Compost pens: why I ban the "Cone"!

I always instruct Clients, Trainees, Students - and anyone with even a passing interest in compost - to stack their compost pens in such a way that there is a depression in the centre of each pen, and not to pile things in a sort of cone shape. 

This is all to do with water retention: far more compost pens fail from being too dry, than from being too wet. 

If you pile everything up in to a cone in the centre of the pen, the rainwater, dew, etc will roll off and out the sides.

If you make a depression in the middle, the water will soak into the pen's contents.

It really is that simple.

Here's the compost pen of a well-trained Client: 

More or less flat on top, slight depression in the very centre, only a small amount of shredded paper, and a good mixture of weeds, vegetable peelings and rhubarb leaves, along with a fairly small amount of grass.

Perfect!

That's not a lid, by the way - those slats of wood on the top were just sitting there temporarily.

So these Clients get top marks, and - more to the point - they get excellent compost.

Now, I have a student who didn't really believe the whole Anti-Cone philosophy:  we were working together in a large garden a couple of weeks back, and our tasks produced a huge volume of garden waste, far more that you would normally expect to find. We tied some pallets into open-fronted pens, and piled in the waste. 

Both pens were piled higher than the pallets. The student piled theirs in a cone, whereas I piled mine in a flat-topped, push-it-into-the-corners arrangement.

One week later:

 

 

Can you see the difference?
 

 

 

My pen, flat on top, has sunk down a considerable amount. It was level with the top of the pallet at the back, but now it's a good three to four slats lower, especially in the middle.

Whereas the student's pen is still a cone, and is still very nearly as high as when it was built.

Conclusive proof, they agreed! 

So, dear listener, when piling up material which you hope will rot down, don't make it into a cone, make it into a flat-top shape.

I rest my case!

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Stones in groups... a post-rain phenomenom

Why are the stones in groups after rain? 

 Have you ever noticed this? 

If your garden soil is stony, then after a while you find that the stones have arranged themselves into small groups. 

Here's an example from one of "my" gardens, left: their soil is very stony indeed, and whenever I'm there after a gap of a couple of weeks, and especially if we have had a lot of rain, this is what I find.

In this case, I know that the garden owner is not able to do any gardening herself, so I know that no-one has disturbed the soil, other than me, the birds, the wind and the weather.

 I've seen it time and time again, and I've often idly wondered why, but I've never really tried to find out what's going on, until one of my Clients spotted it in her own garden, and asked me what was going on.

I already know that small stones come to the surface in garden beds: annoyingly! No matter how many you rake off, more will always come to the surface.

This is an easy phenomenon to explain, it's exactly the same as when you shake a bowl of any dry materials, ie cake mix after you've rubbed in the fat, the lumps come to the top.

When potting up at home, I see the same thing: if you shake a tray or bucket of compost, the lumps come to the top.

And if you can imagine it, the whole planet is being “shaken” by geological stress, by gravity, by rotation, etc etc etc, so although we feel that the ground is pretty solid, it's actually being constantly shaken - in slow motion.

This explains why small stones are constantly working their way up through the soil to the surface. Nothing to do with worms pushing them up, as I heard one person say!

But why, once they are on the surface, do they congregate in small clumps? (Not because “the worms push them into heaps” as I heard a different person say...)

I did some research, asked around - yes, other people have noticed it, too - and the best answer I've found so far is that when it rains heavily, the big droplets push the smallest stones to one side or the other. They continue to be moved about by the rain, until they find themselves bumping up against a slightly larger stone, which is too big to be moved by the rain.

So, over the course of several hours/days/weeks of rain, each slightly bigger stone will accumulate a halo of smaller stones around it.

If I had all the time in the world, and enough money not to have to go out to work, I'd like to set up a research bed with cameras to take photos every day, to see just how long this actually takes - wouldn't that be interesting? And can you imagine watching the film afterwards, with the stones invisibly moving into clumps?

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*singing* "It may be winter outside..."

... "But in my heart, it's spring!"

And according to the daffodils in "my" gardens, it may still be early November, but as far as they are concerned, it's nearly spring.

Look! 

There they are, poking their noses above ground already.

Anyone would think that it's nearly spring, and yet we haven't had a proper winter yet. In fact, it's been surprisingly mild, I've been working in a t-shirt for most of this week so far. Yes, trousers as well *sigh*, not just a t-shirt... *rolls eyes*

Anyway, here we are in November, trying to catch up with all the usual autumn slaughter jobs - cutting down perennials, general trimming and tidying - and now we also have to watch where we are putting our feet.

I'm often asked when, as a professional gardener, is it best to start working for a new Client, and I have to say that it's a lot easier to start in spring, because then you can see where all the bulbs are. 

Which saves you from that heart-wrenching moment when you feel their crisp new shoots crunch and shatter under an unwary boot.  Oops.

So, even though it's winter, the daffs think it's nearly spring, so be careful where you put your feet, when weeding or cutting back the beds and borders.

Not that there's been much opportunity to get onto the beds and borders, as this has to have been the wettest summer/autumn since - well, since the last one, ha ha. The wettest for some time, surely? (*hasty googling*) Well, what do you know, it's the wettest since 2006 (and the year has not ended yet!) and it is the seventh wettest year since records began.

I rest my case, m'lud.

When it's been raining, I try to stay off the soil as much as possible, as stomping all over wet beds ruins the soil structure, not to mention leaving wet muddy footprints all over the grass, and treading mud all over the paths, patio etc, so it's a lucky escape for the new daffodils.

And there's always a lifting of the spirits that appears when you see the first daffodil noses peeking out of the soil - and so I sing, "but in my heart it's spring!"

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Architectural oddities: the wall-eating outhouse

I often come across odd things in "my" gardens, and this one always makes me smile.

It's a small outbuilding, which appears to have a section of old walling erupting from it, in "Alien" chest-burster fashion.

This has lead to many minutes of happy speculation, while I've been weeding or working around it: it's clear that the back wall of the brick outbuilding, the face on the right, is stone, rather than brick.

So there must have been a stone building there, and the red brick was added on, using the existing wall as one of its four walls. 

But did the stone building continue to our left? Or was it abutting an older stone wall - judging by the size of the stones projecting, which would appear to be larger than the stones used in the wall.

Was there originally a massive old wall, which then had a stone building attached to it, which then had the red brick outhouse built onto it, but then the original wall fell down?

Or maybe the original wall formed part of the stone building, but when the stone building was taken down - all apart from this one wall, which was by then part of the red brick outhouse - the wall was removed as well, but they found they couldn't get it all out without destroying the outhouse.

You think they would have tried to make a slightly neater job of it, either way. I don't suppose I will ever know, because the current owner has no information about it.

So the remaining question is:

Is this a wall-eating building?

Or a wall, eating a building?

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