Composting is easy and fun once you get the hang of it,
however the advice circling the magazines and web can be so confusing that you
don’t know where to start!
There are a myriad of different composts that can be used,
and each one comes with its own set of ingredients, like baking a cake,
sustainable gardening needs the right ratios of mixing to be able to produce
the best results.
There’s something quite satisfying about filling up a bucket
with the vegetable peelings from the Sunday roast and knowing they won’t be
wasted. Or raking the wet fallen leaves in Autumn ready to turn them into
mulch. As we mow our lawns for the last time, we take great pleasure in knowing
our clippings will generate heat in a pile that will then transform them into
silage, and our days of buying compost in tough green plastic bags are over.
The more serious gardener will have more than one compost
heap, either for varying degrees of decay or for separate substances which
should not be mixed. Here we have six, three of which are food related and
months apart in their decomposing process, whereas the others hold leaves,
grass and manure from our ducks, chickens and horses.
The Famous Compost
This is my favorite compost. Not only can peelings, out of
date vegetables that bruised apple that no one managed to eat, or the
watercress that just wasn’t used in time be thrown on, the cuttings from the
veggie patch make a great addition too. Broad bean plants add nitrogen fixing
properties to the compost, and seed heads (empty of seeds) give a great mix.
However there are a few don’ts!
Avoid too much citrus, as this can make the compost acidic,
never throw on cooked vegetables or any meat unless you fancy a rat problem and
a mushy mess, and always take the stickers off fruit before you deposit!
Clippings too!
From hedge clippings to cut back fuschias and
chrysanthemums, this pile will take longer to rot, due to the woody nature of
the waste, however it will be great compost for seedlings once ready.
Don’t forget the
paper!
Cardboard, providing it has no shiny surfaces, newspapers,
egg boxes, toilet roll innards and boxes can all be added to the compost. I
prefer to add layers rather than all in one go so the moisture from the kitchen
waste speeds up the decomposition.
The Leaf Compost
Leaf mulch is excellent for protecting delicate plug plants
and crops from low temperatures. It seems to take no time at all to rot into a
sticky brown substance that will enrich your soil and protect your plants,
although low in nutrients, leaf mold will attract worms which will transport
the mold from the top of the soil to the bottom – magic!
There are dozens of different ways for sustainable
gardening, and dozens of different compost techniques, however for your
sustainable garden it’s best to pick the ones where you think you will produce
the most content, and stick to those. Here we’ve mentioned just a few
techniques, however sustainable gardens encompass manure, hot and cold
composts, silage and much more.
