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- So I'm, I'm making compost here in many ways.
I, I'm the kind of person who loves to try things out,
and I've got a combination of different heaps
doing different things.
Like over there actually are,
are my main heaps for the garden,
which are quite big.
They're three times the volume of the ones here.
And that means we, we it's easier to get them hot.
If, if you want heat, you do need
a certain amount of volume, to create the kind of
(chuckling)
combustion always.
The heat though is not, it's not burning heat.
It's heat between roughly 50 and 70 centigrade,
which, which is warm enough to kill weed seeds,
but not too hot to kill valuable microbes.
And it, it also speeds the process up.
(dog barking)
It is not vital though.
You can make lovely compost without it getting hot.
And we do all sorts of crazy things,
an yet not really crazy,
but like putting on roots of
bindweed, convolvulus, for example.
We put on the sort of things on the compost heap
that most people will tell you not to.
And you can, you know, there's a lot of nonsense out there.
A lot of what you hear, to do with gardening, is wrong.
(chuckling)
I say that in no uncertain terms.
I've been more hesitant in saying that in the past but,
I've got to a certain age now where I, I just feel,
I want to really make clear I'm telling the truth,
as I see it, as I know it. From experience, you know,
I've tried all these things out.
So the hot compost over there,
we can fill one of those bays,
which is nearly three cubic metres, in about six weeks.
'Cause we've got so much stuff here.
This garden is between a quarter, third of an acre, around.
Ah, that's 1,300 square metres,
roughly of cropped area, from which we are selling.
Or we're selling over 20,000 pounds worth,
that's sterling money, a year.
(bird chirping)
That's with me, part-time, and the help of
one full-time guy,
and a couple of part-time helpers, mainly for picking.
'Cause we're selling quite a bit, on Saturdays.
And now we're also growing quite a lot of other vegetables.
The, to give you an idea of how intensive it is,
and that does mean there's quite a bit of waste,
like vegetable waste.
We leave all the roots in the beds when we clear plants,
but there's a lot of leaves.
Ah, we're mowing some grass as well.
We need grass around the edges for access, and to keep,
keep it tidy.
That means fewer slugs, fewer pests.
It's good to have always a tidy area around your plot.
And also I'm taking delivery of wood chips from like
tree surgeons, arborists, who are happy to give it away.
Yeah, this is the beauty of making compost.
You're turning waste materials into
something really valuable.
And you can use other people's waste materials.
And particularly if you're not fussy about what you take.
So for example, also in the compost heaps,
we put blighted, late blight on tomato and potato leaves
and stems and fruits and everything.
That's fine. That breaks down.
The blight spores cannot survive in solid compost,
they need living tissue to survive in.
So you can feel totally safe about that.
And I know this from experience, you know,
I've tried it so many times.
And with bindweed roots,
you know, the, these roots that people are really afraid of,
you know, and ground elder and,
and some of the weeds that are perennial weeds
that can be very persistent in the ground.
Once you've got them out into a compost heap,
they, they've lost contact with the,
the main bit of parent root that has been powering
their growth and making them seem invincible.
And they always come back at you.
Once they're in a compost heap,
they've only got so much energy and resource in there,
which they can use to carry on growing,
which is what they'll do initially.
And then, and then eventually, well eventually,
it can be in as little as a month, maybe two,
they've just used up all that resource and they die.
Yeah, it's a simple fact.
I've seen it so many times again.
Even in a cool heap.
So, you don't need to worry about getting heat
to kill perennial weed roots, or to, for blight to die.
The main one would be more seeds.
If you're putting a lot of weed seeds, or even flower seeds
into a compost heap, and it's not getting hot,
they will survive.
And then they'll grow when you spread them.
But, because they're on top, and the compost is really soft,
you can easily run a hoe or rake through that surface.
It's a very nice job.
(chuckling)
You know, and you're not digging
you're just tickling the surface.
And the secret with dealing with weeds like that,
is growing from seed, is to,
the old saying is "Hoe your weeds before you see them"
which, actually, doesn't really make sense.
But what it's saying is that
you're catching them really tiny.
If you disturb, and this,
and this'll be in the early spring,
you disturb the surface, where you spread your compost and
it's starting to grow weed seedlings,
even thousands of them,
just tickle that up enough,
disturb it enough, that on a dry day, sort of like today,
you know, in early March, there's sun,
there's a bit of wind, surface dries out quite quickly.
Those weeds die before you've even had to worry about them.
So you save yourself a lot of work and
that's actually the key to good gardening.
It's, it's a little bit of knowledge, enough.
A little bit of skill, so you can do the right job nicely.
And knowing enough that you can do these jobs
at the best time.
Timing counts for a lot.
And you know, you can learn this, look it up.
I'm, I'm offering a lot of
free online resources on my website.
You can also buy courses and things like that
or videos obviously.
So, inform yourself, you know, and,
and don't believe everything you see or read.
But, in terms of making compost,
if you, if you want to get it hot,
I would suggest to you this is a minimum volume.
And this is such a simple way of doing it.
Where you've got, we, we just took four pallets,
knocked off the bottoms actually,
just to make it easier of access,
but you can keep the bottoms if you want.
You know, it's like in so many things,
there's no right or wrong,
it's how you want it.
They're not held to the ground in any way.
There's no posts round in at the corners.
It's just, they're just sitting on the ground here.
This was very weedy.
Six months ago, this was couch grass here.
There was nettles.
There was bindweed, well there's still is some bindweed.
And ivy, which I pulled out actually.
And brambles, which we dug out.
So woody, woody roots, you do need to remove the main stem,
not all the roots, but the main stem, so they can't regrow.
Or ivy we pull.
And then we've got a bit of cardboard around the edge.
That's just to control these weeds a bit,
but there's no cardboard underneath the heaps
because the heaps are the mulch, if you like.
And, the way this system works here is we,
we fill this one first.
We did that from mid-April to the end of May.
And then the next heap we filled in June, early July,
was the one on the end, not the middle one.
(lid lifts)
And then in early July, we turned this one, into that.
And then in August,
we turned the far one, into the middle as well.
So, it's actually the middle one now has two heaps in one.
And it means you, we've con-,
we're using a three bay system.
There's three lots here, three, three areas,
as a four bay.
So we're kind of gaining a bay.
But we're kind of being clever really,
and putting that compost on top of each other.
And I could just show you what it looks like.
(lid lifts)
Because the finished product.
Well, it's a joy to behold actually.
So we have,
this is not finished compost, but you could actually use it.
It's only three or four months old,
you know, and that's incredible.
And, and that's the result of
(lid rattles)
putting on,
(closing lid)
a combination of green,
green means, what it says on the tin,
(chuckling)
fresh green leaves.
But also other green materials are things like fresh manure.
See, that's green cause it's high nitrogen, it's
it is pretty much fresh; whatever's been eaten.
And then weeds, or weeds, leaves and roots,
but not the soil around the roots.
So soil is a brown, as is,
this is something we use a lot as a brown.
And that is, there's been some
(chuckles)
grass growing in it.
But basically this is, this is all wood chips actually.
And that's, I put a thin layer of that,
sprinkle that over the green.
So if we, we, we put on, we do it in less,
just because it's easy then to kind of organise it.
To put on a, maybe five centimetres of green,
fresh green leaves, could be grass, mows as well.
And then, a sprinkling of brown on top.
And that helps to hold structure in the heap.
(birds chirping)
It helps to balance the carbon and the nitrogen.
It reduces the heat sometimes, sometimes the,
especially those big heaps, they can get too hot
and I don't want them over 70 centigrade.
And that's how we make the compost you just saw.
Within about six months, I would say on average,
I've noticed how people love to have sort of precise timings
and, and quantities and all this sort of thing.
And actually, don't worry too much about all that, you know.
There's, just have an idea.
Try a few things and see how it goes.
But I've, just to give you a guide, you know, we,
we can make, here, nice compost,
which is usable within six to ten months, I would say.
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