In an ideal world the compost that we produce for our gardens would be be perfectly ready,
exactly when we needed it.
And with the right mix of ingredients, and a well made compost pile, that is adequately
turned, and given enough time, I think this is possible.
But that’s often not the case, and many growers, including myself, often want to end
up adding compost to garden beds, before it’s ready, before it’s had enough time to decompose,
or reached that ideal crumbly texture.
This is especially the case with the small scale community composting facility that I
operate, where a number of different people add a wide variety of different materials,
that is usually not chopped up very well, or mixed adequately, and I definitely don’t
turn it enough.
There are always lots of clumps and compressed blocks, that I’d rather break up before
adding to the soil.
I usually find lots of partially decomposed woody material, a fair number of stones, and
pieces of plastic, or cutlery or other debris that is mistakenly or carelessly added in
with the kitchen compost.
As well as pieces of twine and other materials from the gardens.
I really don’t want any of this stuff in my garden soils, and I needed a simple process
to remove it all.
I have seen a number of different methods for sieving compost, but the best one seemed
to be a simple sloped metal mesh or screen, where you shovelled compost up onto the top
and let gravity do the rest.
I ended up building one from a metal screen that I got from my neighbour, which was 60cm
wide and 180cm long, and it had holes about 25mm wide or about 1 inch.
I built a frame out of some scrapped wood, and fixed the screen to the bottom of the
frame with large staples, and added posts to keep it upright.
It was simple to use, shovelling compost up onto the top of the frame, and the small particles
dropped through the holes, and the larger pieces tumbles down the slope of the screen,
breaking up along the way.
This simple piece of equipment does a remarkably good job, leaving a pile of sieved compost
underneath, and most of the stones, undecomposed material, and a lot of the foreign objects
end up in a pile at the bottom of the screen.
But I found that I needed to shovel this pile of unsieved material back up onto the screen
two or three more times, to break up the clumps, especially if the compost was wet.
I decided to add stilts to the bottom end of the sieve, and a few pieces of wood to
divert the material that tumbled off the end of the screen, into a bucket that I was able
to fit underneath, making it a lot easier to collect this unsieved material.
Once the one bucket was full, I could swap it with an empty bucket, and dump the contents
onto the top of the sieve, which was easier than shovelling to collect the material.
This involved a lot more lifting, which was compounded by the sieve being higher, which
required a lot more upper body strength, but it definitely speeded up the process.
After a few runs down the sieve, I had a mix of tough clumps, undecomposed pieces, stones,
plastic and other unwanted material.
I could manually pick out the larger pieces of plastic and stones, but separating it fully
was a tricky enough task in a bucket.
For quite a while, I would simply dump anything left in the bucket, back into a new compost
pile, to go through the composting process again, rather than putting in the work to
separate it further, or getting rid of it in some other way.
This had the unfortunate impact of increasing the amount of stones and plastic and unwanted
material in subsequent batches of compost.
I wasn’t getting rid of the stuff, I was simply making more work for myself later.
Trying to figure out ways to make this sorting of material a lot easier, I decided to try
to set the sieve in a more horizontal position, resting on four posts, even though this seemed
counter-intuitive at first.
Of course, in this horizontal position, I couldn’t make use of gravity to work over
the clumps, but I didn't need to shovel the material so high, and I only needed to lift
it once, so there was a lot less heavy lifting.
This work was replaced by more work with a spade, shovel or by hand, to break up the
pieces on the screen.
As I was a working over a larger area, it was much easier to see and pull out the pieces
of plastic, the undecomposed material, and to push the stones to the end of the screen
and into a bucket.
It was also an easier height to work at, with less bending and lifting.
It was perhaps slower, but more thorough, with less plastic and stones added back into
the composting system.
The compost could be sieved directly into a wheelbarrow underneath, or in a pile, or
even in a large bag to mature for longer.
The downside of this horizontal orientation was that larger material was able to pass
through the holes, including some pieces of plastic, and a lot of sticks were able to
get through.
It was also an issue that smaller stones were more likely to get stuck in the screen, which
made it harder to use a shovel, and this was perhaps the biggest hassle of this orientation.
After trying out a few things, I found that filling a bucket with the original compost,
and then turning it upside-down onto the screen, and then sliding it back and forth, world much better.
A few passes over the mesh and most of the compost would have fallen through the screen,
and it was quicker at reducing it to a small pile of cleaner material, that it was easier
to manually separate.
I still had to handle the bulk of the compost material several times.
Once lifting it onto the sieve, then transferring the sieved compost into a bucket or a wheelbarrow,
and then spreading it over the garden bed.
As I often use a bucket to transfer the finished compost into the garden, I realised that this
meant that I could actually sieve the compost directly over the garden bed.
There was of course more work dragging the sieve around, but I think there was less work
in the end as I only had to handle the compost material once.
I’d fill the buckets from the compost pile, take them to the garden and then sieve directly
over the soil surface.
This was also quite convenient when I needed to spread compost over part of the garden,
but I hadn’t got around to sieving a batch of compost yet.
I could essentially sieve the compost on demand.
Now that I have this piece of equipment in the gardens, I’m starting to use it for
different things not just for sieving compost.
I have found it really useful to use this sieve to help clear rough and weedy ground.
By cutting out chunks of soil and weeds and placing it onto the sieve, I can bash it around
and separate out all of the biomass from the soil which falls through the sieve, especially
the problematic weed roots, and it also clears out the stones at the same time.
It is a fair of work to dig out all of this soil, but its possibly the fastest way to
go from really rough ground to loose cleared soil that is ready for shaping into beds and planting.
I’ve even tried using the sieve to help dig out a few beds of potatoes, which helps
to ensure that no tubers are left in the soil to regrow the next season.
This is perhaps most useful in the Intensive Garden where I usually double dig the beds,
as this is several jobs done in one pass: harvesting potatoes, double digging the soil,
as well as helping to clear out any stones and weed roots.
I’ve even found it to be an effective tool to help to thresh the small amount of wheat
that I grew this season.
While I originally built this simple sieve to help improve the quality of my compost,
it’s become one of the most useful piece of equipment in my gardens, especially as
I’m still clearing a lot of ground.
It is interesting how the uses of a tool will change over time, and how rarely I use it
in the original sloped configuration that I built it in.
Of course different designs and uses will fit different people and contexts, and as
my gardens evolve, no doubt my own uses and needs will change.
I’ve been thinking of how I could adapt it in the future, mainly to have legs that
are adjustable, to a variety of different slopes and heights.
It would also be nice if it was lighter, and collapsable, to make it easier to move around,
and to store.
It could be useful to inlay an additional screen with smaller hole sizes, when I wanted
really fine compost, but perhaps it’s better to build a number of different sieves with
different screen sizes, shapes and uses.
But for now, I’m quite content with this simple and rugged piece of equipment that
I hacked together a couple of years ago, and it’s been quite interesting to watch how
my approach to some of the key tasks in the gardens has changed since I’ve had the use to this tool.
It’s been about five weeks since I released my previous video, and this delay was caused
by an unexpected and quite dramatic event that took place.
But more on that in my next video.
For now I’m glad to be back making videos and I’m planning to do a lot more in the
coming months.
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