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| good rich compost, full of worms, made in my makeshift 'bin' |
I'm not talking here about the bags of compost you buy in the garden centre, but the rich crumbly stuff you make yourself. It adds richness to your raised beds, or - if in short supply - is useful for mulching. Good compost is not difficult to make, though it takes time. Left to itself, something magical happens; nature doing its own thing turns waste into goodness; no need for those green council wheely bins - why give away something precious.
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| home-made compost added to one of my raised beds before topping up with soil |
If you have the space, you can build your own, from timber or cinder building blocks. I had to move my last one in a hurry (another story) and hadn't time to make a proper new one; temporary measures were needed. So I laid a sheet of tough plastic on the ground, positioned paving slabs upright against the fence, knocked some pairs of posts into the ground about a metre away from the slabs and slotted an old door between the posts; as I filled it over the last two years, I kept it covered with old carpet. It turned out to be the best compost I have ever made! It isn't pretty, but it works. And if you do not have space for something home-made, buy a compost bin - or better still, two - you fill the first and leave it to 'work', then start on the second.
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| well worth reading ... |
Two particularly helpful books are 'Compost' by Ken Thompson (Dorling Kindersley, ISBN 978-1-4053-1103-8) and 'Composting' by Bob Flowerdew (Kyle Cathie, ISBN 978-1-85626-930-8). You CAN actually compost cooked and raw meat and fish using a 'bokashi' pickling system, and dispose of kitchen vegetable waste in a wormery - both of those will be the subject of a future post.
