Teabags

We changed to Fairtrade tea a few years ago, buying both Teadirect and Clipper. I only recently realized that Clipper teabags are biodegradable while Teadirect's are not - they hang around perfectly identifiably after a year in the compost bin. I suppose after a longer time and more disturbance they would physically disintegrate, but that would just mean small pieces of nylon in the soil rather than large ones.

So, anyhow, we have become obligate Clipper teabag buyers. Happily both Somerfield and the Co-op on Camberwell New Road sell them.

So what's it all for?

This little lovely is a lime hawk moth on the pavement just down the street yesterday. Our instinct was to take it to a safer place - a shrub outside the house.

But the life of the lime hawk moth doesn't quite fit the fairy tale. As an adult it doesn't feed - it mates and dies; perhaps ours was already on the way out.

Near the shrub there is bucket with water for pot plants. One of the local boys wanted some water for his water pistol and we had a look in the bucket and found that it was teeming with animal life: mosquito larvae, tiny red worms, water fleas (I'm pretty sure) and even smaller creatures going about their business. It's enough to make you believe in spontaneous generation.

Well, mosquitoes could have laid eggs, and anyhow the water came from a water butt, not from the tap. But a few years ago the water butt was a clean, empty plastic container and the rain came from the sky. Evidently the makings of water life are constantly lurking in relatively dry places.

In sum, Nature goes on in her mysterious and heartless way in Camberwell.

Young things

We first saw a great spotted woodpecker in the garden in 2004 and thought, what a rare and surprising thing. Last year a juvenile visited the fat feeder quite often and this year we have seen both an adult and a juvenile. Last week, briefly, the juvenile was on the fence and the adult was feeding it from trips to the fat feeder. So it isn't rare, but it still seems surprising - I thought you had to go into the country to see woodpeckers.

Of course it is the time of year for juveniles - the garden is full of young great tits and young blackbirds (a young blackbird being fed is of course what the photo shows). And we also identified a pair of young squirrels, a little smaller than adults and behaving in that exploratory playful way that seems to mark the young of at least all mammalian species.

Plastic bags

I don't suppose gallant little Camberwell will follow in the footsteps of gallant little Modbury and ban plastic bags altogether, but small moves are being made. Somerfield will give you a "bag for life" in exchange for five used ordinary bags, or sell you one for 10p. The bag for life is estimated to last 25 times longer than ordinary plastic bags and can be exchanged for a new one when it is worn out. (Something odd about that phrase "bag for life"?)

Alternatively and again emphasizing re-use, there is a plastic bag exchange at Basic - put in the ones you don't need, get ones out if you are caught short.

Insects mostly

During the long dry spell, and I assume in consequence, blackfly proliferated in the garden. They were even on the holly shoots. Their natural predators, for example bluetits and ladybirds, didn’t seem to be on the job. I suppose normally we have a lot of both bluetits and ladybirds and not many aphids, so I shouldn’t complain.

Recently we have been seeing ladybirds, generally harlequins (the one shown is on lavender in Camberwell). These are a bit bigger than 2-spots and 7-spots and have more spots (although they are variable and sometimes appear, for example, with two large red spots on black). Harlequins are fairly recent arrivals in Britain and are spreading out from the south-east. Entomologists are alarmed because while harlequins devour aphids voraciously they also attack other ladybirds. On the other hand no-one is suggesting any particular action, and none seems feasible.

Also, if harlequins are so good against aphids, and turn out against the blackfly, perhaps we should welcome them. I might be able to start growing broad beans again. I really don’t like blackfly, which probably do less damage than, say, woodpigeons, for which I have a soft spot. But if we didn’t have blackfly, or other aphids, what would the baby bluetits eat? and who would grudge a baby bluetit a meal?

Detergents

Great for the dishes and the clothes and the hair, then down the drain and away, out of mind, but in fact into the great Victorian sewers and in due course into the sewage treatment plant. As an amateur surfer (no pun intended) I have found it hard to find good technical information on the effect of washing-up liquids and other cleaners on sewage treatment, but it does seem that Ecover, while just as toxic as other products to organisms such as water fleas or green algae that are not at all accustomed to it, is much better tolerated by the kind of bacteria whose business in life is munching their way through sewage. So two cheers for Ecover.

Here in Camberwell, Basic on Denmark Hill refills Ecover washing-up liquid, laundry liquid and multi-surface cleaner bottles. This is cheaper than buying new bottles and of course saves all that plastic being chucked.

Plastics recycling

Having got over the first flush of pleasure after the Council started collecting plastics for recycling, I began to wonder what was going on.

A bit of backstory: the little recycle logo on most plastic containers has a number in it which tells you the kind of plastic. The commonest are polyethylene terephthalate (PTFE), number 1, most plastic bottles; high density polyethylene (HDPE), number 2, milk "cartons"; and polypropylene (PP), number 5, margarine tubs, yoghurt pots etc.

Flash forward again. The Council leaflet says you can put out "plastic food trays, plastic yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, all plastic bottles". That seems to cover the three common kinds of plastic. But what about other items that are made of those plastics? and what about "food trays" which can be made of almost anything, including polystyrene which is normally a recycling no-no?

It seemed that a more intelligent instruction to householders would give the numbers of the plastics that could be put out and, even without such an instruction, one could act intelligently if one knew what numbers the Council could in fact deal with. So I asked the Council. The question was a long time in the answering. The final answer was that they didn't know.

What is going on is this. The information the Council puts in its leaflet is the information it gets itself from the recycling contractor, Baylis Recycling. So the Council knows no more than you or me. I surmise that the same instructions are given to the Baylis employees who hand-sort the plastic. So if you put in something that doesn't come within the description, even if it is in fact the same kind of plastic and just as recyclable, it gets chucked. So I wonder, when we read the recycling statistics, do they include what is dumped by the contractor?

It is to be hoped that something better can be achieved with the heralded new recycling facility for Southwark, or with Ken's big scheme.