Make your own garden compost
Our gardens generate lots of unwanted waste over autumn, from twigs and branches from pruning to spent vegetable plants, and from grass clippings to leaves shed by deciduous trees. Rather than consigning all these odds and ends to your wheelie bin, help your plot to flourish by turning it into rich, crumbly garden compost.
As far as I’m concerned, garden compost is fantastic. The material is ideal for mulching the surface of beds and borders, or it can be dug into the ground as a soil improver, helping structure, workability and moisture retention.
The starting point is to get hold of a purpose-built bin. There are loads of models available to suit every budget.
Another option is to build your own with abandoned pallets, attaching three of them together using tree stakes as corner posts to construct an open-fronted structure with two side walls and a back wall. Place on soil or grass to improve drainage, using a piece of plastic sheeting to form a lid.
It’s important to fill bins with the right waste and to ensure a balance between ‘green’ and ‘brown’ materials. Soft material that rots quickly falls into the green camp. Browns are drier and give compost structure. On their own, greens produce a smelly sludge, so add more browns to the mix.
Plant trimmings, dried leaves, annual weeds, shredded newspaper, tea bags, coffee grounds, vegetable peelings and lawn clippings are all good composting materials. Avoid adding animal and human waste, diseased plant material and fresh perennial weeds. Cooked meat and food scraps attract rats.
Spread a little well-rotted manure in the bottom of the bin to encourage worms, and then start to add garden waste – large amounts of one material can be slow to rot, so mix contents with a garden fork. The compost at the very bottom will be ready in about three months, when dark brown and crumbly.