Composting: A step-by-step no-nonsense guide

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A compost bin system I built for a client

Composting is simple. You make a pile of organic materials, and you wait. That’s the essence of it. Composting is a staple of sustainable gardening.

In this post, I wanted to make a straightforward, easy guide to turning your garden waste into usable compost.

Before I start with the steps, it is important to know how compost is made and terms generally used to describe it. Nitrogenous material – known as green material – and high carbon material – known as brown material – mixed in the right ratio decompose with the help of bacteria, fungi, insects and other decomposer organisms. Oxygen and water are also required to keep the organisms alive. The resulting product of that decomposition is garden compost. Perfect to use to mulch your borders with, feed your roses, and all sorts of other things.

What is green material and what is brown?

Green:

Green material is generally things like non-woody garden waste, grass, food waste, hedge clippings, weeds and so on.

Brown:
Brown material is paper, card, wood chippings, bark, woody pruning’s and saw dust.

Now you know the terms, lets start with making a compost bin.

Step 1.

To begin with, you need a place to put the compost. Many gardens will use a dark corner or deep shade under some trees where nothing else grows. I would advise against this, as the compost will benefit from some light to warm it and rain to keep it damp. Siting it in dappled shade is fine. As is full sun.

Compost bays, painted with a wood stain to help with longevity of the wood.

Step 2.

You might next ask how big the pile should be. Should it have a cover? Slatted sides, closed sides, and so on. To answer the first question, the compost pile must be 1 cubic metre squared to start doing anything. Do not cover it, as previously mentioned it needs some rain.

I like to build slatted compost bays, as shown above, to help with much-needed air flow into the pile. Its not essential, you could just make a pile on the ground, or go as far as concreting an area and building large metal bays. If you don’t produce a huge amount of waste, then start with one bay and expand as needed.

I create bays out of wood, slatted sides, and painted with a good quality wood stain to prevent rotting.

Step 3.

Cut up or shred your waste before adding it to the pile. The smaller it is, the faster it composts. This goes for both green and brown waste. It really can be the difference between finished compost in 6 months and finished compost in 2 years or more.

Adding to your pile you want to get a good ratio of green waste to brown. A 50/50 mix is fine. Too much of either thing can cause issues, so I highly recommend storing some chopped up brown waste like shredded paper, as an example, somewhere easily accessible when adding a lot of green waste (like lawn clippings). You can then add in some shredded paper as you go, and you’ll find your compost pile works much quicker.

Step 4.

Wait for it to decompose. This doesn’t mean you need to stop adding to it. The pile will shrink over time, so I tend to keep adding to it until it fills up, let it shrink, fill it again, and then I will leave it for a year and start on another bay.

 You can do a few things to try and speed it up. The first thing is getting a perfect 50/50 green-brown mix every time you add to it, but this isn’t always possible, particularly in winter. Some recommend ‘turning’ the compost, which means digging it over with a fork to add more air. This doesn’t need to be done but doing it may help it heat up how-ever, and with compost heat is good.

Step 5.

You’ve now waited 6 months or a year, and you’ve dug into the pile to find lovely, dark brown compost. It won’t be the jet black, fine compost you get from garden centre-bought composts. It will have some lumps, some twigs and all sorts in it. As an example, when I trained at Capel manor they received compost made from people’s garden waste bins. It was quite common to find cutlery!

Home made compost seive



You can put this compost on your garden borders, around plants and trees, etc now without doing anything else to it if you want. I would advise however to sieve it. In the image to the left you will see I have made a compost sieve out of wire mesh and an old pallet, that fits snugly over my wheelbarrow. Simply shovel some compost onto the sieve, give it a shake and let the finer particles fall into the wheelbarrow. The bigger bits are placed into the current pile to decompose further. And there you have it! Composting from beginning to end. I often help clients of mine in Buckinghamshire set up composting areas, particularly when it’s a larger garden that produces a lot of waste per year. If you need some help with garden waste and want to book a consultation, please get in touch today.