Garden Centre

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Composting

This time of year causes compost! Vast huge amounts of compost ingredients are generated as we cut lawns (often for the first time this year) and trim hedges, not to mention cutting back all those deciduous shrubs that need to be pruned after flowering, like forsythia and buddleia. And that means that canny gardeners will be able to do what we’ve done, which is dig out a large bucket of last year’s twiggy prunings to go in with the green stuff.

It sounds a bit convoluted I know, but after years of watching our compost go through a stage of being slimy, vile-smelling and wet, we’ve finally worked out how to stop it. All the gardening books will tell you that your compost will not do this (it’s called becoming anaerobic) if you turn it often enough. Poppycock! If, like us, you have to rely on plastic bins for composting, there’s every chance it will happen for several reasons:

The bins have no side ventilation to allow air in and moisture to evaporate out
Their sloping construction means that they concentrate weight downwards, pushing the air out of the contents, and also making it impossible for you to get to the bottom outer edges of the bin to turn the contents adequately
Their lids tend to form airtight seals.

Anaerobic inactivity happens because the oxygen is squashed out of the compost – if you put a lot of wet greenstuff in (like grass clippings and soft hedge clippings for example) and then it rains (like now and for the foreseeable future) you’ve got the worst conditions for making good compost.

Your choices are to get in their with a hoe, hook or fork and turn it, as best you can, or to do what we do, use an ounce of prevention to save a pound of work. Each winter, as we prune the hard twiggy plants in the garden, we stand the prunings in a really big bucket which lives through the winter in our shed. Come April, when we’re inundated with greenstuff, we cut those twigs to one foot lengths and layer them with the greenstuff – the rule of thumb is that we scatter the twigs to about the same depth of each layer of greenstuff we put in. The green will distribute itself through the twiggy material, which keeps lots of oxygen in the bin, and means we don’t have to go out in the rain and turn the compost all the time!

Compost by chika

Labels: garden compost

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:32 AM

---