Composting

Many people think that composting is a science. Some people think it is magical. Not so, it is a natural process that happens even if you do nothing.

Have you ever walked through a wood, amongst the trees, kicking and scuffing the surface of the soil when you were a child? I used to, very often and if truth be told I still do even though I have just had my 52nd birthday - well occasionally. It is good fun but now I class it as research, I am looking at what happens during the decomposition process. That is my excuse for doing it anyway, looking at how nature does composting.

I am not joking, the next time you are out for a walk in a wood, get down on your hands and knees and really have a look at what is happening, look at natural composting in action.

I can hear you now thinking I have lost it. "There are dead leaves on the floor. What do you expect in a wood"? I know there are, but what is underneath them. Try it and scrape down into the soil.

What you will find at the top is dry dead whole leaves but as you go further down there are more broken up leaves and partial leaves and so on, until you get down to a rich crumbly soil which is high in worm activity. You may have just dug down through the past 10 years of forest floor composting. It has all been done by nature. There are no compost bins in the forest, composting just happens.

If you leave a dead plant on the ground, it will eventually disappear. All you are doing by composting your yard waste is giving nature a helping hand. You are helping out the bugs and critters which help you make compost.

You do not need anything except somewhere to pile your yard waste up and just leave it. Eventually it will rot away and if you dig into the pile you will find lovely, dark, crumbly, sweet smelling compost. But this can take years and I want compost in months. To do this I use a hotbox composting system and a cold composting system.

The hotbox is where the bugs work, microbes which start the process of composting. They consume your waste and need shelter, somewhere warm, somewhere moist and somewhere safe - a hotbox composting system.

The cold composting system is where the critters work, the creatures that eat what the bugs have left. Whilst they do not need heat, they do like somewhere safe to work and things tend to stop in really cold weather or when it is frozen.

Compost is good for your soil. It is not high in nutrients but when added to your soil mix it helps to develop the humus content and build up the life force of the soil – something often referred to as the soil food web.

The other thing about composting is that you are helping the planet. Any yard waste you put out for the garbage collection will end up as landfill and the world is running out of places to dump our rubbish. By composting, you are helping to reduce the dumping as well as benefiting your own plants when you add the compost to your soil.