Making compost from waste materials

How to compost garden and other waste materials. I wish to encourage you to discover the fun and interest of making compost!

Compost varies enormously, and homemade compost is the most variable and interesting, thanks to seasonally-changing ingredients and everybody's variable-sized heaps and varied methods. Making compost is a fascinating hobby and if you never tried it yet, do have a go. You are turning wastes into something valuable.

Facebook 13.8.18 Richard Loader on UK Here We Grow:

Since visiting Charles Dowding garden and seeing his composting system we have started to see our compost heaps very differently. Previously weeding, trimming, mowing seemed like chores but now these activities have become harvests of food for what we now call 'The beast'. We gather the 'browns and greens' and blend them so as to satisfy the appetite of the beast and enjoy monitoring the process of decay and heating with a long probe thermometer. It's like having a new pet to care for.

A compost heap transforms even persistent perennial weed roots into food for soil organisms and plants. Don't believe everything you may read about what you "Can and cannot" compost - see this from Stringfellow in forum topic, horsetail 16/06/18:

I had a lawn of Horsetail covering my plot. Being a total beginner back then, and paranoid about horsetail growing through concrete bunkers etc. we mowed the top growth and skipped the lot. Now wish I’d composted it all. Just keep an eye on the heap, you’ll get little if any regrowth - I’ve found they quickly wither and die. It all ends up back on your plot to help grow veg.

For further advice, see my You Tube video on how to make compost.

I had this lovely comment to the video in August 2019, from Devdas:

I have been collecting coffee grinds from petrol stations cafes etc. Waitrose Morrison all give it away for anyone wanting it. I used to throw away grass clippings now I am growing it for compost😁. Before mowing was a chore now I am looking at it in a totally different manner.

Plus there is a lot about making and using compost in my no dig, online course.

Why compost, not just a mulch of undecomposed matter?

Compost is organic matter that has decomposed, from leaves and manure to weeds, wood and paper. Compost feeds soil in a slow and steady manner, allowing soil to feed plants. In gardens, a compost heap speeds up nature’s process of decomposition, resulting in less slugs than from mulches of undecomposed matter, and stronger plants.

• Organic matter enables soil to aggregate into crumbs, for stability and aeration, and is food for soil’s billions of mostly unseen inhabitants. Organic matter is carbon, and more in the soil means less in the atmosphere.

Fresh manure is organic matter, so far so good, but compared to compost it contains less living organisms such as fungi, and its nutrients are more water soluble. Hence the worries over nitrate leaching from slurry (pure and fresh cow poo), which confusingly have been transferred by legislators to include compost.

I write 'confusingly' because in compost, nutrients are not soluble in water, so they do not leach in rainfall. And compost is about way more than nitrates/fertiliser/plant feeding. Its stimulation of soil biology ensures increasing and maintained fertility.

Six-week-old compost heap at Homeacres – I unscrewed the front to show a profile

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Nine month old compost after lumps broken while loading the barrow, ready to spread

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Charles spreading 8 month old compost, after harvesting celeriac

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Why compost and not fertiliser

I have always felt that using fertiliser is a dangerous short cut in terms of soil health, and our health. See this recent and extensive study Synthetic fertilisers hurt soil life, and ultimately marine life as some of them leach away. They short circuit plant growth and are a reason for foods becoming depleted of minerals.I rely on compost because it's not a fertiliser in the 'modern' sense of the word. Instead it's a biological stimulant, which feeds soil life and enables soil organisms to help plant roots find food and moisture. Think of it as enabler, more than a primary source of food.

Compost quality - homemade and others

Ripeness means that a heap’s warmth has mostly gone, because the processing is finished. Often brandling worms arrive at this point, and heaps become wormeries of reduced quantity, increased quality. It can take up to six months before worms appear in my heaps at Homeacres, which are too warm for worms until that point, except in winter.

Green waste compost

Contrast this with municipal compost which looks fine and “finished” after just a few weeks, from being shredded and then turned, regularly. However its blackness is from carbonisation caused by high temperatures, up to 80C, because huge numbers of thermophilic bacteria are encouraged by the regular turning and introduction of air.

I take deliveries of such compost and measure temperatures of 60C, even though the appearance is ‘like compost’, black and crumbly. I have tried spreading this compost and then planting through it, with poor results compared to when I spread it after one to six further months of fermentation. Depending how hot and dry it is - dryness is a problem with this compost, when it's immature.

You can plant/sow into green waste compost once it has cooled down and ripened. Check its heat when delivered, perhaps your supplier has kept it for enough time that it's ready to use.

Mushroom compost

Of composts you can buy, this is my favourite, because its composting process is not so hot, and it also has more nutrients than green waste compost. Furthermore, it does not harm growth so much when it's fresh. Often, I have used it recently delivered, and still warm, with quite reasonable results!The problem is relative scarcity, increasingly, because, even some farmers now use it on their fields in large quantities. See if you can buy a dumpy bag or a larger load, to reduce the price per weight.

Vermicompost

During 2022 I had a first go at this method of compost-making at Homeacres, doing it on the ground. Initially, I purchased 4 kg of red/tiger/Brandling worms. I'm not sure that I needed to have purchased them but it got things off to a rapid start.During the year, every 7 to 10 days we added a bucket or two of organic matter along the top of a windrow, 4 foot long,. The bucket contained a mix of a few fresh materials, but mostly semi decomposed organic matter from the top of a current compost heap. Bacterial decomposition had happened to some extent and that speeded up the conversion to vermicompost. See results in this video about making potting compost.In January we dismantled the heap and kept its top surface layer, full of worms, to put nearby as the 2023 worm heap. The bottom part of 2022 was 3 1/2 wheelbarrows of beautiful worm compost. It's showing promising results for use in potting. Even as much as 50% of the mix which is a higher than usual proportion because, perhaps, there is some soil in there.

Woodchip

Old wood becomes compost, and may even morph into humus. That is fully decomposed, organic matter, pure and very light, extremely soft in texture. See globulin below, also see Johnson-Su reactors as in my woodchip video.A pile of wood chips, two years old, will probably have decent compost near the bottom. It may be worth sieving with a 12 mm frame, to take out the larger unrotted pieces of wood. How much you will have at the end of that depends on the quality of wood delivered, and the size of its chips. Small is good.

Leafmould

This word translates as leaf compost made from leaves. It applies only if you have a lot of trees or access to a lot of leaves. More than can easily be absorbed into your main compost heap. On their own in a heap, they decompose slowly, and in a fungal manner, to make a compost of similar value to decomposed wood. In other words, valuable!

Potting compost

This is good to use for filling beds, but pricey. There is plenty of nutrition because it's designed to grow successful plants in small volumes of compost. Is best as surface layer only.When using it to fill a bed or even a surface dressing, it's a good but expensive option. Compared to say, your own compost or other composts you buy.

Some of the below is extracts from my article in Which? Gardening July 2017. Their magazine is worth subscribing to, see this offer. 2019 had a no dig feature every month, and 2020 is Homeacres small garden, which they call Family Garden.

Ingredients for making, green, brown and moisture

• Green ingredients are soft, leafy, high in nitrogen, usually moist, and are low in fibre. Kitchen peelings and food wastes are mostly green. They lead to high temperatures.

• Brown ingredients are fibrous, drier and more woody than leafy.

• Some materials are both green and brown.

• Some green ingredients such as coffee grounds and horse poo (both 3% nitrogen) look brown.

Why differentiate? When you achieve the desired balance of about 50:50, or a perhaps a little more green than brown, this contributes to a correct level of moisture, warmth and structure/aeration. See more in this video.

Quantities of green and brown are hard to compare - greens are often voluminous, browns are dense. So 50:50 means that a layer of say 3in/7cm green leaves equates in compost making value to 1in/2.5cm brown materials such as old wood chip and cardboard.

In the British climate, air is often damp and so are the materials we add to the compost heap. As they decompose, their moisture becomes free to seep into the heap and if it cannot either drain out, or be absorbed by drier materials, the compost becomes soggy and airless, or anaerobic. This slows or halts the process of breakdown: adding paper, soil and other brown ingredients is a remedy.

In contrast during the dry summer of 2018, I actually watered the compost heaps. Especially when we were turning them and many dry pockets became visible. Moisture levels are hard to assess.

Photos below are Homeacres October 2018, the year's fifth heap 1.5m/5ft2

1 layer of browns includes cardboard and old woodchip

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2 Green additions here include chicory leaves from harvests of hearts

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3 More green wastes include trimmings of leeks and broccoli

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4 Now another layer of brown wood wastes, plus some coffee grounds

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Good to compost, waste materials

• Weeds (green) include some soil (brown) on their roots, so you can make fine compost from them alone. You can compost perennial weeds too: I add roots and leaves of bindweed, docks, nettles, buttercups, dandelions and couch grass. They break down even in winter’s cooler heaps, and regrow only if left exposed to light. You can save much time by not separating out perennial weeds.

• Fresh leaves are green and older leaves become more brown, so autumn tree leaves are mostly brown.

• Rhubarb leaves and citrus peel are good to compost, I know from experience. Eggshells bring structure to a heap but decompose slowly, often ending un mulches on top.

• Diseased leaves are good to compost, such as mildewed courgette and lettuce leaves, rusty garlic and leek leaves, blighted potato and tomato leaves and also tubers/fruits with late blight. Blight spores for example need living plant tissue to survive in, hence they die in a compost heap, and likewise in soil. I spread compost which was made with blighted leaves, around tomatoes in the polytunnel, with no ensuing problems. Likewise blight spores do not survive in soil and there is no need to empty greenhouses of their soil.

• Most shredded materials are woody (brown), and their speed of composting depends on size, and whether crushed or simply cut: crushed is best. I keep a pile of shredded branches near to the summer’s compost heaps, for adding to any large additions of grass mowings and fresh leaves.

• Other brown materials are paper, best crumpled, cardboard which you can add in large pieces, wood ash (in winter my heaps are up to 10% wood ash), soil, and straw, which gives good structure and aeration.

• Fresh manure from any animals is green and is excellent for speeding decomposition. Should you have large animals such as a cow or horse, their manure and bedding will ‘take over’ the compost heap, volume wise, meaning your compost heap has become more of a manure heap. Old manure is compost, just of a different quality.

• Beware adding too much wood-flake bedding, often kiln dried and very slow to decompose. Not the end of the world, but your finished compost risks looking woody!

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Choice of bin: solid or open?

A bin with plastic or wooden sides keeps materials together, increases warmth and moisture, plus you can keep rain out if there is a lid or cover. It’s said that wooden bins need slatted sides to allow entry of air but I find this makes little difference: my heaps with plywood sides make great compost: they conserve both heat and moisture. I screw them onto corner posts, then it’s simple to unscrew them when turning and emptying heaps.

Homeacres 7 bays and a video to see my method

• The posts are 6x6in (15cm) pressure treated softwood, and set in 12in/30cm concrete. The posts are 8ft/2.4m long, about 1ft/30cm sawn off the back ones to create the roof slope.
• All the roof is treated softwood timber, and many sides were half inch plywood. But now I am moving to planks of Douglas Fir.
• Everything else is what you see. Steel roof.
• We dug the holes, builder erected the structure for £3k/$4k.
• Each bay is 1.7m deep and 1.8m wide, roughly 6 feet square, and the base is soil. So all materials sit on the base of earth.
• After filling to say 1.5m/5ft high, the materials sink to half that within six to eight weeks.
• Therefore each bay contains about 2.1 cubic metres/2.7 yards of compost, or 1.5 tonnes depending on moisture content.
• The first bay we fill is no.2, then turn to right into number 1. Second bay to fill is no. 3, etc.

In 2016 I invested in a roof for my composting area, to keep the rain off. In the UK, water is often changing aerobic composting to anaerobic, by excluding air. Anaerobic compost is black rather than dark brown, more smelly and less crumbly. Hence a polythene sheet over heaps is worthwhile to keep rain off - to keep air in, not to prevent leaching, which happens less than claimed.

Plastic bins from the council are small, which restricts the heat they can maintain. My trial with a Rotol “dalek” bin saw temperatures rarely exceed 45C, and many weed seeds survived the process. Nonetheless it was good compost, and the sides are easy to lift off when you want it.

BaseSoil is best, for drainage, and for organisms to enter from below as heat subsides, or before it happens.

Making a heap-enclosure with pallets

This can be simple, quick and cheap. The pallets do not need anchoring to the ground and we simply wire them together at the corners, top and bottom so two wires only, on each corner. My preference is to knock the bottoms of each pallet so that you just have the top frame which is lighter and easier to handle. The photos explain it, and the cardboard you see is only around the edges not underneath. It's to prevent weeds growing in from the sides at ground level.

We cleared a lot of weeds including brambles whose main stems we dug out, and there are still roots of bindweed, nettles, thistles

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Four pallet-tops wired at the corners and card is around edges only

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After filling the first bay on the left, we created and filled the second bay on the right

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Undoing the two wires allows you to open one side and this was six weeks after finishing filling in summer

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A little later and the contents of that heap are now in the middle, on top of the contents of the first heap which we also turned into the middle

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By October, after starting in April, there was this gorgeous compost in the middle bay, around one tonne and it’s the combined compost from each side

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Building a heap

Add your garden waste as it happens, in level layers rather than a mound in the middle, to have uniform spreads of different materials as you add them. Sometimes you need “balancing materials” in terms of green and brown.

In much of the growing season there is a surplus of green, so keep a pile or some sacks of paper, autumn leaves, cardboard and twiggy materials, especially when adding grass mowings. In winter there is more brown, and some fresh manure or coffee grounds make for a good balance.

When to stop adding more material

• Small gardens generate less material and may struggle to fill a bin, even over a whole year: use the smallest bin you can find because a fuller, small bin makes better compost than a half empty, larger one. After perhaps a year of filling, lift off the bin to a spot adjacent and fork the undecomposed, top part into it, then use the compost in the bottom part.

• In large gardens, heaps may rise to four or five feet high within a month. Continue filling even after this for another 2-4 weeks as the heap will keep sinking, then cover with straw/carpet/polythene, preferably polythene to keep rain out, while you make a new heap. For best results, turn the finished heap after 1-3 months and leave another 2-4 months.

Turning compost: is it necessary?

This heap took 6 weeks to make, was finished 5 weeks earlier and I unscrewed the side to turn it

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Turning is worthwhile for larger scale compost-makers with several heaps, to mix and aerate and speed decomposition. At Homeacres we turn every heap once, to the right as you look at the bays. You need an empty space or bin next to the heap you are turning, andthe compost being finer and more even will repay the time taken.

Use a manure fork with long prongs, be sure to shake out any dense lumps: turning involves mixing, shaking and also allows you to check a compost’s quality. If you discover many dry lumps, add a little water, or conversely add some dry paper if it’s soggy.

For a small heap that perhaps barely fills up in a whole year, turning is not worthwhile.

The law of diminishing returns applies to compost turning. I never do a second turn as gains are marginal, compared to one turn.

Finished compost

Within a year you should find a crumbly texture of variable quality. If there are large lumps they need breaking up with a fork while loading your wheelbarrow. A dark brown colour is better than black, which would suggest some lack of air and too much wetness.

Sieving compost before use is not worth the effort and time needed. Simply pull out larger pieces of undecomposed materials, including roots of perennial weeds which are white and noticeable. There is nothing to fear from such roots because even if you missed them while spreading, you have another chance later when you see them start to regrow. Such visibility and easy removal are advantages of no dig with compost on the surface, instead of incorporated.

• A quality of mature/ripe compost is that carbpn/organic matters has been transformed into humus, now known as glomalin.

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Glomalin

This was discovered only in 1996, by a scientist Sara F. Wright while working for the USA Agriculture Research Service. She discovered how to extract this sticky material which binds soil particles together, giving structure and tilth. It accounts for perhaps a quarter or more of soil carbon and exists for decades in no dig/untilled soil, unlike most of soil’s short lived, non-mineral constituents.

It transpires that glomalin is partly a by-product of mycorrhizal fungi, as Sara Wright describes:

“We’ve seen glomalin on the outside of the hyphae, and we believe this is how the hyphae seal themselves so they can carry water and nutrients. It may also be what gives them the rigidity they need to span the air spaces between soil particles”.

During plant growth, as roots extend further into soil, fungi close to the original roots die off at the same time as new fungi colonise and work with the developing root extensions. The decaying fungi shed their glomalin, and it remains in soil as a glue-like sheath around nearby particles.

This raises the intriguing point that plant growth helps build soil organic matter. As long as soil remains undisturbed.

“In a 4-year study at the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville (Maryland) Agricultural Research Center, Wright found that glomalin levels rose each year after no-till was started. No-till refers to a modern conservation practice that uses equipment to plant seeds with no prior plowing*. This practice was developed to protect soil from erosion by keeping fields covered with crop residue.”

“Glomalin went from 1.3 milligrams per gram of soil (mg/g) after the first year to 1.7 mg/g after the third. A nearby field that was plowed and planted each year had only 0.7 mg/g. In comparison, the soil under a 15-year-old buffer strip of grass had 2.7 mg/g.”

It's reckoned that brassicas and beets* do not increase glomalin levels, since they do not work with fungal threads in order to grow. But most of our food crops, including cereals, do cooperate with fungi and scientists are now looking at fungal encouragement as a way to reduce dependence on phosphate fertilisers.

*I doubt this. On my dig/no dig comparisons, I observe how the no dig brassicas and beetroot consistently outperform the same plantings in dug soil. I remember how in the early eighties I would read that mycorrhizal fungi were used by trees rather than vegetables. The 'scientific' view keeps changing because it's only a 'snapshot' of current understandings. Science is not religion but is revered as such.

Compost and fungi

The new knowledge about glomalin ties in with older work by Albert Howard ninety years ago, on the value of compost. He taught farmers his recipes developed at Indore Research Station in India, and then he discovered how small applications of compost could transform the soil of tired tea plantations, enabling plants to rediscover their vigour. Howard had trained as a chemist and initially thought of compost in terms of chemical foods such as NPK, that it was recycling nutrients.

Then the results from using it, coupled with his knowledge that nutrient levels had barely increased because he was adding so few, helped him to see compost as a broad game changer. That was when he acknowledged the role of compost and soil fungi, and the ability of compost to help fungi multiply.

For fungi to grow and multiply in a compost heap, they need fibrous (woody or stemmy) materials, and not too much heat. We see them more around the heap edges when turning, as it's been too hot in the middle. Then they colonise heaps as cooling occurs.

At the time of Howard's work in the 1930s, mycorrhizal fungi were being noticed and appreciated by scientists such as Dr Rayner. She worked for the Forestry Commission, on Wareham Heath in Dorset.

Which brings us to the value of transforming manure and other wastes, into compost. I notice at Homeacres how crops grow best where animal manure in particular has been fully ripe when applied. It is dark, crumbly and the smell is sweet, not the ammonia or sulphur smells of manure stacked in an airless state. Homemade compost, may be less mature and growth still is good. Partly it's a question of how much space you have to stock it.

Then to use your precious compost most effectively, the best method is surface mulching. Soil organisms are waiting, even in mild, winter weather, to eat and excrete surface organic matter, for example as wormcasts. When you give soil organisms high quality compost, the results are wonderful.

*Learn more about compost in this module from my online No Dig course – 'Fertility, compost and soil' *