I am thoroughly enjoying the new series on BBC2 about how the Strawbridge family is restoring an old Cornish farmhouse and land and turning it into a permaculture paradise.  It is our dream to fulfill a similar project in the future, but being in our early thirties with little children, it is on rather a larger scale that what we can afford in both monetary and time terms.

Last night’s episode of It’s Not Easy Being Green had a message on recycling woven through it, inpiring me (and hopefully many other viewers) to improve our own recycling system to make it more efficient and easier.  We are fortunate to have a local council who collect some of our recyclables every second week, and we are responsible for delivering our own glass, batteries and clothing/shoes to a local recycling point.  The recyclables that the council collects are stored in a wheelie-bin in the front garden, but the glass is a far more disorganised affair that lives in the shed, and only gets delivered to the bottle bank once the mountain of bottles nears toppling point.

I suppose the root of the problem is the messy shed that poor Pete spends lots of time trying to organise, and I keep putting more and more things into it and cluttering it up.  This week I’m going to endeavour to tidy up a corner of the shed to stand the recycling bags for our glass near the door, and work out some sort of system to remind myself to take it all away whenever I am going to be going near a supermarket or car park that has a bottle bank.

—

Here is another example of a sustainably-minded blogger being inspired by the Strawbridge’s.  Ken Boak of Sustainable Suburbia lives in the Redhill area of Surrey and is planning some major changes to his garden.

—

Watch It’s Not Easy Being Green on Tuesday nights on BBC2 at 8.30pm.