My Life in Compost

There are many different ways to compost available to all of us, your local council may even offer you reduced rates or, at times, free garden composters including wormeries, wooden bins, express composters, waste digesters, the list goes on! All can be bought in most places and a whole host of them are available from online retailers.

The best and cheapest way to do it is to build your own, regularly put some time in and then appreciate the effect of your hard work with great compost and some free exercise too!
This is my approach developed through trial and error over the years.

I originally tried to get to grips with a wormery, a great idea which seems simple to do, but even for my small family needs, it took a long time to get up to speed and became annoying to not put any acidic foods in. Eventually, after a second tiger worm genocide, I decided to give up and try another technique. This time, the council were giving away free waste digesters.

The idea was simple, dig a big hole in the ground, bury the base and then add the double skinned pyramid top. This digester would break down all of your food waste, including cooked food and it would disappear into the earth. This meant no compost could be taken from the unit, but at least all waste was put back to the earth. Unfortunately for me, we live in a very chalky area. The advice was to therefore dig a bigger hole than was recommended to allow free flow of the broken down food into the earth.

This meant I dug a three foot deep whole, three feet wide. Once I had broken through the flint and chalk layer, I had the correct depth. Five hours later, I then had a mass of flint, chalk and soil to then dispose of around the garden to level off the area in preparation for installing. I also realised I had basically dug half of my own grave. I did contemplate carrying on and just dig the whole thing and give up for good, but I’m no quitter! I persisted. I installed the digester as recommended and was ready to digest.

Great, I now had an immobile Dalek in the bottom of my garden, ready to consume all of my family’s food waste. Unfortunately, the problem with living over chalk meant that actually the food never really got digested; it just sat at the bottom of my semi-grave and got filled up closer and closer to the “do not fill above line”. Soon we were way over it and no downward action happened all summer!

So it was time to bite the bullet, go back to basics and rely on the old fashioned ways. Build one, make it a box, give it a lid and put one next to it. Next month, find out how I did it.
Simon Zec, Treedom Tree Surgery - www.treedomsussex.co.uk

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