Composting Magic

In spite of my best efforts, two enormous bins (built from the old fence) and a smaller plastic job we never seem to have enough compost. Well, you never can have enough of the crumbly brown stuff can you?

Nearly all the garden waste goes into the compost apart from the really tough woody stuff. Our shredder long since gave up the ghost and hiring one wasn't a roaring success (see http://planticrunotes.blogspot.com/search/label/Shredders ) So unless we can find another use for it such as plant supports the tough woody stuff goes into the green bin and off to the council municipal composter.

Our compost bin is filled with layers of garden and kitchen waste, grass cuttings from friends, cardboard and best of all the chicken manure. The bedding is made form all the shredded household paper. And there is a lot of that. I thought computers were supposed to mean less paper not more!

Our bins do heat up quite a bit in the summer when a lot goes into them but is much cooler the rest of the time. The whole process takes between 6 months and a year to complete. In the past it's been used mainly in the vegetable garden, improving the structure of a sandy soil and in trenches for peas, beans and potatoes.

This year I'm sieving the compost to mulch the flower borders. We've never had enough to do that in the past and ended up buying in a mulch which is very expensive. I'm doing a small bit of the garden at a time so that I can examine all the seedlings.  There is an abundance of  astrantia, hellebore and verbena bonariensis. But there maybe some other, very special seedlings such as cardiocrinum giganteum and these take time to find.

After the compost has been sieved the bits that haven't rotted down are used to start a new heap.

 

The end result is this fine crumbly stuff.  The only downside of this maybe that it's full of weed seeds and I'm unknowingly spreading them all round the garden..........