Organic Gardening - Recycle and Compost

Continuing with our 'Organic' theme of articles we thought that it would be a good time of year to mention the perfect way to a blooming garden that avoids the use of chemicals and other nasties.

Your garden and house already provide most of the nutritional requirements of your soil and garden. All you need to do is to help them out of the form they are currently locked away in. A potato peeling or a pile of grass cuttings aren't much use by themselves but properly composted they will produce a rich and perfectly natural fertiliser and soil conditioner.

Composting is one of those areas that gardeners and gardening books seem to delight in laying down mixtures rules and techniques for. The simple truth is that composting is probably one of the easiest and, in and odd way, rewarding aspects of gardening. Compost is simply the byproduct of our little garden friends having a right royal feast on the organic leftovers we produce from home and garden. It's quite difficult to not produce good compost!

The lazy gardner's compost

"In our first garden we had a nice hidden area behind a couple of bushes that provided a much easier alternative to taking our garden rubbish to the local tip. I used some old ply board and bricks to put together a complete wreck of a container for grass cuttings and other 'rubbish' and started piling it up. The only thing I really noticed was that no matter how much I added, the next time there always seemed room for more.

Having pruned the concealing bushes back the next year my, rather unsightly, compost container was revealed. I decided to get rid of it and start making the trip to the tip. To my amazement, a few inches below the rotting vegetation on the top was a deep vein of the richest compost I had ever seen. More than enough for our garden that year.

I may have been a little lucky but you'll really have to try quite hard not to get good compost. For those that like more definitive instructions :

• Use a variety of materials and mix them up a bit
• Make sure that your heap is well ventilated
• Keep it moist
• Activate new heaps with material from old ones
• Keep it covered to suppress weed growth and retain heat
• Avoid large lumps of anything, break them down or discard
• If the neighbours can't see, personal liquid waste contains a superb sterile source of nitrogen (only for the really dedicated)

And if all of this seems too much, just dig a series of small holes and bury whatever organic matter you can fit into them."

Recycling and Compost Products

Wiggly Wigglers Lower Blakemere, Herefordshire HR2 9PX Tel: 01981 500391 Fax: 01981 500108 Website: www.wigglywigglers.co.uk Email: wiggly@wigglywigglers.co.uk Worm-assistance is a tremendous benefit to the composting process as each healthy adult composting worm can recycle half its own body weight of waste into rich, dark compost every single day.

Web Links:

The HDRA Guide to Making Compost http://www.hdra.org.uk/gh_comp.htm "Making compost will help you reduce pollution - cut down that landfill! Your plants will grow healthier and look happier for it. It will save you money on fertilisers too." With thanks to About Organics for the above information