- I'm sharing with you simple methods to make great compost. It's a cheap system to assemble. Three bays and you'll see
what we put in the heaps and how we treat them ongoing, and how quickly you
get some lovely result. I'm making compost in
lots of different ways and my garden's quite large. It's an acre and a half now, and I've got bigger bays behind me where I make most of the compost. And then I started
writing a book last April about 18 months ago. It's coming out in this autumn, "No Dig." And there's quite a bit about
making compost in there. And we decided to do this
'cause it speaks to many people. So an allotment size, medium garden size, rather than the large ones. And then if you're a smaller garden, you could have something like a Dalek. And the principles are very similar how you assemble the ingredients. This one, it's a little bit specific, the details of how we treat each heap, and it's actually four bays in three. So, for example, this bay here never receives any fresh material. We add to two outer heaps and
turn them into the middle. We first of all make the
heaps by getting some pallets. We actually knock the bottoms off. I find then that's easier to get. You've got easier access to the heap. They're lighter to handle. And the only way they're
secured at the corners is two bits of wire for most of them. So eight bits a wire, four pallet frames, you've got your heap. There's nothing securing it
to the ground in any way. There's no posts on the corners. They were placed in the beginning on some pretty tenacious
weeds like bindweed, couch grass, stingy nettles. And we didn't put any
cardboard under the heap 'cause the composting
material is fantastic mulch. I did put cardboard around them just to tame the weeds a bit. We've still got some bindweed
there but not too much. So, you know, you haven't gotta do elaborate site preparation. It's really good on soil. You don't need concrete
underneath or anything. You'll read a lot of
stuff about compost making which in my view makes it
unnecessarily complicated. It's actually really simple
once you understand the process. And then, you have a very good
chance of achieving a result. Something like this. So that is four and a half months old. It came out of the heap there which was filled between March and April. We're doing roughly two months per heap. That's just what we do here. You might take three or four months to fill a heap like that, and that's fine. All the timings and exact
proportions of material you've gotta adjust
according to what you have. Don't make it too difficult for yourself. You know, there's no
perfect list of ingredients. There's no perfect timings
or anything like that. But I'll give you the principles. So that's a heap turned once. I find that turning a heap once, which turning just means moving basically. We undo these two wires. You can swing open the front pallet and then you've got access. Basically that's like a doorway in. And with a manure fork,
which is much easier to use than a digging fork, It's got
longer prongs, they're curved, just fork it out and shake out any lumps. That lets in a bit more air. And if you come across any dry pockets give them a bit of water. So you gotta heap then that you can leave until you're ready to use it. This is August and that
compost is ready to use for me, but I'm not gonna use it
yet 'cause we don't need it. So what we're gonna do next actually is put this heap on top so the two outer bays
both go into the middle. And you can get more of an idea here about the amount of wood we're putting in. It's quite a bit. Possibly that's even a
bit too much actually. But, you know, it's all relative. When we spread this compost, it's no dig, and it's just gonna go on top. So any woody bits end up as a sort of a very thin woody mulch, which actually is fine. It works really well. You just don't want it too thick. We don't sieve this
compost before using it. It just goes on like that. I think though I'm pretty sure that we've got more wood on top here. It was just the finishing layer. If I just go down a bit there. Yeah, there we can see. Now I'm feeling the temperature
there is slightly warm. There's a bit of un-decomposed something, like a brassica stork probably. And all of this will then be
turned into the middle bay and sit on top of what's there already. That is fine. We find that is absolutely fine 'cause it won't be long before this one is also
pretty much ready to use. So actually by October, November we can empty this, put it on the beds and we'll have a good
tonne of lovely compost. And this that I showed you there is only two and a half months old. So that was made in
March, or May and June. I'm doing it in two months now just. Obviously, we can control this a bit 'cause we got a lot of material and we'll put it in other
compost bays as well. But it just helps to
clarify what you can do and how you make it. So this is now going to
the assemblinger heap and I've got some buckets of materials to illustrate a few things. And you'll notice also that we have cardboard around the edge. And I know this contradicts
what is commonly said that you should have slatted
sides to a compost heap to let the air in. I find that's not true at all. Actually, you don't want that. You know, imagine in the
dry summer we've just had, if you had air flowing
into your compost heap, it would just dry out
and you want moisture. So actually the cardboard
keeps moisture in there and it keeps warmth in
closer to the side as well. It's insulating as well. And it's slowly decays, and we'll then add it to the heap when it's not serving
this purpose anymore. So that's one possible ingredient. And then I put this here, I'll just mention this since it's here. This is an optional extra. I'm thinking to do this next
time we assemble the heap. If you have a part of, any kind of object in the middle, a fence post would suffice actually, and then you remove it
after filling the heap, you've got an air hole. This is an optional extra. You know, there are so
many things you can do and I love the comments to these videos. Thank you very much for
everything you contribute because that's what I
noticed with compost making. Pretty well everybody has
a slightly different way of doing it and there
are so many variations and I learn from them as well. And do read the comments actually 'cause you know a lot of people say that. There's a lot of really good stuff there. So what do you actually put
in and in what proportions? I'll mention layering first. Layering is not a sort of
gospel thing you have to do, but because all these
different ingredients have different qualities, some are dry and woody and
some are fresh and leafy, it's good if you're
putting in a large amount of one or other of those categories. Say you're mowing your grass and you've got a lot of grass mowings, I would put a layer of maybe
seven centimetres maybe and then a thinner layer,
maybe one or two centimetres of something twiggy, woody,
paper scrumpled a bit, cardboard, anything like that, dry leaves. So dry stuff a bit brown,
fibrous, that's your brown. That's a smaller volume and the green stuff is bigger volume. But in terms of dry matter, this is where it can get confusing. In terms of dry matter, it's
probably about half and half, but I'm going by what we see. So what we see is more
volume of leafy stuff. So that's your main ingredient. And then, not everything is pure leaf. You know here's a courgette leaf that I was cutting off
the plant this morning. This is not a vital thing to do, but it was more that it was in the way so it got a bit of mildew on. Old leaf basically. So this green leaf has some fresh green, but it also has a fibrous stem. And so there's a bit of
brown in there as well. And this is why it's actually impossible, pretty much impossible to
quantify what you put in. And I can only give you guidelines and then you can have a play because this is a very
creative thing to do. And that's one of my favourite comments where people express how much
they love making compost. You know, it's almost
like an addictive thing that you do for joy. You'll see here there's a bit of grass that I removed from a pathway earlier on. That's fine to put in. It might be better if
it was broken up a bit. But that's got some soil. Soils are brown as well. So this is green I'm putting on here. It's also pleasingly damp although it's been a very dry summer. That was gathered with some dew on. Whereas here we have some quite dry green. And I'll mention this just
because I think a lot of people are afraid of putting stuff
like this on their heaps. That's bindweed with roots. I was doing some removal of
bindweed yesterday evening. Quite a lot. That is fine to put on. Even if your heap's cold actually. These heaps do get warm. I will mention heat in a
minute in more detail, heat. And so I'm just spreading
that around a bit. And then here we got some seedy stuff, like, that looks like snapdragon
antirrhinum gone to seed. There's some marigolds gone to seed. Flower seed, here's some
Phacelia mollis, seedy stuff. If you want to put a lot of seeds on and not have them regrowing in your garden that's where you need the temperature. You don't need the
temperature interestingly for things like bindweed root. I've got rid of that. It disappears over a winter
even when the heaps are not hot. Heat doesn't happen automatically. Heat happens when you put
insufficient green material and more in the summer months just 'cause you have green material. So that's when you'll find your heat. Don't worry if your heaps
don't get hot, you know, but you'll see this one, we've
got a thermometer in there. It's reading actually
in a really good place. It's between 55 and 70
is an ideal temperature because that will kill weed season. But it's not too hot. I think actually this is
one reason these heaps make a slightly better
compost in my experience compared to my slightly larger
heaps which get a bit hotter and they're often at 65, 70. You don't really want
to go more than that. And if you do, try adding a bit of water and a bit more brown, a bit less green. And here we have quite a lot deadheading. Dahlias, marigolds, more marigolds stems. So I was pruning the back of it. Something like that is
half green, half brown. You know, if you had a whole
bin full of that, a whole bay, that would probably make nice compost. So it's a question of
balancing these as you go. Coffee grounds, people ask a lot about. That's great to compost. I would much rather put coffee grounds in the compost than on the ground where they go full of
fungus. and they are a green. They're slightly odd
because they look brown, but they're a green. Another green is fresh manure. Fresh horse manure, in particular, and that gets hot as well. So that's a way of having
hot compost in the winter if you got a horse. And size, I do wanna mention this because a bit of a shame,
but we're so dry here I'm actually cutting out one or two sunflowers I planted in May because they're very greedy for moisture and I've still got plenty. But this one I felt was one too many. So what I'm doing here is trimming it because I'm doing this
just to make this point. It would not work to put that on like that because that, especially if you put two or three of those on, that's creating a lattice
effect of structure which will hold too much air. Much as we like air, you
do not want too much air. And so, cut your woody fibrous
pieces into small lengths. It doesn't have to be as small as that. In fact, if you have a
shredder, I do have a shredder. Do check out some of my
earlier videos on this. I show you using a shredder and a lawnmower as well actually. A really good mobile shredder for things like broad bean stalks. And you could do this as well. And, in fact, any kind
of breaking of the fibre is good like that because that lets in. What we're doing here is
helping it to bed down and letting in bacteria
and fungi into the stem. And one last thing actually is
easier to show with that one, you can cut really woody
stems more easily lengthwise. This has got so woody now it's
very difficult to cut across, but lengthwise that's
opened it up very nicely. And then just make sure, I
find always when I'm adding, I'm nearly always pushing
things to the side because if you not careful,
you end up with a dome. So concentrate your
addition always to the side that way you'll keep a nice level there. And water. I've never said much about this before 'cause this is the first time we've really had such
a prolonged dry spell where watering a compost
heap is worthwhile. Because if you're adding green leaves which are full of moisture, then that's your water as simple as that. Particularly things like grass mowings when the grass is damp. But now these green leaves, they're actually feeling quite dry already and they're not holding as much moisture as they normally do. So how do you know how much water to add? Well, it's a bit of a guess
actually, an educated guess. But what you could do is
have a look a bit later on. You know, put a fork in there and lift it up and see what's going on and have a look at the
ingredients in the middle. That'll give you an idea. So a lot of compost making
being successful is about that. It's being involved with your heaps. You know, becomes like a pet almost. It needs looking after. And then as you go forwards just keep an eye on what they're doing. But just in simple outline, this method, two months to fill the first one, two months to fill the third one, then you turn the first one into there, turn the second one into
there and you've got, within six months doing
it like I've described, as long as you have enough material to fill these in two
months, that's another if, then you can have lovely compost. And I've just remembered
one more thing actually that people often ask. How do you know when the
heap is full or finished? And, well, that's a
moving goalpost situation 'cause it's up to you, you know, but if you stopped at this point, if I stopped at this point,
this is gonna sink quite a bit and you'll end up with
actually not very much. I aim to keep going. In our two months we can get to the top. It quite quickly goes down,
but we're near the top for quite a while and then
it's sinking and sinking, then we fill it again and sinking. Then it's pretty much near the top. And then you can see the
level of that one over there. It's about three quarters full now. And by the time it's gone through its
final stage of composing, it'll be about half what
it was at the beginning. So have fun making compost
using these principles. It really is a joy. (soft music)
