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Compost making
Keith Butler2
Posts: 53
Hi,
Last year I built a compost frame and filled it up with brown and green waste, I have a new lawn and put the cuttings on the pile, this year the waste looked good enough to put on my raised vegetable bed, unfortunately I have a lawn growing through my cabbages and spuds, where did I go wrong?
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Posts
sounds like it didn't warm up enough to kill the weed seeds. Was your compost bin closed in / covered or open to the sun/ air? If it's open they don't normally warm up enough.
Happy to offer any further advice, I make tons of compost every year
I had a problem getting it hot, where did I go wrong?
if it was me, and I'm certainly not telling you what to do: I'd lose the conifer to the left and have another bin. When you've filled up the first one, dig it out and into the second bin. This mixes up the dry and wet bit, rotten and unrotten bits and adds air . The whole process gets a kicks start and sets off again. In the mean time, you'll be filling up bin 1 again. In theory, you'll have used bin 2 by the time you've filled up bin 1 again. That's the theory anyway.
As I filled the bin up I mixed it up with the folk to the left of the bit, and when it seemed dry I watered it. i thought of having two bins but am a bit short of room, the only other space I have is under Hawthorn trees and the bin would be in constant shade.
I doubt if the shade would matter much - the heat is mostly self-generated by the thermophilic bacteria in the compost. Air is essential. And making it big enough - a metre each way is what you want, but you probably don't have enough material. Grass cuttings from the neighbours and torn up cardboard is a good combination.
in my last garden, I removed the lawn ( the garden was too small) but I asked my neighbours to leave their garden waste over our fence and i composted it all ( after checking contents) . Cardboard, newspapers etc add vital carbon to balance the nitrogen in grass clippings.
Is it a Cubic Metre you need or is it 1m x 1m x 1m, example will 1.2m wide x .8m high x 1m deep be ok?. I did notice that as I got near the top as I filled it, it was going down at the same rate as filling.
it's a rough guide. Mine are bigger but as I'm lucky enough to have a large garden I'd need too many 1m cubes.