Photo credit: gardeningnoob.com

Wool Recycling in Ways you Never Thought of Before

Here’s a way to use your old wool blankets, wool stuffing from something, wool sweaters and wool socks with holes in them that I bet you never thought of: fertilize your garden!

I saw this video today by Fresh Tech, “Here Is Why Australia Buries Tons of Sheep Wool Under the Dead Soil”, and it blew my mind.

Photo credit: Fresh Tech video Youtube. “Here is Why Australia is Burying Tons of Sheep Wool Under Dead Soil”

Thinking Creatively

Due to a downturn in the wool market, Australia had tonnes of excess wool. Instead of send it to a landfill, which happens with discarded clothing, they thought about what else they could do with it.

Turns out it makes great fertilizer for soul and helps stabilize and rejuvenate depleted soil and stop desertification. The wool breaks down slowly and adds many nutrients back into the soil, without adding any harmful chemicals, as well as help retain water, much like mulch. It stops snails and some insects from crawling up stems.

They buried huge amounts of wool to bring dead soil back to life. In Mongolia they have successfully buried wool in circular patches to stop the advancing desert and prepare the soil for a massive tree planting and reforestation project.

Photo credit: Fresh Tech video Youtube. “Here is Why Australia is Burying Tons of Sheep Wool Under Dead Soil”

They buried wads of it in soil, where thru found it slowly broke down naturally.

A Pellet for Your Thoughts

They made some old wool cloth into pellets, which they buried, with the same positive results.

Photo Credit: Wool Grow Australia. https://aussiewoolpellets.com.au/

They used flat pieces of wool cloth and tacked them around young trees to protect them in areas where they wanted to protect the young roots from sand and erosion and it worked better than anything else they had tried to date.

They have also created a liquid wool fertilizer!

A Cozy Blankei

I think the most surprising example of using wool leftovers was to put it down under walking trails that had eroded and turned into watery mud paths.Apparentky they got this idea from remnants of wool found under ancient Roman roads. The wool lined paths made 10 years ago have remained intact and stabilized. I am absolutely amazed by this. I think of all the wool sweaters I have owned that got holes in them, and wonder how this material that seems so delicate could fortify roads for hundreds of years.

For those reading this who only have small garden patches, take heart. This gardener (the gardeningnoob.com) tried it out in her garden in the back yard and reported she loved using wool because it:

• protected her tiny plants

• retained moisture extremely well during a drought , wool (pictured above) retained water
• fertilized the soil slowly (she reported it took a year to break down)
• brought dead soil back to life by attracting healthy biome development
• aerated the soil (providing air and water channels deep into the soil).

I admit that at first it struck me as a huge waste to bury wool and use it as compost or fertilizer. But I’ve changed my mind. Compared to filling landfills, where nothing really breaks down once buried and the soil created is so filled with chemicals it can’t be used, burying wool in an eco friendly and productive way that rugged you immediate benefit and restores the earth is not actually a waste at all.

Published on March 6, 2025

Photo Credit: Andrew Millison, “How 8,000 Food Forests Grew Africa’s Great Green Wall” https://youtu.be/1LCTVO_Y5Rs?si=VTQYbaBOW6ac1TFd

I just posted an article on Substack about a way to created food abundance in your neighbourhood for a few low cost, or for free. https://tinyurl.com/3ttdmbbn

It’s an idea akin to ‘seed banking’ , on a community scale. The idea was sparked by a video I saw by Andrew Millison about a family in Senegal he visited (see image above).

They created a food forest within 4 years that was enough to support them as a family, both financially and food-wise, and seeing the transformation of their land was startling and inspiring.

As the title of the video suggests, this particular food forest is part of a veyr large initiative to green up a large part of Africa, to form a living barrier, or ‘green belt’ that stops the Sahara desert from expanding, and provides much needed food for the local people.

While this is impressive and filled me with wonder at people’s ability to work together and achieve such great results on such a large scale, what caputured my attention even more in this video was the idea of one family building a food forest in just 4 years that could provide food for them year round, and also enough to sell and share with others in the community.

They were sharing seeds and seedlings as well as ripe produce.

This is sus a simple idea and small act of generosity, but it has a huge impact.

It creates food abundance for all in an area for free.

This is a great way to save money on food and make a strong community.

I love solutions that don’t involve big cash investments or banks, as you can tell from other articles I have written recently on the subject of community based funding ideas to get ahead in life, or fund small start ups and projects:

How to Get a Hand Up Instead of a Hand Out https://tinyurl.com/A-Hand-Up

Tandas – How to Save Money And Build a Trust Based Community https://tinyurl.com/mexicantandas

Seed Bank Ideas https://tinyurl.com/seedfundingidea

This idea of sharing food grown in your back yard reminds me of the neighbourhood we grew up in in Alberta, Canada.

I remember how our neighbourhood was when I was a very small girl. I remember the heat radiating off the sidewalks in summer and the glaring light reflecting off the windows and all the new house. We had moved into a newly build subdivision and none of the houses had landscaping or trees yet. It was blinding, I remember.

It took ten years for all the houses to have half decent looking yards and enough trees for shade. And very people thought to grow fruit trees instead of ornamentals. Even the city missed the boat on this. They distributed elms (which all suffered from a disease once mature, and most died).

My Dad was one of the few people who planted some edible trees: an apple tree, and two crabapples. They ne grafted a brand onto the apple tree to create and apple-crab that was delicious. I remember a few summers where we passed bags of apples over the fence to neighbours and received a few bags from their trees once their fruit was ripe, but in retrospect, the neighbours could have done so much more.

If each household had planted even one fruit tree, and shared it with others. And if they had coordinated who would grow what, to ensure variety, what a bounty this would have produced.

The whole neighbourhood could have drastically cut its summer grocery bills by growing and sharing their harvests with one another. They already had a lot of neighbourhood parties and knew each other quite well, so it wouldn’t have been a stretch.

I think that even if you are living in a house with an established yard, it wouldn’t be hard to add in a fuit tree here and there.

What Would It Take To Create a Food Forest That Spanned A Neighbourhood?

Here’s a list of what it would take to establish a food sharing network and make edible forests that span a neighbourhood.

1. A bit of time talking to your neighbours and getting to know them. Deciding who will grow what and who wants to participate in a fruit exchange.
2. Spending some time to research and find out which trees are likely to thrive in your area
3. Source where to find slips and seedlings or suckers sprouting from an established tree in your neighbourhood, or where to buy a tree or plant you want.
4. Spend a few hours harvesting your shrubs and trees when they are ripe.
5. Spend a few hours preserving them (freezing them, making jam or canning preserves).

Worth the effort? I think so. For just a few hours a year you could save a lot of money on fresh fruit and add variety to your meals throughout the winter, when the price of fresh fruit skyrockets (as if it hasn`’t aleady, with inflation).

For those living in apartments, you could do this on a small scale, with microgreens. A bit of coordination with your neighbours and you could have a delicious food trading network for pennies compared to what you would pay for the same greens in the supermarkets. And not nearly as fresh and tasty, since supermarkets have to ship food in from far away.

I encourage you to think about it! What could you grow yourself, and maybe share with others?

Published on December 30,2024

I recently talked to Line Madore about a community group she is involved with in the Montreal area of the province of Quebec in Canada that is a sociable, fun and easy way to cut her grocery budget in half and get some tasty home made food.

The group is called Cuisine Collective Accueil – Le Ble de’Or. This is a group that coordinates cooking sessions among small groups of people. They get together every two or three weeks.

They use a community kitchen area, and what is made together is divided up amongst the people who helped cook it, and taken home to eat through the coming week.

There is a facilitator who coordinates everything. The group receives donations of ingredients and receives government subsidies to operate. They are provisioned with staples such as flour, rice, oil and spices.

Sometimes luxurious items are donated to them so that they don’t go to waste, such as chicken, vegetables or chocolate. They also receive canned goods.

It’s almost like a store inside the community kitchen, like a food bank.

Line loves being part of this collective kitchen. She just likes cooking in community and sharing what is made amongst all in the group. It’s a bonus that it saves her so much money.

Line shared that the people who participate in the cooking come from all walks of life. There are students, elderly people, people who live alone, and people who are struggling to feed their families in the group. They come for a variety of reasons: to get some social interaction so they don’t feel so isolated, because they want tasty homemade food,or because want to save money.

Each cooking session is 12 weeks long.

A facilitator coordinates this. A group of about 4 or 5 people come together to decide what to cook. They have five cooking books and they meet to decide what to make in advance of each session. They take 30 minutes to go through the five cook books available, and decide the menu for the upcoming cooking session in two week’s time. They always decide which entrees to make (two vegetarian and one meat meal) and a desert and they give the list to the facilitator. They facilitator is responsible for rounding up all the ingredients needed.

They meet for a few hours on a designated day to do the cooking. It usually only takes two or three hours.

They each bring their own containers, which might be plastic containers or jars. The Facilitator divides up what is made and the participants pack up what has been made and take it home.

The facilitator also announces the total cost and all the participants pay the facilitator the agreed upon amount. It is well organized and operates smoothly. The sam

photo

It turns out to be a huge cost savings. For example, in the picture you can see that on this day they made red lentil pasta sauce, peach meatballs with sundried tomatoes, pita bread with dried tomatoes, hummus and vegan brownies for a total cost of $3.95 CAD.

Here is another example of what they cooked together. One this day they made red lentil and apple salad teriyaki chicken, cheddar muffins, and kale patties for a grand total of $7.35.

Line commented that she always takes 6 portions and that this enough to feed her and her family for the better part of a week.

The food is paid for through donations of food and money, and the group is subsidized by government funding.

The collective is provisioned with staples such as flour, oil, rice, and spices. Sometimes they receive donations such as chicken, vegetables or chocolate. Sometimes it costs nothing to make the food due to the donations. They freeze ingredients or use canned goods.

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A Better Solution to Food Security

This is such an improvement over the idea of a food bank, which carries stigma and lacks the dignity and social support that this program provides. It would be so much more fun and less shameful to go for a collective cooking group rather than to a soup kitchen or food bank.

What a resourceful idea that brings people together in such a pleasant way, and that meets such a wide variety of important needs with dignity.

It’s also a very eco-friendly solution to problems of waste in our food supply systems. It reduces food waste in a community by providing a way to give leftover food or extra supplies to those that need and want it. In addition, because people bring their own containers, overpackaging of the individual portions is avoided, cutting down on packaging waste that would go to a landfill.

It also helps people learn how to cook, and learn about healthy food and safe food storage and preparation who might now have learned these skills at home or elsewhere. I remember a time when schools had Home Ec ( Home economics), where all students learn life skills such as cooking, but this has been phased out of many schools. Many families with two working parents at home many no longer cook food from scratch, relying on processed and prepared foods and take out or restaurants. Adults who missed out on learning cooking basics can learn how to make easy wholesome meals while having fun. Brilliant.

I applaud the people who thought of this idea, and who are facilitating and making it happen! What a lot of lives this program brightens and nourishes, in all ways.