How to make a compost heap

As I've been both using and building heaps this weekend, I thought I'd write something on compost making.

I have a fairly strict 'recipe' but one which does produce very fast-maturing heaps of good friable compost. It does require lots of straw saturated with manure which I don't suppose all gardeners have. I keep my poultry on what is known as the 'Balfour Method', which is a semi-intensive system using a yard covered which straw, plus access to free range. 

The straw absorbs manure, but also gets saturated with moisture (from rain and duck bath), which greatly helps the composting process. Dry straw will not rot. If you don't have poultry, then using saturated straw with added manure or anything else which has a high nitrogen content might be a good alternative.

In between the damp poultry straw are thin layers of lawn clippings. On their own, they would be too slimy and acidic to make good compost, but they are a wonderful activator. Having been pulverised by the mowing process, they have many surfaces that the microbes that break down cellulose can get to work on, and they speed up the rate of activity phenomenally.

Other layers of kitchen refuse, cardboard etc are added on top, and anything that might attract vermin (e.g. pepper tops, mouldy tomatoes etc) covered over with a couple of handfuls of straw.

As for using it, most of it goes as a mulch on empty beds over winter. By spring, the soil underneath will be very friable and ready to sow. This idea comes from 'no dig' gardening, which appeals greatly when digging can harm so many toads. I find I can't give up digging entirely (possibly because I simply can't make enough compost for all my beds) but it has helped a lot, and made life easier on my back too.

Compost: don't include triffid in the mix!

This is a cautionary compost tale. In theory almost everything of plant extraction should be possible to compost. But not Parrot's Feather Myriophyllum.

I cleared a lot out of the pond last summer as it tends to overwhelm the surface and cause the aquatic oxygenaters to die back. I mixed it in with chicken straw and grass as the bottom layer of the new heap I was making, thinking that a year underneath a hundred-weight of hot, actively steaming muck would kill it off. Wrong. When I came to harvest this heap earlier in the summer, the bottom layer was still full of wiry, strongly-rooted stems that looked far from dead. It was impossible to use in this state, so I left it. Within a week, the stems had started to grow and produce fresh green leaves. This plant does not need water, it can grow in fairly dry soil like any other. It is truly a pest. I have now treated with glyphosate, which has wilted it a little, but I'm still not sure that I can just compost over it again. I think I'll have to dig it out and destroy some other way.

Compost: Grass snakes

My favoured recipe for compost (mixing lawn mowings in with the poultry run straw which results in very rapid and hot breakdown) has attracted an unusual number of grass snakes this year. The current heap has at least four regulars, one a good four to five feet long. They have been breeding in next doors lawn clippings heap for years, but this is the first year I've ever noticed more than the odd juvenile in my heaps, or what was formerly the slow worm reserve (a metre of old pond liner under a medlar tree).

Below is a tiny one; the next one is a huge adult, over an inch in diameter, difficult to tell differences in scale from photographs. Hopefully they'll control any rats that are breeding in the heaps too, though I suspect the amphibians are an easier meal.