(gentle bright music)
- In this video, I'm looking to answer
many of the questions I'm asked about compost
and how to use it, in particular,
how much to put on, at what time of year,
and so forth.
So, I've got nice examples here of what we're doing
at Homeacres at the moment, which is,
believe it or not, November.
This is the 8th of November today,
and the sun's just come out
and it's 16 degrees centigrade, 61 fahrenheit, so wow.
So very nice, not seasonal weather.
But, because it's winter, coming into winter,
we are spreading compost.
It's time of year, late autumn,
when soil life is looking for food.
If you think how leaves fall
and all the old grass is dying
and things are going down into the soil for winter.
And the cycle of life is used to that
and ready for feeding now.
So we're spreading compost in the autumn,
and that links to the question,
the specific question is,
what is the best time to spread it?
And that itself links to the common misunderstanding
that nutrients leech out of compost.
They do not.
Compost is not fertilizer.
And the reason for that misunderstanding
is because the two are often equated
and people have been almost brainwashed
to think in terms of putting stuff on the soil
to feed the plants.
And that's not how compost works.
It's feeding the soil life,
which builds up a web, a matrix
of food and potential plant roots,
like the network of fungi that roots can tap into,
and they make the nutrients available,
and the nutrients sit there in water insoluble form,
not soluble in water.
So these nutrients are not going anywhere.
You can spread your compost now, before the winter.
One question I had this morning,
a person in Germany, and they said,
"It rains a lot here in Germany, in Northern Germany.
Am I safe putting my compost on?".
And I replied and said, "Yeah, absolutely no worry.
It's what I do every winter,
and look at the abundance at Homeacres.
If it was leaching out, that just wouldn't be the case."
They replied then and said,
"Ah, do you know, I thought that.
Kind of makes sense, but I'd been worried
by what a local farmer said."
And that's exactly how these problems arise,
'cause a lot of people don't really understand this,
but they'll tell you nonetheless, as though they do.
And even farmers say, who you'd think would know.
I don't think they really get compost
in the sense in which I'm talking about it.
They know it's good stuff.
But this thing about nutrients not leaching out.
So, the simple answer is you can put your compost
on it any time of year.
There are no constraints to that.
But if you want to please your soil life the most,
November, December in the Northern Hemisphere,
is a really good time to do it.
And, you can do it under existing crops.
So, this links onto the next question,
which is how much compost to use?
We put on here, I've been in the habit of saying
two to three centimeters, about an inch, every year.
That's once a year.
And that led me to actually be a bit more careful,
'cause I'm getting quite prominent now
in my writing and teaching,
and I can see that people are using this information a lot.
So, I got my ruler and I thought, well,
let's just quickly check the depth here.
This is some compost we spread last week,
and for me, that's reading around two centimeters.
So I think it's more accurate the two rather than the three.
And likewise here, this is asparagus
that we've recently cleared, and I put the ruler in there.
It's about two again.
It depends a bit how you measure it.
If I push it down you can see how soft and fluffy it is.
If I do that and then put the ruler in,
well, it's about one or one and a bit.
So, these figures, you have to take them
with a slight pinch of salt.
And what I'm trying to do with a figure
is just give you an idea.
I mean, you can actually see in the videos here
how much is going on it.
It's that much, it's not a huge amount.
The backstory to that is even better, actually,
which is that this bed has...
This is a second crop
from the one application of compost.
So you're putting the compost on in the winter,
say, as I've been describing,
and it can feed the soil enough for two crops
in the following year, the whole year.
So this bed has had already this year
a lovely harvest of carrots.
The carrots I sowed on March Equinox,
what, 20th of March?
In the spring, last spring, they came up,
they were abundant,
and then we started harvesting late May
and by the middle of June,
we could make little spaces in the carrot bed,
still loads of carrot leaves here,
and popped in the Brussels sprout plants.
Mid-June, that was from, they were sown early May.
And, well, look at them now.
So the carrots finished by the middle of July,
and the Brussels sprouts just carry on growing.
So these Brussels have had no feed, if you want,
using that word in the sort of conventional sense.
They just had the compost that went on last December.
That was good for the carrots and for the Brussels sprouts.
Although, of course, it's not feeding
in that sense of the word of feeding plants,
but the soil is so well fed
and well nourished that it makes your job as a gardener
so much easier, 'cause you can just keep popping in plants.
Keep something growing, and you don't have to worry
about whether they're heavy feeders or light feeders,
all that kind of thing as well.
We've been doing this every year here.
So, including a bigger initial dose,
maybe 10 centimeters in year one, which was 2013.
That's eight years of applying compost.
And then I look at the level compared to the path up there.
So that concrete path I presume is not rising up.
The concrete path is the same level,
and my beds are hardly any higher
than the concrete path,
and that illustrates how the compost is being eaten.
It's not the same as if you added soil.
Compost is not soil.
They're very different substances.
Check that out in my online course module,
we've made separated out now and you can buy it separately.
It's got a lot of detail about all of that kind of thing.
And so the compost is being eaten all the time.
Then the excretions are rich in nutrients
and the level does not rise up very much.
Another question I'm asked is,
for typical British allotment,
so a whole full-size British allotment
is quarter of an acre.
Sorry, no, not quarter.
It's a quarter of a quarter of an acre.
It's a 16th of an acre.
How much compost would I use in a year?
And then you can look at these compost calculators
that give you ideas of multiply the area by the depth,
it'll tell you how many cubic meters you need.
And I did that for this area, actually,
because this area is roughly the size
of a whole allotment in the UK.
1/16 of an acre, so about 250 square meters.
And the compost calculation came out,
yeah, it came out at four cubic meters,
and that works out at about three tons,
and I thought, I'm not using that much.
And then, of course, if I reworked that,
what I need to allow for is
that you're not spreading compost on the whole area.
So if you look at how here, for example, we have a bed
with compost and then there's a gap by the side.
Actually I would have put a bit more,
and I had a guy doing this.
I'd normally go to about there,
'cause I know that birds are going to kick it
down a bit and that kind of thing.
But nearly always we leave a gap
between the edge of the bed, if you like,
and the path.
You can see we've put some wood chip recently on the path.
The path is not hugely wide.
Then you've got another little gap
before you got compost on the asparagus.
So it's maybe two thirds of the area has compost on.
So if you use these compost calculators
allow for the paths which are not receiving compost.
We're using wood chip.
This is six months old wood chip on average.
So you can see it's slightly decomposed already.
And you could say that that's a kind of compost.
It's like, what is compost?
Compost is anything decomposed.
Actually that leads onto the next question,
but I'll just quickly finish by saying
that for using these calculations for a full-size allotment,
I reckon you need around three cubic meters
which in terms of tons is less, it's about 2.4 tons.
That's my calculation based on experience
of actually doing the compost spreading.
So let's go and have a look at now
some different types of compost,
'cause the next question is actually
what does well-rotted mean or well decomposed?
(gentle bright music)
So here we have some examples of compost
that's well decomposed and compost
which is less well decomposed.
For example, this is homemade compost here
from Homeacres, my garden,
which was made last December mainly,
between November and April,
but most ingredients went in November, December, actually,
and so we could say this is a year-old compost.
You can see that's pretty nice.
But, it doesn't have to be perfect.
So you've got bits of wood in there.
There's all sorts, a few stems.
We aim to cut stems not too long,
so that they're still quite short,
but I do not mind at all seeing bits
of still yet to finish decomposing material in here,
'cause that's spread on the surface.
That's food for again, food for life in the soil
and bits of woody material in particular
are food for the fungal network in soil.
So they're valuable actually.
So that for me would be perfect.
This, maybe a little less perfect.
It's actually some green waste compost,
which looks beautiful.
You can see how black and soft it is.
It's actually a year since they delivered it,
and that makes it better,
because often when this kind of stuff, compost you buy,
is delivered it can be too hot.
Hot, fresh, burns, those words are all kind of synonymous.
And steamy compost, you could spread it
as a thin layer and things will then eat it, eventually.
But it's gonna take a bit of goodness out of the soil
while it finishes its own decomposing.
So, older green waste compost,
this is actually, I'm very happy,
it's getting life back in it.
It doesn't have a lot when it is delivered,
and that has a lot of life, I reckon, microbes.
And then I brought up from,
I went to my neighbor's yard earlier this morning
just 'cause I wanted to show you
some less well decomposed,
'cause that's another thing that causes concern.
For example, this is actually fresh manure.
When we talk about manure, what do we mean?
The word, traditionally, manure includes the bedding
which is this, it's mixed with bit of horse poo
and a bit of your horse urine probably.
It's quite damp, but that's literally from last night.
So it's very fresh.
Actually smells quite sweet.
Horse manure is not offensive smell, in my eyes.
And this is what I think some people think of as manure,
which is literally the manure, the horse poo of last night.
You can see there's still grass fibers in there.
And generally speaking, I wouldn't recommend using
that as a compost dressing.
It's not really, well it's not compost.
But if you had nothing else, then as a soil food,
if you like, a food for organisms in a thin layer,
that would be better than nothing.
But I wouldn't call it compost.
And one thing it will have is weed seeds,
because it hasn't got hot.
And the hay, this is hay,
I brought a bit back to show you as well.
'Cause if you've never lived in the countryside
or worked on a farm, you wouldn't necessarily
know the difference between hay and straw.
So this was some of the other manure
from her yard, and that's straw.
So they've used straw as a bedding.
Straw is not an animal food, as much as hay is.
Hay is just dry grass
and straw is the stem, or was the stem
of say wheat and barley growing,
which have been harvested and then the grain taken out
and the straw remains, the stem,
which is bailed up and that's used for bedding.
And that also is from manure which is just a day old.
And it's this hay which is causing a lot of the problems
for gardeners at the moment,
'cause it has this pyralid weedkiller,
or it can have this this pyralid weedkiller in.
The stuff that never breaks down, basically.
Do check out my video on that,
it'll give you some information.
It's just something to beware of.
And while I was at Jenny's, I also brought this back.
I found this behind her heap of manure.
And this is probably a good year-old horse manure.
So that's horse manure and that's horse manure,
and this is where the words can be confusing.
That's fresh manure.
This is well decomposed horse manure,
which is basically now compost.
You know, this I would use like compost.
One would still call it manure,
'cause that's identifying its origin.
And then, here I wanna show you,
I have some nice old wood chip.
So this wood chip was delivered by the tree surgeon
or arborist last January,
and you can see how it's gone quite dark
and starting to decompose,
but it's still lots of bits of wood
and actually, black as that looks,
when you put something like that on the ground,
and then it's been washed through by some rain,
you basically end up looking at wood.
But already decomposing a little bit.
So that's a great mulch cover for paths,
that will feed the soil fungi again.
That's for me the main value, more than weed suppression.
We put it on only two, three centimeter deep,
an inch, no more, but it's keeping the soil happy.
There's a lot of fungal decomposition
already going on there.
We also mow it actually.
Chopping up with a mower makes it very decomposable
when you add it to compost heaps.
And let's just finish this video with a look
at one of my own compost heaps,
which has got some still decomposing compost in
to give you an idea.
(gentle bright music)
To round off, I can show you this compost heap here,
which contains compost which is pretty much
exactly three months old in terms of the average age.
We started assembling, it took about seven weeks.
So I actually put the dates out here.
It went from 19th of July to the 6th of September,
and today's the 8th of November.
And this compost has been turned.
It started its life there.
It's been turned into here about two weeks ago,
which tends to speed it up.
And so if we think the average age
of everything in here is three months old,
and if you look at it,
it's looking actually reasonably decomposed,
and I can see some germination going on.
I think that's probably lettuce
from lettuce seeding plants that we've put in here.
And there are not many weed seeds in here.
But it's generally been hot enough to decompose
the weed seeds or kill the weeds seeds.
And so this compost I would not yet use.
I don't mind seeing bits like that.
You can put bits like that on the ground.
That's fine.
But it's more if I do this and lift out a bit
you'll see how hot it still is
by the steam rising there.
And we put a thermometer in just last week
and it was reading 60 centigrade actually,
which is pretty hot, but that's great,
'cause that means faster decomposition,
and it means it's better off staying there, basically,
and that decomposition will continue
and I'll be looking to use this compost maybe by December,
in five or six weeks time.
We'll see how it goes,
but I'm not sure I'm gonna need it even actually
by December, we might well be using this next spring.
So that'll be fine.
So, if you can let your compost be well decomposed
before you spread it, that will give you better results.
It means less work for the soil organisms
to finish breaking it down.
But it doesn't want to be too perfect.
So, there's there's room for trial and error.
The main thing is to understand what you're doing
with compost, and I hope this video's given you some clues.
And you can find out more also in my newest book,
"No Dig Gardening", which has got a lot about compost.
It's just one aspect, one facet,
of the whole No Dig process,
which is such a lovely way to garden.
(bright gentle music)