First, please accept my apologies for having deserted you for the last few months. They have been hard months for everyone and I'm no exception. And I suffer from the "perfect is the enemy of good" disease and sometimes just can't get anything written because it doesn't fulfill every last requirement of my perfectionism: I'm not good at creating videos, I don't know how to make it meaningful enough, does anyone really care how I garden on my roof? am I wasting my time? and yours?

But today, thanks to a friend (you rock, Jordi!), I'm able to quiet those voices, and just show you a new thing I'm doing in the garden. I hope you find it useful. It has to do with old bank statements. And it all started with my strawberries. They have this terrible fungus. Gray mold, or Botrytis cenerea. In fact, I have been suspecting there was something going on with some kind of fungus for a while. I have a hard time germinating even easy seedlings like lettuces and spinach. My nasturtiums get all spotty and ugly. And last year I had tons of raspberry fruits appear and then fade away without ripening to my infinite sadness.

But it was the strawberries that pushed me to act. I had tons of flowers this February and March, and lush leaves, all from strawberry plants that I had started last fall from runners from other plants. They were in a big pot with lots of worm hummus and coconut fiber. They looked really happy. There were tons of strawberries, but as they started to ripen, I noticed they lost their sheen, turned kind of brown, and if I left them, they developed this sad gray mold and rotted.

Another friend helped me identify the cause (thanks, Jaume!) and recommended I pick out all the affected fruits and all the now browning leaves. Which I did. And I also started spraying them with two natural fungicides: horse tail extract and nettles extract. I get them from Cocopot, this lovely family owned business in Valencia, who thankfully has been shipping during lockdown. (And no, I don't get a commission from them, I just like them.) The fungicides have been helping, and I'll tell you more how I do them in another post.

But I want to tell  you about the bank statements :) You know strawberries are called strawberries for a reason. And I thought* it was because farmers use straw as mulch to keep the strawberries off the ground and away from moisture and worms. But I don't have any straw. But I do have bank statements. And junk mail. And old toilet paper rolls. And a paper shredder. And since I try to create a circular system in my garden (to avoid carting things up and down my 91 stairs), shredding all my paper for mulch seemed like a great idea. I looked it up on YouTube and discovered I am far from original. But I don't care, and I would have tried it anyway, but great minds think alike**, and all that.

So I started shredding. I have this dumb little shredder that gets fussy if you put more than two pages in it, and then it closes down altogether after two minutes. But since I don't have the patience (or the time) to shred paper for very long, I just go along with it and every once in a while when I need an excuse to procrastinate, I go find the paper shredder and the bag of old bank statements, and off I go. It's curiously satisfying.

Then I go up to the roof, and spread them around the base of my strawberries, and every other plant I have. It's kind of brilliant. First of all, I like the way it looks—rather like straw. And it's a rather perfect kind of mulch: porous, carbon-based (all those Youtube videos promise that everyone uses soy inks and junk mail is very safe for plants), attractive, and free. No, better than free, it actually saves me bringing all my paper waste downstairs so that someone else can recycle it.

And then I started thinking I could give it to my worms too. They love recycled paper and shredding it makes the perfect bedding for my worm composter.

Now I go around the house looking for things to shred. Cracker boxes, egg cartons (it takes coaxing to get them through the shredder, but I'm stubborn), old magazines, catalogs, it was great fun to shred all the political propaganda that I got from the last election and feed it to my worms. And oh those bank statements.

And then I water on top, and it creates a nice little layer that keeps the shredded paper from blowing around, holds the moisture in (which is especially important in August), but away from the leaves and strawberries, and it also stops weeds from growing. I don't know how I get so many weeds on the roof, but that is also a story for another day. Now I'll have a lot less.

I love the circularness of it. I love being able to recycle my own paper waste. I love making it into fertilizer for my plants (with help from my industrious worms). I love not having to carry paper downstairs. And my strawberries are much happier.

If you're interested in hearing more about my rooftop, organic, urban gardening in Barcelona, please subscribe to this page. I also post lots of pictures of it on Instagram. I could use the support and I'd love any feedback you have. You can also read this post in Catalan (translated by yours truly, with all that entails!)


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*Turns out that's a fallacy (old parlance for fake news), but it inspired this story anyway, so whatcha gonna do.
**And fools seldom differ...