Becoming a Womble

· gardening ·

Last weekend, someone fly-tipped in the car park of a pub that's near our house. The pub is closed at the moment, so the fly-tippers obviously thought the car park would make an ideal location for their illegal activity. It was broad daylight, but we watched in amazement as they roared up, opened the doors and shovelled the stuff out, then sped off again, wheels spinning.

When Mr. Bsag went over to see what they'd dumped, he found a huge load of mostly intact ceramic roof tiles, as well as a smaller number of slates. We immediately thought that the tiles would be very useful on the allotment to act as borders for our raised beds. At the moment, we just heap the soil up and don't have proper edging on the bed to hold it all in. The tiles overlap and interlock nicely, so we should be able to set the bottoms in the soil, then hold them upright with wooden pegs — ideal! We might even use the slates to floor a small porch that we're having put on our front door, if they turn out to be strong enough. It's not a big area, and there are enough intact tiles (if we clean them up a bit) to cover the whole floor.

So Mr. Bsag acted like a good Womble and barrowed most of the tipped material over to our house, ready to be re-used and recycled.