Recycle your Christmas tree

Most councils will recycle your Christmas tree, but little is as sad, in those grey days post-Christmas, than the sight of enormous piles of discarded trees at drop-off points, waiting to be collected. Councils normally shred them and use the chippings as mulches in parks or woodland areas, so there’s nothing to stop you doing the same at home.

Prune off the branches with a sharp pair of loppers and run them through a shredder – you’ll probably still need to put the main trunk in your green waste bin since that’ll be too thick and chunky to go through a small garden shredder.

You can use the resulting chippings as you would bark chips, to top-up paths in a woodland garden or in the vegetable garden. They also make an excellent mulch, especially for ericaceous (acid-loving) plants such as blueberries, azaleas and rhododendrons. In fact, in her book Eat What You Grow, Alys Fowler says you can grow blueberries in the soil even if it’s not acidic with the help of a Christmas tree mulch. Traditional advice has always been to grow these shrubs in pots of ericaceous compost if you don’t have acid soil, but Fowler suggests adding ericaceous compost to the hole at planting time, and then giving your blueberries an annual mulch of shredded Christmas tree, to maintain acidity levels.

If you don’t own a shredder and can’t borrow or hire one, then leave the Christmas tree outside on a plastic sheet or on some paving and wait for all the needles to fall off. Gather these and use them as your mulch, recycling the rest of the tree’s branches.

Once pruned off the main trunk, you can recycle your Christmas tree branches in the garden. Use the twiggiest to make plant supports in the border, or use them to keep cats off freshly raked soil or