- Compost making and composting weeds in particular.
If you have a cold heat, what do you do?
Well, you can still compost weed roots,
believe it or not, like bindweed.
I've done that over winter when the heap's not hot.
The heaps are not always hot, especially in winter.
Dock roots.
Thistle roots, that's creeping thistle.
It's like, there's so much volume of material to compost
that is in weeds, and also diseases and insects,
look at these aphids on a Brassica leaf,
and actually there's some kind of predator going on there,
I must check that one out.
Chomping away.
So, that's all good to compost,
there's a lot of aphids at the moment.
We just put everything on,
it's such a big time saver to compost everything.
But if you've got weed seeds,
like here's a sowthistle I just pulled out.
And that's where it's where you see the the fluffiness
at the remains of a flower, that's seeds,
and I'm putting them in my heap
because I have got just enough heat here,
I reckon over about 50 degrees centigrade,
that's 120 degrees Fahrenheit, is good.
And that will kill the weed seeds,
but even so, I put them more in the middle of the heat
where it's a bit hotter.
I've got this little thing here.
It's allowed a bit of air in the middle of the heap,
it's quite a big hole actually,
we'll take it out when the heap's finished.
This heap is two months old.
And it'll probably go for another three weeks,
and we line the sides with cardboard,
that helps to keep the heat in.
That's totally good,
you don't need air rushing in your sides
to make great compost, you're doing balance
of roughly three quarters green by volume
and one quarter brown, very roughly.
And this is part of my three bed system,
so that's the only one that's left,
we're moving it, actually,
to open up the view from the house to the new pond.
And here, we have where we're creating the new three bay.
And so that's going to be a compost heap there.
And believe it or not,
we just pile the materials on those weeds,
you can see there's thistle, clover, bindweed, everything.
And this is where we turned the ingredients
of a previous heap.
So here, this heap was made in between November and April.
And this is what it's looking like now,
it's pleasingly good.
So this is June now,
so, on average, we're looking at something
that's probably about seven months old,
and that's not got very hot, that one,
'cause it was a winter heap.
So there might be some Wheaties in that one.
And, yeah, just take you 'round here to.
We could go this way, actually.
I want to show you the Dalek bins.
I call them Daleks,
which are just small, enclosed plastic bins.
These are 330 litres, which is about 70 gallons,
and that's a decent size,
you can get a lot of compost in there,
so, this is the one that we're currently filling.
And again it's same principle, green and brown,
that's a bit big for a brown, some of these bits of wood,
I wish they were a bit smaller actually.
Look at that, guy's drier than it you'd think it might be.
It looks wet on top.
And you can see the temperature is just for 40,
it's about the temperature of hot bath (chuckles).
Not quite hard not to kill wheat seeds,
but good for breaking down other things,
because the result of doing this, have a look in here.
I turned this one just a month ago.
And again, this is what was made in the winter
between roughly October and March, have a look at that.
So that's one turn, I do just one turn
because I find that turning these heaps once
gives you a chance to mix everything together,
spot any dry bits, maybe add a bit of water if need be.
And yeah, just see what's going on,
and it speeds up the secondary decomposition.
There's some nice garlic here, by the way,
that we'll be seeing
on the tour video we're doing quite soon,
I'll explain all the different types.
So this is my larger compost making system
and this heap here.
I put the dates up on these pillars
to remind me when we started them.
The 6th of June.
And today's the 22nd, so, that's 16 days,
just over two weeks.
You can see the temperature's higher.
Which is partly 'cause it's a bigger mass,
so bigger volumes generally get hotter.
Sometimes it's going to get too hot,
and I'm happy to see it's not more than 70, at least,
actually 65 centigrade.
And we're again putting in a nice mix of green and brown,
and the browns, in the summer, like at the moment,
can be what you're short of,
so bits of cardboard, paper.
Any woody bits, old tree leaves,
it's worth setting them on one side this autumn,
if you remember to keep a heap of brown potential materials
for your adding to your compost heap greens in the summer.
And, if you want to learn more,
we're going to be having an open day here
on the 3rd of September.
You can sign up on my website,
and I'm running a compost making course here,
in the middle of July.
And again there's details on my website.