Repair is a dying art. In a recent survey by Which?, eight in 10 people said they would not repair a broken MP3 player if it developed a fault after a year but would prefer to buy a new one. The magazine report concluded that we most readily throw out audiovisual goods such as cameras and DVD players.

You can't blame us. The typical repair cost of a household electric item is £100, according to electrical chain Comet, which means that it is only pricey items such as Dyson vacuum cleaners and washing machines that make it worth the trouble. However attached to a faithful toaster or microwave you have become, once you've paid a call-out fee plus labour costs and VAT, you could have bought a new model several times over.

It doesn't help that shops doing repairs are on the decline. Which? found that many UK towns have five or fewer repair shops. Large numbers have gone out of business, claiming that parts are difficult to get hold of and consumers are less interested in repairing items. Try www.howtomendit.com to see how fixable your goods are. Then sign up to Which? Local (www.which-local. co.uk), a members' forum, to find recommended repair shops in your area.

The green solution is to buy better quality. A cheap DVD player is not only more likely to pack up in a few years but it will be impossible to fix when it does. Your chances of success at a repair centre increase the more you paid for the product. The high street electrical chains Currys and Comet offer repair centres. At Comet, you can even take along brands that are not sold in its stores. Retailers also have to ensure the safe disposal of electric items once they have given up the ghost, thanks to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive.

Help! My homegrown tomatoes haven't gone red.

For the second year running those of us growing tomatoes are likely to be cursing the weather. Too much late summer rain has not only made our crop vulnerable to blight but it has also suffered - as we all have - from a lack of sunshine.

By now, your tomatoes' time is up. Depending on where you are in the UK, the first frost will be on most of us, ruining the fruit, so you might as well tackle your unripe harvest and compost the remaining plants.

Lugging armfuls of fruit to the compost bin is always disheartening so I suggest that you bring at least some of it inside. Keep any that is showing the slightest sign of blushing on the vine and lay it out on a sunny windowsill. The fruit may ripen over the following days.

Another technique is to put the tomatoes in a paper bag with a ripening banana. All fruit produces a gas called ethylene as it ripens, but a banana works best because it ripens after being picked.

The American solution is to thickly slice the largest members of your bounty, dip the slices in flour, then beaten egg and finally cornmeal before frying them, to create fried green tomatoes, a popular snack in the Southern states, and the title of a Nineties film starring Kathy Bates.

If that doesn't tickle your fancy, a more British approach would be to spend an afternoon brewing a vat of chutney, with plenty of brown sugar to compensate for the tartness of the unripe fruit. I like recipes that include a hit of chilli and ginger, such as Keith Floyd's (find it on www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes). Once in jars, the mixture will need to mellow for at least three months - so at least you have some Christmas presents up your sleeve.

Anna Shepard's book How Green Are My Wellies? is

out now (Eden Project Books);

it is available at www.amazon.co.uk

GREENIE POINTS

DO IT Scraping up fallen leaves in the garden can seem like another chore. But if you make leaf mould from them, it gives the task a higher purpose. Collect leaves after a rain shower and pack tightly into black bin bags with a few holes punched in the sides. For a smarter look, you can buy jute leaf sacks from www.henandhammock.co.uk (two for £3). Store the bags in a shady spot and this time next year the leaves will have rotted to a crumbly mixture that can be used as mulch around plants.

CLICK IT The UK's leading renewable energy company, Good Energy, has launched an online store (www.goodenergyshop.co.uk). As well as offering eco luxuries such as a wood-fired portable hot tub (£3,399), there are affordable eco kettles, wind-up radios and dimmable energy-saving lightbulbs, plus energy-saving tips and news of weather and climate change.

SKIP IT A tasty topping to your pizza they might be, but don't forget that anchovies caught off the Bay of Biscay have been listed as an unsustainable fish by the Marine Conservation Society (www.mcsuk.org). The MSC says that overfishing has left fewer adult fish to provide eggs. Try replicating their salty

kick with capers.

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