- It's early May.
Such a lovely time of year,
and the garden's getting a little bit abundant,
and it means that we're finding here, at least,
a lot of material we can now put in compost heaps.
And even from a smaller garden,
you'll be finding quite a bit.
I'm showing you in this video
some options for how to create this valuable product
of compost, which means anything decomposed.
Compost is something particularly special,
and it is anything decomposed.
And it's happened in a way that seems to add value
to whatever you put in.
So let's look at ways of doing that in a garden context,
where also you might be bringing in a bit of other material
to help fill your compost heaps.
These are heaps which I've used now for quite a while,
and they're pretty big.
For many gardens, these would be too big.
It's good to scale your compost making setup
to the size of garden you have,
and how much material you're going to create.
And so these are 1.5-by-1.8 metre.
That's five-by-six feet.
Now, that's five weeks it's taken us
to get this much stuff together,
and quite a lot of that's recent,
and you can see there's some serious heat
being generated here.
And that's partly because
we're putting in quite a lot of grass mowings,
and we are mixing them with brown material,
some of it's soil,
some of it's quite old wood chip,
and that's called green and brown materials mixed together.
You can see the temperature as a result.
We're in the red zone, which is between 55 and 70,
and that is hot enough to kill weed seeds.
And it means also the compost makes quite quickly.
So for example, here,
over the winter, we had a heap there,
which we turned into there.
Turning is not obligatory.
You can make nice compost without turning.
I'm looking to give you examples,
and that you can see the results.
So doing it this way,
we can get something that looks like that five months later.
And at this stage,
you can see quite a lot of worms have come in.
They were not there before.
In the hot phase that we've just seen,
there can't be any worms,
but their eggs seem to survive that phase.
These worms,
are Eisenia fetida.
That's brandling red worms, tiger worms.
Not earthworms, in English anyway,
and their eggs
are in most soil and materials we're putting in compost.
Now we're going from five months to seven months,
and you can see it's looking even more decomposed,
but there's still lots of wood bits in here.
And I do not mind that.
This will go on my beds like that.
I do have a sieve here, with four millimetre holes,
because we occasionally use that
for making potting compost or potting soil only.
We're not sieving in any way or form
for putting compost on the bed here.
This is no dig.
We're just putting this material
on top of the soil once a year,
around an inch, 2.5 centimetres,
in the autumn normally, but you can do it any time of year.
You could use compost like that to make a bed.
Now, you'd need a bigger depth to start off in my version
but there's many ways of using it.
Compost, you know, it just doesn't have to be perfect.
It can have some nits of undecomposed wood.
So here we have a slightly different setup with pallets,
and it means we have smaller heaps,
held together by just two wires on each corner,
meaning that to open a bay,
you just take out the two wires,
and you can swing it open if you want to get in there,
say to access the compost, either to turn it, or to use it.
And we knocked the bottoms off the pallets,
so you just got a much lighter frame.
It makes it easier.
They're sitting on the ground.
They're not tied to anything.
And we line them with cardboard
to keep in the warmth and moisture,
and then we're throwing in
or adding a bit of everything,
like this is a brown material or one of the brown.
You know, this is just examples.
So what we've got is quite old wood chip.
It's is a bit dry.
Does that matter?
Actually, not, at the moment, not here.
Depends where you are.
In dry climates, you might be advised to water that.
But what we are doing here is adding,
green material, and it
has a lot of moisture in, including bindweed.
So that's some bindweed roots
that we were weeding this afternoon, removing them.
They go in.
It's fine to compost weed roots without heat,
and weed seeds if you can get the heat,
Weed roots, you can compost without heat.
They just decompose,
because basically you keep burying them.
You keep adding more matter on top of them,
green or brown, more material.
And this material
is grass cut by a lawnmower this afternoon.
Any fresh green leaf has a lot of moisture in it.
So as it decomposes,
that moisture's going to come out.
Here's another example of a very moist green leaf,
which is cauliflower.
Leaves of the cauliflower.
I don't even cut them up,
because this is not a woody stem.
It's very easily snapped.
Woody material, though,
we prefer to put into small pieces.
I'll show you that in a minute.
So that's going in.
And then under here, we have some kitchen waste,
bits of paper, and coffee grounds,
paper cup, and old shallot,
a banana skin, lemon peel, you can put it all in.
Rhubarb leaves are one of
the things you might have read
that you're supposed not to compost,
but they can all go in!
There's a bit of potting compost there
from propagation work we were doing this afternoon.
And yeah, I just wanna show you this cauliflower stalk.
So this was from a cauliflower harvested today
in the morning.
This is one way to deal with Brassica stalks,
they're very, very woody,
and see, if you can get a knife down lengthwise,
they cleave open much more easily
than if you try and cut across,
because all the sinews are going down that way,
and you can even do it twice,
and get it into quite a thin stalk,
which it is then possible to cut across or snap like that.
But with more woody material like this,
I do prefer to put it in
in smaller pieces.
Breaks down more quickly,
'cause what you're doing
is you're exposing more of the edges
to bacteria and things that break it down.
And we do have a shredder here as well,
because we're dealing with quite a bit of green wood
from the hedgerows, and prunings of apple trees,
that kind of thing.
Could be worth it if you have a lot of woody material
in your garden, and it's really good
to get woody material in the compost heap,
because that increases the amount of fungal activity
and value subsequently off the compost.
This three-bay system here,
firstly that's the current heap.
That's one that we finished earlier this week.
And this is the result of earlier creations
from these two heaps become one.
So this one finished in January from last autumn.
It's last autumn's compost, and went into the bottom.
The winter's compost has just gone into here, on top,
and that's what we've got.
I've got my trowel here.
It probably doesn't show up on camera,
I'm showing a little indent there
which is almost certainly a mouse run.
There's loads of wildlife in compost heaps, which is nice.
So last time we opened this one up,
there was a a frog and a toad sitting in there,
and quite a few mice, actually.
You know, I don't mind that.
And then look at this.
Loads of worms.
You know, compost heaps are incredible.
In fact, this is on its way to becoming a giant wormery,
because you see these are baby worms, pretty small.
And this compost is not that old.
It's about four months, on average,
material from the gardening,
and quite a bit of wood, as you can see.
So some of the woody material, that's not ideal.
That one, that feels pretty hard.
So that won't be breaking down anytime soon.
You don't want too much of that kind of wood
because it's just wood pieces.
But it's more this kind of wood that's really good,
quite thin, and that's starting to degrade and go soft.
The wood helps to keep air in the heap,
and gives the balance, green and brown.
Do check out my other videos on this,
because there is quite a bit to learn
about making really good compost.
But once you get a grasp of the principles,
it's actually not difficult,
and you see how you can quite easily get heat
if you want it, if you've got enough green material.
Green material includes fresh manure,
and coffee grounds as well.
In composting terms, they're green.
Grass is the classic one.
Here we put in some grass mowings
to a pile of wood chip, and that's slowly on its way.
But again, there's too much of this big wood.
So if I wanted to use that as compost,
I would actually, I would sieve that,
just because there's so many large pieces of wood
that will not turn into compost anytime soon.
But with our normal heaps,
we're not putting in that much wood.
So that's why we won't bother to sieve it first.
I can just show you some wood chip in passing.
This is the kind of wood chip
that we'll be adding to a heap.
You can see, this is one year old,
and looking pretty nice,
but by the time that rain might have washed through,
if you put it on the surface anyway,
you'll basically just be looking at wood chip,
like you see on the top of the heap here.
So it can be misleading to look at it like compost,
It's a bit of a combination of wood and compost,
but it's not compost yet,
and it needs some help to decompose.
And here is a way of making compost
if you have a smaller garden.
I bought this one three weeks ago,
and we've been slowly filling it.
And again, it's pretty warm in there at the moment,
but mainly because we've recently added
quite a lot of green material.
It's that time of year, spring,
late spring, especially,
grass is growing fast here in our climate.
And this one, we'll just keep filling,
and we won't turn it.
What you can do with these ones
is you lift the whole frame up, it's quite light,
just put it down there.
You could scoop off the top layer, the less decomposed,
and then use the bottom compost.
And that could be usable in about three months from now.
There's no right or wrong time to use the compost.
It depends what you want from it.
And with no dig,
when you're just putting the compost on top,
it's kind of like a mulch cover anyway,
so it doesn't have to be perfectly decomposed.
And now we have something completely different
that I haven't shown you before.
This is, I'm experimenting with a wormery.
I've got it under black plastic,
to keep in the warmth,
plus it keeps out the rain.
And let's see what we find.
(chuckles) I was hoping to see a slow worm,
but actually it's not here at the moment.
Normally when we take this cover off,
there's a beautiful, shiny grey slow one.
Oh yeah! there he is.
Up that end. Do you see?
He's probably worked out.
He gets less disturbed
when we are looking at the heap.
And slow worms are great in the garden,
because of how they eat slugs.
And that looks like a piece of bindweed
that's pushed its way up from the ground.
This is a very bindweedy corner of the garden,
and yeah, not that that's a problem.
But look, there's more baby worms.
Worms don't like daylight.
So they're very quick at hiding when you disturb them.
But in this pile here are a lot of worms,
and that's partly because I bought some.
Actually it's funny,
when I say that,
I'm seeing less worms
than we saw in the main compost heaps, but they're here
I might need to go a bit deeper.
I don't like to disturb them,
but I do want to show you to give you an idea.
Going down here,
we do have a high population of worms.
How did they get in there?
Well, mainly, I bought some.
You don't need to do that, if you have some,
I probably could have not bought any, actually,
but I bought four kilos, just to see.
They are nice,
slightly fatter than the ones I see normally
in the compost heaps,
but I think I could have created this
without buying any, actually,
because of how we're finding,
that they appear so fast.
And the way I want to do this
is to keep adding half decomposed material, not fresh.
So semi-compost is best worm food,
like we see how they arrive in the compost heaps.
Keep adding that material,
and this will keep going up through the summer,
and the worms congregate near the top.
And so at some point,
we'll be able to just take off the top layer,
which will have most of the worms,
maybe put it down there, and then use the compost.
I want to get the compost at the bottom
because it's so good for say, potting and propagation.
This could be the next load of potting compost
that I can use.
I don't yet know how much I can make
in a summer, but we'll see.
And do have a look in my resources about compost making
such as in my online course.
There's a lesson about making compost,
and I've also just made an audio book
about my no dig gardening.
That has a chapter about making compost as well.
And you can find that through the link
in the video description.