Sir – It’s grand that Tim Hobden has not killed his composting worms this winter — though whether it was clear from his last Back to Earth article (Weekend, March 28) quite what he was describing I don’t know.

I do like his take on being ‘behind’ with allotmenting and being bemused by those who aren’t — join the club, Tim!


The problem with his article this time is his cavalier approach to burning garden waste — ‘twigs and dried weeds’. Now, I love bonfires and grieve that I can’t justify them. At all.
Dried weeds can be composted, or hidden between cardboard layers over a bed waiting for crops to finish rotting down.
Twigs can be left in a neglected corner — don’t say you don’t have any — as habitat for beetles and ladybirds, or chucked on to paths to be trodden down into a nice surface such as people pay for. That way you keep all the goodness from your soil that is now in that ‘waste’ on the land that it came from.
Or the whole lot, especially if it contains really dodgy weeds like oxalis or celandine and the rest, can go into the green waste recycling stream — either by being taken to the tip or by being put into a brown bin (in Oxford).
If you don’t have one, neighbours will often loan out some space in theirs.
You can bung up holes in your allotment fence with it all, to stop deer and small boys getting through — loads of uses.
Bonfires are only for diseased material that needs to be destroyed. They should not be used, or suggested in print, in any other situation. The world’s polluted enough.
Liz Hodgson, Oxford