Tips and Tales for Organic Allotmenteers: January — Compost Heap Creation
By: Gemma Brandy Boyd
Tags: Gardening Tips, Allotment, Composting, Organıc, Gardening

I’ve been running two organic allotments in Hainault, Essex, England for five years, and would like to share with you what I’ve learnt. Enjoy!

‘New Year potatoes’ by Gemma Boyd

How to Create a Compost Heap

There’s something so satisfying about watching a compost heap change, grow and be replenished year on year.

My two allotments have two compost heaps or bins on each. They are the engines which power every little magical surprise that greets me each time I enter the site.

I was happy to see a ready-made square cage on the allotment I took on nearly six years ago, fashioned out of chicken wire wrapped around wooden post supports in each corner. It’s reinforced around the bottom with thin wood planks; absolutely ideal for starting a compost heap.

My first job was to clear it of overgrown grass and weeds and to pluck out any foreign objects. Next I dug over the rather pale soil at its base and saturated it with water to bring it back to life a bit.

I purchased a small plastic bin in which I began to collect bags of all of my home non-animal organic waste such as fruit and vegetable skins, stalks, seeds and flesh, tea bags, bread, newspaper, coffee grouts, old wine, biodegradable tissues and towels, tortoise poo, dead flower heads and leaves.

These gloopy packages of goodness were then spread generously and evenly on top of the wet soil in the cage. To this I added worms exposed while digging, yellowing comfrey leaves and anything else that wasn’t a weed from the plot.

The critters that work so hard at turning the heap into compost prefer to do so in private in a shady, dank atmosphere, so do cover your heap!

After two months I churned things up with a garden fork and put in a mixture of organic manure and mulch. These ingredients help to speed up the process of decomposition — and plants of all kinds love leaf mold.

When you’ve got the layers of this hefty brown cake well established, repeat all of the aforementioned steps ad infinitum and a year later you’ll have a pungent mess of compost that can be scooped from the depths of its confines, ready for sifting through gloved hands and immediate use.

I strongly advise against dumping tough stems such as pruned roses, spent sunflower stalks, vines, twigs and branches into a heap you have in current use, because all they’ll do is clog it up and make the treasure harder to access. Instead I cut up these stems and twigs into smaller lengths with sharp scissors and use them as the foundation of a new heap (created out of one that’s been recently emptied).

A few words of warning: Wear heavy-duty gardening gloves when rummaging around in the compost because take it from someone who knows; you don’t want to get a splinter lodged between your finger nail bed and fingernail that can’t be extracted with a needle. Also, go gentle when turning the heap because there may be a dormouse curled up asleep as tight as a knot inside.

When it comes to weeds and grass, I prefer to keep them separate from the compost heaps. For years I used to bag them up in green bags issued by the council for disposal off-site. Nowadays a wiser me chops them up with pruning shears and distributes them around the bases of all the plants and trees growing on the plots. This adds carbon to the soil as well as helping to keep in moisture during the dry, hot summer months.