Brown is the New Gold
Remember how Tom and Barbara in The Good Life were depicted as loonies for wanting to pursue an alternative, self-sufficient lifestyle? If the seventies sitcom was on telly now, far from being a comedy, it’d strike a chord with those trying to change their behaviour to take action against climate change.
OK, so you don’t have to go as far as chucking in your job to keep pigs (although if you’ve got the space, hens could be a possibility – just imagine a freshly laid egg for breakfast every morning – yum!) But there’s no reason why you can’t compost. We guarantee that once you’ve got a system set up, you’ll wince when you see perfectly good compost-fodder being scraped into a kitchen bin.
Garden Organic (www.gardenorganic.org.uk), the national charity for organic growing, reckons that 40% of the contents of an average dustbin are suitable for home composting, so if you start, you’ll be making a positive impact on reducing landfill. Plus it’ll only cost you a few quid to get started and you get something useful back. Convinced? Good. Follow these six steps and you can’t go wrong.
1. Find out if your local council supplies brown composting bins. If they do, ask for one to be delivered for your home. These can often take more kitchen scraps than a regular compost bin (like cooked food, fish-bones and meat rind) so you can put more waste in. Plus, if you don’t have a garden but want to compost, they neatly solve the problem of how to do it. Win win all round.
2. If you want to start a compost bin in your garden, and DIY doesn’t have you running for the hills, you can make one out of wood. Alternatively, you can buy a Dalek-shaped compost bin either from your local council or a garden centre (they normally start at about a tenner and councils tend to price them cheaper).
3. To get it going, make sure you have a mix of two-thirds brown stuff (carbon source, including autumn leaves, cardboard, twigs, stems, old cotton clothes) to one-third green (nitrogen source, including weeds, grass clippings and plant leaves).
4. Keep your compost where it’ll get some sun, but not in direct sunlight as it’ll dry out.
5. If you want to add in garden waste, you need to chop it up first; big cuttings don’t rot down quickly. Egg shells also benefit from being crushed and if you do start keeping hens you’ll have lots of those: great news for compost - they’re packed with nutrients.
6. Water the compost if it’s dry and turn it over from time to time. Basically, show it some love, and it will reward you with manna from heaven for soil.
For more tips and advice on getting started, head to http://www.homecomposting.org.uk/content/view/30/53/
or http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/basics/techniques/soil_makecompost1.shtml
Happy composting!