Composting for beginners
One of the greatest horrors of lockdown has been, without doubt, the closure of garden centres. Across the country gardeners first noticed the impact on our bank balance as we got through the Easter holiday without the customary splurge on summer bedding. But gradually the serious repercussions of their closure began to dawn on us all… no compost.
No compost!! The shelves were stripped of yeast and Arthur was forced to forgo animal pasta shapes, but when compost became unavailable lockdown had finally hit us where it really hurt. Luckily, whilst there are some areas in which sterile, commercial compost is essential, in general nothing beats the good old home brew, and during lockdown we were saved by the fact that we had been cooking up our own. We only wished we had managed to make more.
I’m amazed at how many friends with gardens don’t make compost, and I think people are put off for 3 main reasons
- They do a bit of research and panic that it looks complicated
- They’re worried it’s smelly or will attract foxes
- They think it’s time consuming
Don’t be put off by expert advice: making compost is easy. Whilst the science of hot composting is fascinating, and I find the tales of people baking potatoes in their heaps wildly exciting, those sort of shenanigans is understandably intimidating to beginners and really not necessary. At the most basic level it can be as easy as chucking your kitchen veg waste and the odd torn up Amazon box in a small pile at the end of the garden. If you follow a few very simple rules, it isn’t smelly and there are no foxes. I am an avowed ‘good time gardener’ who openly struggles with slugs and has a recurring nightmare featuring lily beetle larvae under my pillow. Compost is clean and easy. It’s certainly a lot less smelly than keeping veg and banana skins in those little council food waste buckets that gradually gunge up, the bags somehow always breaking, and which are stomach turning to clean. In terms of time, I reckon setting up a good compost heap probably takes an hour (tops) of initial set up, and then a lot less time than you spend washing out your food waste bin.
There really isn’t any reason not to try it. Here are some reasons you should!
1.It feeds your soil and your plants
In the wild, foliage would drop to the ground and rot, providing a thick layer of organic matter to feed the soil. In a garden, we whisk away anything that looks even slightly untidy, mow our lawns (too) often and give our shrubs a short back and sides. But by composting this material you recycle it, enrich it (more on this later) and return it to the garden. You are replicating a natural process and enriching the soil. For my gardening friends without a compost heap, everything green from their garden is sent out the front door in council collection bags, at which point the cycle within a garden is broken and you are literally drawing nutrients out of your soil (in the form of green growth) cutting it back, and then paying the council to take it away. A few years of this and there’s a big deficit to fill with expensive manure and mulches, some of which contain green municipal compost from… the council!! It’s bonkers.
2. It’s the garden equivalent of taking probiotics
Healthy soil is alive, and healthy compost can make it more so. By leaving your compost in contact with the soil as it forms, you also ensure that it is full of worms and contains some of the microbiome local to your garden. The magic life blood of your garden is a black substance called humus, and the more your soil is alive, the more organisms like worms, microbes and fungi can produce humus from organic matter. Worms also improve aeration and soil structure whilst microbes are vital in many plants’ ability to fix nutrients. Living, breathing garden compost fulfils a role that commercial sterilised stuff never can.
Magical worms
3. It will help you through drought
One of the biggest problems we face in our gardens is the battle with climate change and increasing periods of drought. If you’re environmentally conscious you will be trying to limit your daily watering as much as possible. Even if you don’t really care about water conservation, trying to keep your plants alive through a drought can be a nightmare and requires a lot of time watering that could be spent lounging. Either way, mulching the garden with some kind of organic matter in the early spring will massively improve the soil’s ability to hold moisture. Mulching requires quite a lot of material, and whilst you can buy in manure or spent mushroom compost, garden compost is ideal because….
4. It’s free
As a general rule of thumb you will always need just over 3 times the amount of compost you think you will. Every bag we buy, Toby has to haul through the house to the garden, and over time the cost adds up. From an environmental perspective, it’s important to buy peat free compost, but this is even more pricey. For a few jobs (eg seed sowing or taking cuttings), commercial compost is the ticket. For everything else, garden compost is free.
5. It will cut your Carbon footprint
When food waste is composted in huge council heaps, it breaks down without proper airflow and produces huge amounts of methane. Making compost at home in a small heap prevents this, as well as saving on the transport of green waste out of the home and of heavy compost into it. Composting for a year at home can save the equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of your kettle or three months running your washing machine.
I hope that for any of you who have been put off composting in the past, my enthused ravings have done something to convert you. I seem to have got carried away without sharing anything about HOW to compost so details on that coming up next. You know you’re a gardening geek when you find compost so exciting.
