I am so-o-o-o Monty

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to say this. I am so Monty. I have very few things in common with gardening maestro Monty Don – we hold spades at the same end, neither of us will see 50 again, and we both love a fritillary. That was about it, really.

Until this season of Gardener’s World.

Because prompted by the recent series of Blue Planet and the focus on shoals of plastic waste floating through the world’s oceans, GW is on a mission to stop us using so much plastic. The vision of a small turtle ensnared and dragging along a raft of plastic flotsam has tugged at everybody’s heart strings.

So, whenever Monty goes to sew something into a plastic container, there is the advisory note now. Don’t buy new ones. In the past it was “peat-free compost”, the new mantra is "cut down on the use of plastic in the garden".

It’s been something I’ve been doing for years. I have a polystyrene tray which my wife bought with trailing lobelia back in 2006 and it’s always used for courgette and cucumber seeds. Some of my plastic pots are so old I've thought about taking them along to the Antiques Road Show. "Ah yes, an early Geoff Hamilton, with the distinctive four drain-holes."

The inability to buy new plastic containers makes you think laterally. The reason I’ve been doing it so long, though, is not for a particularly worthy cause. Confirmed eco-gardener Bob Flowerdew, from GQT on Radio 4, is the perfect re-user of old items in the garden. You can imagine him re-purposing takeaway containers as seed trays or cutting up old tyres to act as knee pads, and then using the rest to make a pair of water-skis for a badger.

My main motive is to save money. If I re-use something I don’t have to go down to Squires and shell out £3 on an extra plastic pot that probably cost 7p to make. Also I’ll end up with so many pots I won’t know what to do with them. The tendency for gardeners to divide plants and multiply every garden’s plant stock is ingrained. ‘Here’s a plant, you can restore its vigour by dividing it and hey presto you’ve got another two or three’. Which now need containers.

Or somewhere to plant them. Or do what I do and cast them into purgatory, keep them in containers until you can work out where to put them. Plants then sit around waiting for the right space to come up, adding to the summer watering round. The remedy is not buying any more containers, plastic or otherwise. It forces you to make choices.

The greatest plastic challenge coming up will be how garden centres tackle the sale of summer bedding plants without relying on very unrecyclable polystyrene trays. I’m looking forward to see how that particular curve ball is handled.

As someone who eschews hanging baskets, petunias, marigolds and panseys etc I won’t be adding to the turtle’s load. Indeed, when Monty showed us how to make paper containers from torn-up newspaper and a mould last week, I was already ahead of the game. Three weeks earlier I had used my kit to create containers and was already growing kale and red peppers in them (Exhibit A above).

I am so-o-o Monty. Although I don't have any gold retrievers yet and the wife refuses to retrieve the old tennis ball when I throw it for her. Despite lots of encouragement.