Compost Rules!

First rule of blogging:  'Never miss a blog'.  Well I’ve missed a few but here I am back with good intentions and determined to rise from my blankety pit early each morning to write and get things done.  Working in Belmond Le Manoir gardens is hard work and to be honest I’m beat in the evenings.  Arriving home, skin tight, dry with dirt and dust there’s nothing for it but to take a long bath, look back over the day with satisfaction, open up a gardening book and chillax. And so this blog, from now on, will be written in the company of the yawning house cat, after a strong coffee, before I pull on my boots, clip on secateurs and set off for Great Milton for another busy day of heritage gardening.

Looking dishevelled after a busy day building our Heritage Garden
with Walmsley Shaw Garden Builders

A view through the growing screens towards the Hartley Botanic Glasshouse

So what’s been happening since my last post in April?  Where do I start?  Our Garden designer Anne Keenan’s plans are tangible now with only a few finishing touches to be added.  We have planted beautiful ‘worker’ plants; ornamentals carefully selected to provide forage for our important invertebrate friends. Our heritage vegetables are looking splendid, making themselves at home in Belmond Le Manoir’s rich soil and worshiping the intense heat that has been beating down on us for the whole of the month of June.

Our first batch of garden compost is well on it’s way and in a couple of weeks I hope to be lavishing our heritage pumpkins, summer squash and beans with generous shovelfuls. With all this dry weather it’s important to conserve moisture in the soil and so a thick dressing of dark, compost around the base of plants after watering keeps the soil spongy and provides plenty of additional nourishment for hungry roots.

Turning the first batch of heritage compost

Composting is a must for us organic gardeners.  It is a magical process that turns our precious garden and kitchen waste into a sweet crumbly substance that teams with microbial life; a veritable gardener’s alchemy really. Bio-diversity is an important element of the Heritage Garden but it is not just birds and bees that are essential in a healthy eco-system.  We often overlook the fact that a healthy soil should be alive with a web of myriad species too. Making compost allows us to feed our plants, improve the structure of the soil, maintain a healthy pH, keep weeds down and diseases at bay. Growing veg asks a lot of the soil and so it is important to maintain its vitality by replacing what we have taken away and keep it from tiring.  If you have access to enough compostable kitchen and garden waste you shouldn’t need to buy in soil improvers or commercial composts and you certainly won’t need to use any artificial fertilzers. In fact if you think of organic gardening as feeding the soil rather than the plant then you are on your way to a gardening nirvana.

By applying compost, not only do we return those nutrients like potassium and nitrogen locked up in our organic waste back to the soil, making them available for our hungry veg, but we provide the conditions for a complex and balanced ecosystem of micro-flora and fauna to become established below the surface.  Bacteria and fungi colonise the compost heap, breaking down the fibrous strands of cellulose and chitin that gave structure to the parent plant material and they use up the nitrogen contained in the tender and sappy plant parts turning it into more stable nitrates which are more easily absorbed by your plants.  

As these microbes get to work the heap heats up releasing funky smelling gases but as the they continue do their thing and the materials break down and stabilise the aroma will subside.  Sadly for our microbial friends, but happily for us, larger organisms move in and start to feed on their protein rich bodies along with the decomposing plant material, further breaking down and mixing the heap.  Earthworms, beetles, centipedes and springtails are the beasts of the jungle here and their presence is a sure sign that your compost is going to co-operate.

You can make compost pretty quickly if you get the conditions right. It’s like having a successful dinner party. You need good food and the right mix of people to get the conversation going. So invite some brown waste like herbaceous perennial plant stems, cabbage stems, wood shavings as well as some green waste like grass clippings, kitchen peelings and soft vegetable leaves and stems.  You want to layer these alternately in your heap just like you would design your seating plan, keep it moist but not wet; lubricated but not sloshed, and keep it covered it for a while.  It will start to heat up very quickly, especially in summer, and when it does you turn the whole heap to ensure oxygen is getting to the decomposers ensuring that they can get on with their important work; a bit like retiring to the terrace for some fresh air and more stimulating conversation.  Coffee always helps things along and you can apply this in the form of grounds from the cafétiere or espresso machine.

The ultimate building materials for your compost bay

In our Heritage Garden at Belmond Le Manoir we have constructed a row of three compost bays from reclaimed pallet wood.  These are cheap and easy to build and if you take your time you can make them look pretty smart organic gardening doesn’t have to look ugly). They are about three feet square and four tall, actually a little smaller than the optimal size of about 5 feet all around.  We fill two of the bays up as quickly as possible, wait for the material to really heat up to somewhere near 65º C, by which time the volume of the heap will have reduced by about half.  Then turn both heaps into the third bay with a fork.  This can be exerting; one is likely to perspire and take on some of the inevitable composty aromas that escape the heap, so choose a moment when you are feeling at one with nature in order to perform the operation.  This third bay is then turned into its neighbour and then back again several times over the following weeks. Perhaps add a little water or drier material accordingly, making small adjustments, until you end up with a wonderful black, inert compost.  You will know it is ready when it smells pleasantly sweet and the original ‘parent’ materials are no longer recognizable from their original form.

Perfect compost - Dry, rich and crumbly

I recently gave a talk on composting at Garden Organic’s Ryton Gardens to a group of their ‘Master Gardeners’.  These folk are volunteers who learn new gardening skills with Garden Organic and pass them on to others in their local communities up and down the country.  You can find out more about composting and the important work Garden Organic do in promoting organic methods up and down the country at www.gardenorganic.co.uk