(birds chirping)
(gentle music)
- Growing great vegetables is, or can be,
a lot about compost.
And I wanna give you some ideas for making compost,
answering a lot of the questions I'm asked.
How is best to do it?
I thought I'd just start, though,
with, you know, showing the garden
and what you can achieve with compost.
You can see how much we're putting on,
that's for a whole year.
And it's about an inch in depth, three centimeters,
it looks a bit more at the moment
'cause it's kind of fluffed up
and there's some big lumps in there.
Wow, big lumps.
You can see we're not putting it through a sieve
or anything like that.
We break up the bigger lumps and put it on.
That's how it looks at this time of year.
And by the spring, this will be ready to go.
You can run a rake through it and it's much softer,
will have been broken down by winter weather.
And that will grow two crops, if not three.
This bed had three crops this year
between applications of compost.
There was radish and turnips, followed by French beans,
followed by the Chinese cabbage.
We've almost finished them,
so we're looking to get the compost on as soon as possible
this time of year, late autumn, early winter
and then that's it for the whole year.
And then with no dig, you just put it on,
you don't need to worry about anything else
like digging it in, obviously,
just leave it on top.
And so making good compost,
this is some compost here which is just four months old
and it's looking pretty nice, as you can see.
That can go on with the woody bits as well.
Woody bits is good because that's fungal element
and we've be getting some lovely mushrooms
including some wood blewits recently from that.
At this stage, you might get worms.
I did find a few in here earlier on,
I just don't know if I can see them again,
they're quite shy.
And these are tiger worms or brandling worms, red worms.
They're not the same as earthworms.
They involved in the final stage of decomposition, usually,
that's the way I see them here, anyway.
You don't see them earlier on in compost making
when the heap is, say, quite hot.
they don't like that.
They'll appear later on.
You never need to buy worms or add worms to your heap,
you know, they just arrive, they're amazing.
Question, "Do you need solid sides or slatted slides?"
Actually, that's how it's usually phrased.
You know, people have been told that compost heaps
should have slatted sides,
and I find it actually better with solid.
Solid sides keep in the warmth and the moisture if it's dry.
So that's maybe not ideal, ply wood,
but it's what I've got at the moment.
I've invested in some nice planks of Douglas fir.
we're leaving a slight gap there,
but it's actually more about using less planks,
you know, it's economizing on the wood.
I like the sides to be pretty firm and solid
to hold in the warmth.
And then we also have a roof on here.
People ask like, for example,
"Should the heaps be in sun or shade?"
I find it doesn't matter at all.
I've had both over the years.
And the heat comes from the actual breakdown process,
not from sunlight, so shade or sun doesn't matter.
This roof is not about keeping sun off,
in our climate, it's about keeping rain off.
So partly you're thinking about
how you set your compost making up,
will depend on your climate.
We have quite a bit of rain here.
Our annual rainfall's 37 inches,
920 millimeters, say, roughly,
and that's enough to make the compost very soggy
and if your compost gets too soggy that excludes air
and air is the key ingredient.
So that's what turning can be about,
but you don't need to turn too often.
You know, someone said, "Should I spread compost now?
Or, if I don't, then I'll just need
to keep turning it all winter."
No, you don't need to do that.
We turn it once.
I find that really improves the quality of the compost,
and that's why there's a gap there,
because this compost heap, which we finished five weeks ago,
is gonna go into there, one turn.
We'll just take out this side, this can lift out,
and that's how we do it here.
All these finer details you'll work out
according to your garden.
Now, I mean for example, the size of your heaps,
there's no minimum or maximum,
but if you want it hot,
the minimum would probably be one meter cubed,
three feet square, but preferably four would be better,
that's 1.2 meters square.
These are actually a bit more than that,
they're five by six feet, 1.5 by 1.8 meter,
and that certainly is enough to get warm,
as you can see from this thermometer reading,
nearly 50 centigrade.
And nothing's been added to this heap for five weeks
and yet it's still that warm.
It shows that we've got a good balance,
we've got enough green material in the beginning
to provoke the heat and volume.
And yet we're starting to see fungi,
like these amazing little mushroom.
There must be some nice mycelia in there,
fungal growth doing that,
which is a sign that there's enough woody material as well.
You know, I'm very happy with what I'm seeing on the whole,
but it's taken me a lot of years to get to this stage,
practicing and just working out how best to do it,
and that's what I wanna share with you.
You know, in terms of people say,
"Do You need to layer, do you need to layer?"
Well, layering is only a way of making sure
that you get your proportions more or less even,
rather than have a sort of big mound in the middle
that you keep throwing onto
and then it's sort of a bit higgledy-piggledy,
and so it's a way of distributing,
for example, the greens and the browns.
Greens is literally anything green, Brussels sprout leaf.
Brown is not always brown in color.
You know, ash, for example, is brown, if you like,
so is cardboard, well that is brown, as it happens,
and then the carrot leaves.
So yeah, just nice mix of everything
and if you keep it small, broken down,
that's wood from an apple tree I was pruning yesterday
and then put through the shredder.
And this is what a shredder does.
It's not only cut it up across,
but a good shredder will break it open
and that exposes more surface to bacterial action,
which helps with the breakdown.
And then, so I put a layer of these shreddings over,
I didn't put them on just one piece,
but spread them out and then there'll be
some green on top and so on.
Those shreddings mainly I'd count as brown,
but when it's green wood,
that's still a bit green, even though it's wood.
You can see the color's still a bit green.
And then as we go into this heap,
it's starting to feel warm.
I don't know if you can see the steam coming out
as we get down there.
In fact, yeah, that's nice.
Still, I can hold my hand in there, so it's not hot, hot.
If it was summer time, that would have got hot.
And it's not only about ambient temperature.
It's December now nearly, so it's cooler,
day time's mid 40s, seven or eight centigrade, for example.
But it's also 'cause we're not putting on so much green
and that's what provokes heat.
Then I'm asked, "Can you put on this kinda thing?"
That's a nice root of couch grass I've found,
just for this video, actually, just to show you,
but I'm very happy to compost that.
That can go on a compost heap,
as can bindweed roots, potato peelings,
almost everything you can think of, really,
can be composted if it's organic matter.
And then animals, rats to be specific.
Here is a rat run.
In fact, you can see one or two there along the side.
Those round holes is where they've gone down.
In this case, they're going mostly around
the edge of the heap because it's where it's less hot,
but they'll be having a nice time down there.
However, I'm not overrun with rats here
and, you know, I don't want to be.
I accept, though, that if you have a compost heap,
you could well have rats.
And maybe we've just gotta get used to them a bit.
In this case, it doesn't matter.
I understand, in a more suburban situation,
it could be an issue.
And it's very difficult
to keep rats out of a busy compost heap,
even if you're not putting food in,
'cause they like the warmth.
One thing we'll see if we've got a lot of rats
is they'll be tunneling out the material
and I'm not seeing that here now.
And what's happening, actually,
is I see a cat around quite a bit,
we got a neighbor's cat,
and near to here, you can see it's a little bit wild,
there are weasels.
And I didn't know this but, Edward, who's filming today,
caught a weasel attacking a rat and killing it, on film.
And you know that, well, that was an eye opener for me.
I wasn't sorry to see it, I have to say.
You can see the weasel's not much bigger than the rat,
but it just shows how this kind of predation
is going on all the time.
And it links into the whole ecosystem of a garden
and using no dig and organic matter mulches
where you are basically working with
and encouraging wildlife
and letting the wildlife find the balance.
And all being well, this can happen even in compost making,
the actual making of compost in a heap like this,
is not a natural process,
and so here I'm stepping a little bit outside
the norms of nature, if you like,
but still working with the forces of nature
and how they can be used to our advantage.
What this is doing, is speeding up the decomposition.
And I hope you've enjoyed a little look
at how we're doing it here.
(calming music)