arrival and we have had no weed seed germination from it at all. But last year we noticed a sharp increase in plastic waste shreds in it, so I went along today to find out why. As is so often the case, people are key.

Head honcho composter Steve Kay showed me round the composting yard, with six long heaps of material, each one 10 foot hight and 100 feet long. Each heap is left to self-heat until it reaches the requisite temperature and is then turned by composting ace Jackie and her JCB and ‘cooked’ again six times until finally ready to meet the screening machine. This enormous device shakes the compost through a 1cm screen to produce a gorgeous black, crumbly material which smells and looks lovely. A sample gets sent off for lab testing for ‘fines’ and if passes it’s approved for use. This picture is of the finished product. It’s just fantastic stuff, apart from the tiny bits of plastic in it. And here’s why.

Green waste used to come to the site directly from the householder. Some householders tidily, but wrongly put their green waste in black bin liners before putting in the bin. Others fail to differentiate between green waste and general rubbish. But on arrival at the yard, Jackie used to spread it all out with her JCB and gently pick out most of the plastic before adding the cleaned material to compost pile number one. But now it comes in already shredded and part-composted. And full of plastic as you just make out in the rather dark picture, left. There is nothing Jackie can do except rely on the screening machine to take it out again at the end. Which mostly it does. The screen is smaller than the one they used last year, so I’m going to give it another go and see how much debris we get. But the answer is to market and sell this fabulous stuff, rather than give it away, and reinvest the proceeds in better householder education and pre-screening.