How to: make compost with only two pens

Creating a Soil Fertility Retainer. Or, The importance of Compost: even if you don't have room to do it properly!

Why make compost? Because it’s free, it’s organic, it saves using peat, and it saves you paying to have your garden rubbish taken away: so make a resolution to make compost this year. 

If you’ve tried and failed, or if your compost heap is a smelly, unsightly, unproductive nuisance, then look at it again, following these guidelines.

Start by finding a quiet corner of the garden for the bins: they will never be a thing of beauty, so find a position that is out of sight, and yet easy to get to.

To do the job easily and efficiently, you really need to have three compost bins or pens:- one that you are adding stuff to right now: one from last year that is being left to rot down: and the third one from the previous year, whose compost you are now using. 

These ones - left - are pretty much "perfect" compost pens, being big, and in a set of three: but as so many of us don't have room for three bins, here is how to manage with just two: it means slightly more work, but it's better than not composting at all.

Size is important: the bins need to be a minimum of a yard square each (oh all right, a metre square for you youngsters!) and it’s important to fill them neatly, right to the corners, keeping them flat on top. They don’t need lids, and it’s handy to be able to take the front panel out for easy emptying.

Fill one bin first, aiming for a 50/50 mix of “greens” ie soft garden waste, kitchen waste (non-meat) and grass cuttings, and “browns” ie shredded paper, ripped cardboard, and perennial prunings (no thicker than a pencil). 

At first it will fill up alarmingly quickly, but after a few weeks the level will drop, despite you adding to it. If it doesn't, slosh a bucket of water onto it: more compost heaps fail for being too dry, than for being too wet. You know you’ve got it right when the bin never seems to get any fuller!

When the first bin finally reaches the top, which should take several months, leave it alone to rot down, and start filling the second one. This is where most people go wrong: they see Bin Number One start to sink, and think "Oh, I'll go back to filling that one." 

Don't! Let it rot down!

Once the second one is more than half full, move the top layer of non-rotted material from the first bin into the second one, leaving a pile of good stuff in the first bin for you to use.

This is where having three bins is best: with only two, you need to empty out the first bin to start filling it again!

It can take a year for a compost bin to rot down thoroughly, or it can be as quick as six months: a good mix of greens and browns promotes a hot, quickly rotting bin. If you find that your second bin is full, but the first one hasn't rotted down yet, then you need bigger bins. Or you have to build a third one!

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