Making Compost
Making your own garden compost is a lot easier than most people realise. With a simple heap you can recycle most of your organic household and garden waste and enrich your garden’s soil at the same time. It’s also an extremely satisfying way to help the environment.
Here’s how to make rich, crumbly compost
If you have the space, the best thing is to have not one compost bin but three. One to be filling, one to be turning and mixing and one to be maturing ready for use. However, if you only have a small garden you can certainly make great compost with just one bin, but it will take a little bit longer.
The next most important thing is to make sure you collect enough material. The bulk will help your compost heat up, which will speed up the breakdown of the material and help to kill off disease. Almost anything and everything that has ever lived can be composted and the more bulk you have and the more varied the waste, the better your compost will be.
How to make your compost heat up
Firstly, collect enough material in your compost bin. The more and the more varied, the better. A cubic metre’s worth is ideal.
Tip it all out on to a plastic sheet and wet it. One of the best things you can do is urinate on it, but if the urge escapes you, you can add any vile liquid; water from the bottom of the water butt, dregs from a ditch, the liquid from rinsing out a Bokashi bin, etc. The compost should be about as moist as a rung out rag.
Mix it up and add it back to the compost bin (the mixing bin if you have more than one bin) and it will heat up naturally. When you add compost a little bit at a time, it doesn’t really heat up and as a result it takes longer to break down.
Leave your compost mature
Leave it mature for six months to a year and allow it to dry out (if you have a wooden compost bin you can remove one of the panels but keep the lid on). Then put it through a compost sieve. The ripe compost can be sieved out to produce potting compost or fine material to be mixed with garden soil, whilst the larger bits can go back into the next compost heap to inoculate it with all the things that make it really break down. This is a very important part of the composting cycle that’s often overlooked.
It’s really very easy to make compost, because nature makes everything want to rot down, you’re just accelerating the process by keeping it all in one place and warm and moist.
How long will it take to make good compost?
If you make it in something that is well insulated yet breathable, like a wooden compost bin, and include lots of green material and lots of organic kitchen waste, you can actually make good compost in three to six months.
On the other hand, if it takes you three months to collect enough material, you’ll need to add one month to mix it and heat it up and six months for the compost to mature. A year and a half to two years later you’ll have perfect compost. If you leave it for three to four years, you’ll end up with mineralised sand. It will still be valuable, but it will have lost a lot of its organic goodness.
3 things not to compost
Although any organic waste will rot down eventually, some things are best left out.
1) Large chunks of cheese, pieces of fat, etc, do compost eventually but they tend to attract vermin, so they’re best given to the dog or composted with Bokashi rather than added to your compost bin.
2) Anything that’s sharp or thorny should also be left out, because although the compost heap will destroy the thorns, you’re likely to scratch yourself later on, risking a trip for a tetanus injection.
3) Ideally, diseased plant material should not be composted. Although a good compost heap will get rid of most diseases, if your heap doesn’t heat up enough, the diseased cells may survive and inadvertently be spread to other parts of the garden.
For a comprehensive list of what you can and can’t compost, see our Compost Checklist.
Positioning your compost bin
Where you put your compost bin is very important. In order to keep the micro-organisms active as long as possible throughout the season, it’s a good idea to position your compost bin in a warm and sheltered part of your garden. Partial shade is ideal, that way your compost won’t dry out too quickly and soil organisms won’t perish from excessively high temperatures.
And place your compost bin on level, well-drained cultivated ground. By placing a new bin on recently dug earth, you’re providing soil micro-organisms with a new home, and of course, you’re helping the worms find your compost, which will speed things up no end.
