Homegrown
Steamy: Good. Sludgy: Bad. Golden rules for building the ultimate compost heap
At this time of year you may be asking yourself what to do with all the spent leaves from the vegetable garden and flower borders.
There’s only so much that you can stuff into a brown refuse bin, and anyway why would you want to dispose of so much plant material when it could be working wonders on your soil?
To do that, you can’t let early failures put you off. Creating the sort of crumbly goodness you see presenters forking on to vegetable plots on TV programmes is one of the dark arts of gardening. It is so easy to end up with green sludge or a pile of brown waste that never rots, that many would-be composters give up when they should be mixing up their green and brown waste and having the patience to wait until it all heats up.
If your compost heap is working well then it will be giving off heat. If it is large enough, you may even spot steam rising from it on chilly mornings. This is a sign that it is breaking down nicely.
To keep this process going you’ve got to make sure there’s enough oxygen in the mix and the contents are damp but not soggy.
If your heap doesn’t get enough warmth then it won’t kill off weed seeds and when you spread it in spring you’ll be scattering these around the plot. And you shouldn’t add perennial weed roots for the same reason. Otherwise there’s not a lot that you can’t chuck in, including veg peelings from the kitchen.
Some gardeners swear by a wormery, which also produces a liquid that can be diluted and used as plant food, but if you want to keep things simple then just pile up your garden refuse and cover it with an old carpet or flattened cardboard boxes to help contain the heat.
Don’t be disheartened if nothing seems to be happening. Heaps take longer to break down in winter than they do in summer and if you’ve followed all the rules then the process will keep on working.
There are differences of opinion about turning the heap. Some gardeners swear by it in order to introduce more oxygen into the mix while others claim that it wastes valuable heat. It really is a matter of trial and error to find out what works for the mix of plant material that you have in your garden.
One golden rule that should be strictly followed, however, is the ban on adding leaves to your compost. Even when shredded these take a long time to break down, so put these on the leaf mould pile instead and expect to wait up to two years for these to turn into mulch.