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Published 13 Mar 2024

It’s national compost week!

Last week I popped round to my mum’s (Jane, whose garden we feature in the Jane’s garden album on Facebook), to talk about compost.

Food waste going into compost

As a family we have always composted. I remember as a child, visiting my granny and seeing the compost bins in various levels of maturity in her garden. One that was actively having household and garden waste added to it, one that was full and left to do its composting thing, and one that had formed lovely crumbly humus to be used around the garden.

For us as a family, having a compost bin under the sink was just a standard part of disposing of waste. Chatting to colleagues about compost, I realise that this is not standard practice for a lot of people. If the council doesn’t provide a food waste collection service, then the vegetable peelings and food waste and everything go in the general waste, where it generates methane, a greenhouse gas 25 time more powerful than carbon dioxide. Compost can be a complicated process and when it goes wrong it can be quite unpleasantly stinky. You really don’t need to be a gardener or a compost professional to compost your food waste.

Green Johanna Composter
The Green Joanna, for example, is a brilliantly easy way of composting all organic waste from the household, including meat and dairy produce. You can even put our compostable nappy pads in it. A lot of councils give these composters away for free, or at a subsidised rate. If you stand it somewhere on soil, worms just find their way in and get it sorted for you. You don’t need to turn it or bother with much at all. You hardly ever need to empty it, as the worms tend to busy about in the soil and take a lot of the vegetable matter with them. They don’t actually consume the waste. Bacteria does that. Then the worms eat the bacteria. It’s all fascinating if you want to investigate more!

 

Recycled Plastic Compost Caddy

We’ve started selling 23 litre compost caddies that hold a decent quantity of kitchen waste before you have to take it out to the garden compost bin. They have a neat lockable lid and even better: they are made of recycled household plastic. We like to close the loop wherever we can.

 

 


Sally Phillips

Inventor of Chimney Sheep

compost
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eco-living
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grow your own
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