The lone tidier

My wife Nicola is saving the planet. The only problem is that most of it is in our house. Ethically, I can't argue with her - she works for an environmental campaign group and is co-author of the bestselling book Save Cash And Save The Planet. But our home has become a kind of new millennium rag-and-bone yard. Clearly, if people put perfectly useful things in bins and skips, then it is our duty to save them from going into landfill. Minimalists we are not.

In the library, we have new shelves made from plywood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, only these are obscured by an abandoned 6ft poster featuring a Matisse figure of a naked woman. Nicola saw it on a nearby street while cycling to work and ordered me to carry it home: "The girls could draw dots on it."

The library also serves as a bike repository, holding Nicola's bike, her luminous sash, spider clips, helmet, gloves and various sustainable hessian carrier bags full of work papers. These are placed on her late father's giant wooden fertility chair (yes, he was a bit of a hoarder, too).

She has started a course in conservation management, so now various sawn segments of indigenous hedgerow adorn the marble mantelpiece. They'll be useful for teaching the girls about different tree types, she reasons, which is also why we have various catkins and budding twigs around the house. And there's a basket of wood chips, personally chopped by Nicola, which she says will make good kindling for the fire we won't light until October.

The living room is overflowing, not just with children's toys but also with Jiffy bags. Our neighbour, who reviews and receives hundreds of books each week, gives these bags to Nicola, who's offered to take them in to work to recycle (eventually). While, for some reason (possibly aromatic, definitely not aesthetic), the entire lavender harvest from our garden is drying in the fireplace.

The kitchen has also succumbed. Next to the "bag bag" for plastic bags sent to an organic box scheme, and the council's brown container for kitchen waste, stands a mountain of malodorous flattened Tetra Paks. We can't throw them away because they contain aluminum and Nicola knows a factory address in Scotland where they will recycle them, just as long as we spend on postage sending them up there. Oh, and there's a pile of washed hummus and yogurt pots patiently waiting a sustainable end.

On the kitchen table sit numerous flowerpots full of sweet pea, basil and pumpkin seedlings, awaiting transference to the garden. We've just bought a new basil plant - not for us but for the free-range stick insects (they escaped from their tank last year) that now roam the kitchen. There's also a 4ft pile of paper, aka Nicola's in-tray, full of unopened letters and Natural Collection catalogues. Everything else is filed on the stairs.

It's not that I'm innocent of hoarding myself. Our shared office is another clutter mine. On top of the overflowing filing cabinets, football autobiographies and fanzines vie with several boxes of Nicola's that haven't been unpacked since we moved in two and a half years ago. Mainly they consist of files, paperclips, pens, hole punchers, staplers and a telephone directory from her VSO assignment in the Solomon Islands 15 years ago which she insists might prove useful.

I fear our attraction to refuse could be genetic. I've just washed the grimy coat belonging to my seven-year-old daughter, Lola, and found in the pocket a wax crayon (broken), a twig, 20p, a broken bit of bracelet, a Yum Yum wrapper, a hankie and the end of the TV lead.

And I'd wondered why there was a bag full of mysterious foliage dropping needles on the kitchen floor. Now we discover it's some rare plant our five-year-old, Nell, extricated from Kew Gardens, along with a copious collection of pine cones.

In our bedroom, Nicola has taken to putting orange peel on the boiler, "because if you dry it and put it on the fire, it smells nice". Both parental and kids' bedrooms are dominated by book mountains, stuffed wardrobes and laundry bags of baby clothes that might one day be recycled.

Even outside there is no relief. The garden is perhaps the biggest clutter magnet for the eco-minded family with Gerald Durrell sympathies. At one end of the garden we have a coop for our two chickens. The Wendy Hut is full of straw, corn and chicken pellets, and now stuff for guinea pigs because we're looking after a pair while their owner is away.

Then there are the logs turned into garden seats reclaimed from a passing tree surgeon, the scaffolding boards from skips for raised permaculture beds and one half of a set of french windows, now converted into a cold frame. The pond is populated by newts Nicola reclaimed from a soon-to-be infilled Hackney pond. Oh, and a friend just told us he rehoused a frog in our garden a few days ago. He didn't bother to ask us, and sadly I can understand why.

It's not that we lack space - it's just that our eco-clutter always expands to fill it. Somewhere Nicola forgot the first part of the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra. We've tried to declutter. We joined freecycle, but ended up taking more than we gave; every item we give to the school fete is replaced by five essential bargains.

I like to think our home has character, a bit like Iris Murdoch's chaotic but academic-looking home in Iris. But I'm starting to believe it's more like Krook's abode in Dickens' Bleak House. Can preventing needless landfill compensate for appearing on Filthy Homes From Hell? I'd send for a skip - only we'd probably be the first people to raid it.