Composting at home is an all-year-round job. For best results, you need air, moisture, heat and a rich mix of materials, but the last two are hard to find in winter. The weak sun keeps temperatures pathetically low and compost bins often fill up with wet, smelly kitchen scraps. This is enough to put you off composting, as lots of folk have told me.
Help is at hand, though. Homemade plastic or wooden New Zealand boxes produce the greatest heat because large volumes of material always generate the highest temperatures. Pull away the top 20cm or 30cm and you’ll see what I mean. If you cover compostables with a winter duvet, even the top layer works well because no precious warmth can escape and the cold winter wind doesn’t dry things out. With commercial, plastic composters, lift the lid and put your cover on top of the material.
You can buy covers or, like me, settle for a free, DIY version: a double or triple layer of any bubblewrap plastic – even a thick layer of cardboard or newspaper is better than nothing. If you’re unlucky and have a composter with slatted sides, try insulating the bin with bubblewrap, an old bit of carpet or even cardboard. The temperature shouldn’t sink below 7C or 8C, even in the coldest weather.
And what about the contents of your composter? If it is full to the brim, lift the bin up and check whether any material at the bottom is ready to use. If so, bag it up, all ready for spring. This should leave you plenty of space.
In winter, you’ve probably only got raw kitchen scraps for your compost bin. On its own, this becomes a soggy, compacted, airless mess that quickly turns smelly. To prevent this, you need to find dryish stuff to break it up. If you had been unbelievably well organised, you’ll have chopped and bagged some dry autumn prunings or leaves which you could smugly add to your heap over the winter months.
But let’s be realistic. To break up a mass of tattie peelings, lemon skins and apple cores, you’ll have to rustle up dry compostables from the house and luckily there’s no shortage. Use cardboard toilet roll middles, cardboard egg boxes, crumpled or shredded paper and crumpled envelopes. You should also add a handful of top soil every week or so as this injects much needed micro-organisms. This way, you’ll be faced with a sweet smelling bin, not a stomach-churning odour when you lift the lid.
If your compost bin is still too small, there are other ways of dealing with raw kitchen scraps. The techniques are based on the traditional trench composting method, which entails digging a trench one spit (spade) deep and whatever length you want. Put your raw scraps in the trench and cover with a thin layer of soil every time you empty your scraps bucket or caddy. After a few months, the vegetable peelings will have broken down, with their nutrients absorbed into the soil.
You can adapt this idea by using a stout plastic bag to process your scraps. Place a thin layer of soil in the bottom of the bag and cover with raw kitchen scraps. Cover this with soil and alternate the ingredients till you’ve filled the bag. Tie up and leave in a corner for a few months.
A third possibility is to use spent commercial compost instead of top soil. You’ll have used this commercial growing media for pots and containers and by the end of the season it has no nutrient or structure. The plan is to use banana skins and carrot peel to replace nutrients in the growing media. Because, unlike soil, this compost contains no micro-organisms, you’ll need to sprinkle a teaspoon of compost activator on the kitchen scraps. You’ll find next year you can reduce the number of compost bags you buy. It works a treat – I’ve grown plump strawberries and tasty tatties in bags like this.
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