My Experience with winter-prepared compost in spring 2015….

[Rhys]

Charles

I was reading how satisfied you were with your winter-prepared compost which never rose above 40C.

I also had some compost bins overwintering and this is what I did with them:

1. Firstly, I put them through a coarse sieve to remove haulms and other material not completely rotted. The waste was used to cover walking paths between no-dig beds (I’ve managed to fill in all of my paths (around 25m * 0.5m through sieving one 0.8m*0.8m*0.8m bin).
2. The ‘grade II compost’ (as I call it) was firstly used to prepare a new lettuce bed by the house, using 10cm depth. The lettuces are growing beautifully and I also planted the spare mange-tout plants right up against the house wall and they are enjoying growing in this ‘grade II’ compost also.
3. I then prepared a new ‘Kale and Spring Onion bed’ in the fruit cage – about 2m long and 1m wide. I planted out clumps and individual spring onions in late April and one Kale plant at the end of the bed in mid May. The hope is that the onions will have been harvested before the Kale starts to dominate the area. Both are doing well.
4 . Finally, I prepared a small bed next to a cherry tree for 6 Swiss Chard plants for harvesting from September until Christmas. Again, all six plants have transplanted well and we shall see how they do.
5. I mulched raspberries, the plum and cherry trees and one apple tree with the remainder and all have set fruit brilliantly or started growing beautiful plants (raspberries).

The ‘Grade I’ compost was prepared by making heaps last April or May in a one-r, turning them after 1 month and then, after two months exposed to the elements, transferring them to green bins to continue composting. Regular additions of comfrey leaves/stalks, kitchen waste and spent crop haulms etc were continued until the end of September and then they were left to mature over the winter. At the start of March, I started to aerate the bins using a hoe on a daily basis, which saw the pile become more crumbly and friable within a couple of weeks. Three bins were combined into two to allow a new bin to be started in April (as we were running out of space to put fresh kitchen waste).

So far, I have used the Grade I compost to:
1. Top Dress cabbages and cauliflowers planted out in April.
2. Top dress cucumbers planted out in May.
3. Top dress First Early Potatoes sown in early April, with comfrey leaves mixed in.
4. Top up 35 litre pots for growing Sarpo Mira potatoes once plants emerged (they were planted in MPC from the local garden centre and were rather slow in emerging this spring).
5. Top dress sunflowers planted out in May, ‘bee flower mix’ sown in May.

We still have a bin and a half to use, which will be used for further hilling up of potatoes, top dressing transplanted corn, swede and leeks, top dressing the cabbage and sprouts planted out this weekend and top dressing the beans being transplanted/sown direct the next couple of weeks. I use a 14 litre pail as a ‘unit of compost’ and I have to say I’m amazed at the vigour of growth seen by plants where top dressing has been used.

It’s still all a bit of an experiment for me, this composting science, but it does seem to me that 12 months from start to finish does seem to create good stuff if you are adding accelerators like Comfrey, Yarrow at regular intervals. Six months will give you something usable also………

[charles]

Smart work here Rhys, its true that making compost is an absorbing job, I need to spend more time on mine, though often leaving it a bit longer makes the main difference. One turning too is my golden rule, would do more if the chance arose…

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