I totally admit to being a compost geek. I love the turning, the process, the building and prodding. I like looking at it and I like the recycling, it just seems ‘right’. However over the winter I’ve let my pride and joy slip. It’s so easy to just pile on the old plants and veg in September and just leave it, but the result isn’t great – and our heap was not looking good. So today I resolved to fix it. The first task was to empty out the manure bay, this was one third full of well rotted manure and I spread it all over plot 97. I think I counted 12 trugs in the end, which is quite a huge amount on our little plot. Once that bay was empty I could start transferring the unrotted compost heap to this bay. My plan was the chop up the big pieces, mix it all up, remove the good compost at the bottom, then transfer it back.
This took a long time! The compost bay was fairly full and it’s pretty laborious chopping up it the big pieces. After a while though I got to the good stuff – a whopping five wheel barrows of the black gold at the bottom, to spread around the two plots. Once that task was done I transferred the compost back to its original bay, adding in a few trugs of manure and mixing it up with a wheelbarrow of the good compost. I then set to work filling up the manure bay with many (many) trugs of manure. I honestly cannot tell you how happy I am with the result! The compost bay looks ace, I’m quietly confident it’ll go hot over the next few days as a result of the mixing, chopping and manure. This is the holy grail of home composting – it massively speeds up the process and kills some of the seeds in there too. Result.
Whilst I was obsessing over the compost, Pilla was quietly getting to grips with seed planting. We now have a ton of flower seeds and veg sown in the greenhouse with hopefully more to come tomorrow. We also managed to break for a delicious bean chili for lunch in the new shed.
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