What goes around ...

Attention all you gardeners out there!

Sydney’s LNS (Leafy North Shore) is awash with summer’s bounty: our LNS deciduous trees have almost entirely dropped their leaves. Each one is a tiny packet of nutrition from the surrounding soil, drawn up by the tree’s roots and converted with the help of summer sunshine into a single-season, solar panel. They’re designed to drop to the ground, break down and enrich the soil anew, the ultimate in sustainable recycling. So why are all the wheelie bins full of them? Why are these bins called “green waste” anyway? It’s not waste.

These brown leaves, crisp and brittle when dry and eddying around in the gutters and on nature strips, are perfect for your compost. Don’t forget to collect them from errant neighbours and add them to your compost pile. Amazingly, those neighbours, standing in their impoverished gardens, may even thank you for your theft of their garden’s valuable nutrients! In fact if they were simply going to go into their “green waste” bins and be carted off inside a noisy, polluting truck, you’re doing the world a favour.

Compare your body to a healthy lake. When you eat well, exercise, feel rested and are surrounded by a network of people who love and support you, you are full of energy.

In a pristine lake water laps gently at the shore, fish swim in the depths, insects skim across the surface and trees grow abundantly at the edge. Streams and rain flow in, evaporation removes some and balance is maintained. The surface of the water reflects well-being.

As life progresses, it can become harder to keep the self/lake full. Life’s challenges cause the level of the lake to drop. A pristine lake depends on a good environment, without too much variance in the ecological conditions. We humans can choose to be more in control of our “lake’s” health. No longer pristine, we have to work harder to keep ourselves feeling our best. (more…)