Tuesday 18 April 2017

Gardening and the death of newspapers

Newspapers are dying, fading into oblivion.

Staff cuts and the loss of advertising revenue is gradually destroying both quality journalism and all the fluffy non journalism that used to fill the weekend papers and pad out the weekday papers.

As a consequence they're growing thinner, and even though they've transitioned to tabloid (mostly) the papers are almost as thin now as in the last days of the broadsheet editions.

And this has an unexpected impact on gardening.

For years we've used the quality press as biodegradable layer over the soil when mulching - much easier to deal with than the nasty black plastic woven stuff that couch grass roots get stuck in, and truly biodegradable so once the mulch layer (either bark or sugar cane mulch) has biodegraded the lot can simply be dug into the soil to improve its structure.

Well, yesterday being Easter Monday I was happily mulching away, working through a three week stockpile of The Age, which in the old days would have happily covered the garden bed I was working on, but this time only went half as far ...

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