November 23rd, 2021 - Autumn gardening

What kind of compost bin?

Here is my wooden beehive shaped compost bin which is right near the pavement and intrigues passers by who wonder if there are bees in it.  It’s not an unattractive thing to have in your garden.

Beehive compost bin

And here is one without a lid which is tiers from pervious bins just piled up and up.  It does such a good job that I can forgive its rather rustic appearance.

Wooden compost bin

Because I want to make as much as compost as possible I’ve bought a container on Amazon, called a 799 litre Ciskotu Expandable Outdoor Composter.   Here it is:

An ingenious new way to contain compost material

Admittedly it’s no garden ornament but it will do the job and not too obvious to passers by or from our front room.  It sort of blends in and anyway, I love it.  I’ve lined it with cardboard and bits of old carpet to keep it warm.

What makes a compost mixture?

• Soft green stuff, twiggy brown bits, anything that will break down.
• Grass clippings from a neighbour who has a lawn
• Uncooked kitchen waste but not bread
• All cardboard and brown paper
• Odds and ends – egg boxes, paper based packaging
• Twigs, dead cut flowers, some autumn leaves, unsoiled wood based cat litter, straw,

you get the picture.

What I do with the heap

Add different types of stuff in layers

Compost mixture

A cardboard box here and a bucket of grass there.  Nothing hangs around waiting to go in.  That’s where having 3 bins work out so well.

Acer leaves

I sweep up the loveliest leaves from trees in my road, especially these acer leaves that I wait for every autumn.  They are beautiful to touch and to look at and I add them in big armfuls to my compost bins, again in layers, not all at once.

Then I do nothing but wait.  I don’t mix it or turn it or disturb it in any way.

I just leave it.  Because I don’t want it to get too dry, I lift the lid when it’s raining.

What I get out of it

I get this lovely dark brown crumbly stuff full of living organisms.  A photo can’t really do it justice.  It just looks like soil but it’s as crumbly as a bag of compost.  It’s homemade, it’s free and it’s full of life.

From experience I now empty just once a year around now and chuck the compost that’s been made onto the borders.

In each bin the bottom half will be brown crumbly compost and the top half will not yet have decomposed so is put back in for next time.

I use it on the borders now because it’s the only this time of year that there’s enough bare soil showing.   In Spring and summer every inch of soil will be covered in greenery.

I know we all get our thrills in different ways but honestly, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had chucking stuff in a bin and watching it turn into black gold.

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Still not too late to plant tulips by the way…….. I’ve written about that here

Best wishes to all,  Julie