Ebbie, a method popular with the gardeners of OGL, the Organic Gardening List - a maillist, remember those? - maybe it's still on the go, have a look! was to wet the soil, place four layers of newspaper on top, wet the newspaper, and then place manure or other mulch above that again. This rotted down into a very nice soil amendation, and you could plant through it. Do it every year.

And before people start talking about lead in ink, those days are gone. Inks nowadays are made largely of soybean products.

If I may put my oar briefly into the manure debate, could I make a distinction between carnivores' and herbivores' manure? I would put manure (preferably aged) from any herbivore very happily on my vegetables, but would not dream of putting carnivore manure near anything I plan to eat.

Pacem Stilly River Sage, I would be very cautious of dog manure because it carries the rare but nasty toxoplasmosis bug, which can blind humans if they get it on their hands and rub their eyes. Also, nasty.

But even using horse or cow manure, you should be careful of cuts; the traditional way of getting tetanus (lockjaw; the treatment is even more painful than the illness) is a cut in the web between thumb and forefinger and horse manure getting into it.

Here, the tradition is that aged cow manure is great for roses and other flowers; aged horse manure is better for vegetables.

And seaweed, yes, seaweed is fabulous stuff, though now it may sadly be polluted with heavy metals. Still magic on spuds, though.

Here (Dublin), when you put your compost into the "brown bin" - a brown wheelie bin with holes in the bottom - it's collected fortnightly and brought to a council compost dump, which composts at a terrific heat because of the huge amount of compost humming away together at the same time. I happily put dog poo into that; the heat of the composting is going to burn off any bugs.