Recycling? It must just be in my nature

Every time I squash the remains of the old soap on to a new bar I'm reminded that I was born to recycle. It's in the blood.

It has nothing to do with age: most of my Fifties contemporaries don't do the soap trick, though my father always insisted on it. No one else at work brings their homegrown lunchtime salad into the office in a Westland Slow-Release Plant Food plastic container, either.

Old Palace Lane allotments in Richmond are full of like-minded people. We love to recycle. Skips are magnets for us, full of buried treasure: old glass for cold frames, wooden pallets to make raised beds, large paint tins which make perfect herb containers once holes have been drilled in the bottom Ted on the next-door plot has a bad back and can't bend so he gardens vertically: not only have his runner beans and climbing courgettes been coaxed up a cornucopia of rusty metal plumbing pipes and old bedsteads plundered from skips but he's used the surplus to disguise his allotment entrance. Now only a limbo dancer or an Olympic pole vaulter can find their way in there.

The pinnacle of recycling is, of course, the compost heap. Turning household waste into rich, dark, friable garden gold — I was hooked on this long before the economy nosedived. Veg and fruit peelings (not citrus), kitchen towels, ripped-up cardboard, teabags, London freesheets, coffee grounds, annual weeds, grass clippings — not only do I feel smug that this little lot isn't going into landfill but I know it will improve my soil for free.

And if you are really dedicated and want to help your compost's nitrogen cycle along, get some chap to pee on it. Don't try it yourself, girls, it's harder than it looks.

Down at the allotment we've got two compost bins, made from old pallets, which means you can start a new one while the compost in the other one gets properly cooked, but at home I've only got room for one and it's plastic. I put some damp grass clippings in it the other day but was too lazy to cut them with ripped-up cardboard and freesheets there and then, so now, whenever I lift the lid, I'm wreathed in a cloud of small brown flies, like a housewife in a Delhi butcher's. I'll have to dry the compost out with copies of thelondonpaper, then give it a good stir, taking care, of course, not to terrify any slow worms, grass snakes and garden mice who might have taken up residence.

Though, come to think it, if I were a grass snake or a wee garden mouse I wouldn't care to have my home reeking of human urine. Better keep it in your trousers after all, chaps.