We are very keen composters... we have 4 composting bins in our garden which we fill on a rotational basis with a mixture of kitchen waste, garden clippings and paper/card. We also have a large water tank which we use as our final stage maturation unit (wow that sounds impressive!). Basically every autumn, I fill this with the most mature compost from the bottom of our four bins, layer it with extra paper and card, and also add the old soil and compost from our patio tubs and hanging baskets. The advantage of this is that it turns all of our compost heaps, aerates them, and checks the balance of green to brown matter. The newly filled water tank is then covered with some hardboard and left for another six months. Then each spring I "harvest" our homemade compost. This involves digging out everything from the water tank, then riddling it to remove any large pieces of less composted matter. The result is a big pile of beautiful, homemade brown stuff which improves the nutrients in the soil and also aids water retention. I then top up the water tank with some of the partially composted stuff from the four main bins, and leave it to mature further and settle until the autumn. I also combine the contents of some of the other compost bins to make more space, and add more paper as necessary. Here is some detailed advice on composting from the RHS.
To this we have added a Bokashi system. This means we can now also compost cooked waste, including meat and fish scraps. Bokashi is a kind of fermentation process. Each time waste is added to the Bokashi bin, a layer of bran is added. The bran is enriched with "effective micro-organisms" which perform the necessary digesting of the waste. After the bin has been filled, it must be left for 2 weeks, and then can be added to a conventional compost bin or dug into a hole in the ground where it fully breaks down very quickly. This week our first bin load will have matured, and we can add it to our garden compost bins. Silly as it sounds, I am very excited about this.
We got our Bokashi system from Wiggly Wigglers who offer a great range of products including wild flowers and native shrubs and British flowers (yes, flower miles count towards global warming too!).
We have also been busy decluttering, and I have taken the gut wrenching step of passing on all my little chap's baby clothes through freecycle, so that someone else can get the benefit of them. I kept a few items back for sentimental reasons. I have also been recycling his old bedroom curtains into toy sacks for use at the toy library. I hung onto everything for a long time, but it is good to let it go.
3 comments:
V. interesting and will endeavour to become a better composter as, grass snake eggs aside, I'm not getting enough from my compost bins (but then I think I'm expecting too much from too little intervention). BTW, the http links don't seem to be working?
Thanks for letting me know about the links - I think they are fixed now. Sorry for the lapse in service!
I really enjoy my twice yearly turning/digging of the compost piles. And I cannot stress how much added paper and card the heaps can take. It really does improve things. We used to get smelly sludgy pockets in our compost, but no longer! The grass cuttings are the hardest to deal with, I find, as they have great volume and need to be mixed with a lot of other stuff in order to compost well.
Good luck with your bins... I am on hand for small pieces of consultancy work! ;-)
i grew up in a composting house - with the death of rocky a few months ago, this is the first time in years my mom doesn't have a "working" rabbit out in the back yard. she used to collect there droppings to add to her compost bins - she always has the biggest rose bushes on the block :)
i look forward to makeing sense in our yard in the near future, enough that i can start a compost heap. we think the previous owner meant to compost, but all it is is a pile of sticks and branches 4 feet high in the back corner of the yard. or as we refer to it, "the home for rodents." fun times.
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