We're funny old folk us veg gardeners. We get excited by the strangest things...
When I got married I made sure a compost bin was on our wedding present list. Someone kindly obliged us and a few months later after some ameteur DIY construction and a lot of careful 'layering', I had successfully created my first real compost. In fact, so excited was I that I had to call my wife out into the garden to show her what I'd made!
There's so many plus sides to making your own compost. Its recycling at its best and less for landfill. You are putting goodness back into the single most important element of successful growing - the soil. And it's free - what's not to like.
One of the first things we built on our plot were a succession of 'pens' made out of pallets. Below is a shot of the early infrastructure building...shed, water collection and lots of compost bins.
A few years on and I now use 6 all told. Three are used to store manure, which I leave for as long as I can, but at least 6 months, before adding it to the ground (for the next year's spuds). One will be a full bin doing its stuff rotting down (and gradually reducing in size - I find mine lose up to a third of their mass during the process). I'll hopefully have one ready with fresh compost to supplement my planting (like I did last week with my brassicas), and I'll always have one 'being filled'.
As you can see from the top picture, there's a lot that goes in. First of all, there's at least two caddies each week full of fresh veg waste (veg tops, tails, leaves,and peelings, egg shells, etc.) but note, I never include anything that's been cooked - it'll attract vermin. I have also got a paper shredder which produces huge amounts of paper shreddings on account of the amount of junk mail and cardboard packages we still seem to get each week. These shreddings really help to aerate the heap. We also have a hamster, (no that doesn't go in!) but what does is each week's sawdust including droppings from when we clean the cage out. And finally we'll add grass clippings during the summer months to give the process a bit of heat. All this stuff from home lives temporarily in an old Jewson's bag until its full then I take it direct to the plot where I add a few more elements.
Of course, you can't just pile it all in and expect to come back to great compost 6 months later. There is a bit of science to it all - this is the layering I talked about earlier.
In the slider below, you can see me removing the old carpet I use to cover the growing pile, adding my week's collection from home, turning it over a bit then layering some horse manure before replacing the carpet lid.
The veg waste, paper, sawdust and grass cuttings are all a mix of what they call 'green' or 'brown' waste and it is these that you should be layering. My Jewsons' bag method naturally layers as I add each item separately. Then after I've dumped it in the pen, I'll fork it over before adding a further layer of rotting horse manure from a neighbouring pen. And I'll also add material from the plot itself - at the moment I'm adding the huge leaves from my rhubarb after I've cut the rhubarb stems (the rhubarb is actually right next to the compost bins and you can see the jungle like leaves just behind me (pics above and below) on the heap itself). You should also keep forking and turning the compost as regularly as you can as this helps re-ignite the heap by adding air and reawakening the bacteria that's doing all the good.
I'll add worms to the mix so that they can work their magic too, and over its life the heat generated will not just make me my soil improver, but be a warm and cosy sanctuary for wildlife. Feral cats will bask in the sun and on top of the carpet, being warmed from all sides. I've a resident robin that's always interested when any 'turning over of material' is being done to see if he can pick up lunch. Grass snakes nest and lay their eggs in the heap itself over the summer and the tell tale trails in the top of the heap indicate it's a home to a number of dormouse families over the winter. (Be careful though, I've also put my fork through a wasps nest I didn't know was also in the heap itself!).
You might wonder why I don't add weeds, when conventional advice is that you can. This is because most of my trouble is bindweed which I'm sure would just love to be warmed up and encouraged to grow in composting environment. The garden books will tell you its ok to add annual weeds but not the pernicious type that I have, so I just play it safe and pile them in a separate heap elsewhere on the plot and out of harm's way.
You can also add fallen leaves from trees in the autumn. But don't do what I did a couple of years back and just pile them all up together. They will make a leaf mould if you put them in bags, fork the bags to create air holes and then leave them for a couple of years. But if you do what I did below - just pile them all up, didn't cover them properly but simply left them to their own devices you just up with a dense 'mat' of mush. If you stick to the layering technique - including leaves - you should be fine.
So there you go. The whole process takes between 6-12 months for me but it's well worth it when you finish up adding a rich brown material to my grey clay base. Sometimes, I'm a bit hasty (like below) and it could do with a little more time in the heap, but the process will carry on in the ground anyway so just let nature do what it does best.
Until next time, happy composting. #compost #soilimprover #growyourown #allotment #bgveg #shreddings
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