You know you're lost to your garden when ...

You're totally excited by a riveting book on the history of compost. LOL No wonder people look at me strangely.

Excellent book called "Resurrection in a Bucket" by Margaret Simons taking the history of compost back to the medieval period and tracing it forward. Includes all kinds of hints and tips and recipes as well ... including the forumla 500 necessitating burying cow manure in cow horns for a year before using - anyone do this here? Apparently the practice is enjoying a resurgance.

I find cow horns somewhat difficult to come by, however.

I've been fascinated by the different attitudes to compost - to composters being caught up in the Macarthur years in the USA as being just so wierd they must be Fifth Columnists, to George Washington's life-long obsession with compost to the swing towards articifial fertilizers and 'soil improvers' in the post wwII period to todays' swing back towards composting. (Interestingly, recent figures say 80% of Australian households claim to compost.)

When I was a wee small girlie on the farm (taking us back to the 1950s) my father was an artifical fertilizer convert. It was the Way Forward and the Future of Mankind. Now his daughter won't put anything chemical on her garden at all.

 

Kinda depends on what you want from your growing things, maximum yield or pleasure. Me I use both slow release fertilisers for my container plants, and good compost for the beds. My father was a composter, and his before him and his before him - good zomerset farming stock :D

 

We take all our landscape waste to a recycling yard where they have heaps the size of houses. In winter you can hardly see for the steam & ooooh it smells good.

 

I was going over the final plans for the garden yesterday with the landscape architect, and the thing I niggled most about were the placement of the compost yards - 6 in all, spread out in pairs over 3 areas of the garden. I can't wait. The landscape person said she'd never had anyone so keen on compost. I said we all have to have our dreams.

 

LOL - a designer surprised by a liking for compost! - compost heaps/bins can always be screened by planting, trellis, or fences etc. Mine's hidden behind a shed/chalet structure - but you could make them a feature:D Enjoy your composting you should have plenty to feed it :D

[ 11. November 2005, 05:21 PM: Message edited by: Fran ]

 

I am just so excited by finally having good composting facilities The bins are all going in 'dead' areas which would be hard to maintain plants in anyway ... which is, amusiingly, right on the boundary fences of the property - the front and side fences. I am a corner block .... actually, my house is in a peculiar position - the block juts right out into a roundabout at a 5 street junction so it is really prominent ... and all the locals will see is hedges broken by the occasional compost bay. Somehow that makes a statement. LOL

 

I am worried about the siting of my 2 wooden slat compost bins. They are behind my 12' shed/ workshop, and as they are shaded by a massive cypress and an ash, they get no sun. I put them here because it was the only place I have for a 'messy' area for random bits of possibly useful wood, bags of rotting leafmold, broken things, etc, etc. What does anyone think? My composting efforts have always been in the sun before. :(

 

My previous heapies have always been in the shade and have worked fine. OK, s I am in Australia and it is a tad warmer here, but even in winter when the temp would regularly get down to -5 C overnight and the days not much above 10 C the heap happily steamed away. I think the secret is in the composition of the heap itself rather then whether or not it get ssun. If all the chemical/bacterial/whatever reactions are happening it will happily start to compost and generate its own heat.

 

Mine too have always been and are in shade - not a problem they just need moisture and heat from the decomposition to be kept up. My Henry Doubleday wooden bin even had its own duvet when delivered :D