Making LOADS of Compost in A SMALL Garden

So I do actually have a full wheelbarrow full of compost made just from my small garden, this is one of the batches. So rather than give you the food blogger's long-arse introduction where I tell you about my family history, I'll just tell you what you need to know about how to make this and how I did it in a small garden rather than on a massive plot where sometimes there are some garden YouTubers who have small holdings or bigger plots than you probably do and they have more time and material to be able to make tons of compost. So this method is really low effort, it's fairly quick and you get a really good quality compost made from it. So if you've got a small garden or you've struggled with making compost in the past then this is going to be for you. So the principle is really simple, you stockpile the brown or dry woody material when you have an abundance of it, keep it near where you're composting and then you add the fresh or green material as and when you're producing it. But unlike in big gardens you're not producing the green material or the brown material in massive quantities all at once which is what gets it hot in those situations. So if you've watched channels like Hugh Edwards and not Hugh Edwards, Hugh Richards or Charles Dowding, they're both working on a larger scale than most of us gardens are if you've got a small or if you've got a small garden or a small allotment that you're working from. So you're just not going to get your compost to the temperatures that they are and the key to getting good compost is to get it hot or it makes it easier, there are a few advantages to it and that's I prefer to do it and I'll explain the rest of that in the video. And I won't spend long on this part because there are loads of diagrams and explanations as to what you can and cannot put into compost and the definitions of what the two different types of material that I was just talking about are which are browns and greens. But for those of you who are completely new to it I'll just give a very basic overview so you have enough information to be able to actually get on with it and if you don't want to see this I'll include a little time stamp so you can just skip past this bit which will be on the screen now. So the basic categories are browns or dry materials or greens and fresh materials, so some people call these carbon and nitrogen rich, so the brown materials like wood chips, shredded paper, shredded cardboard, autumn fallen leaves, straw, they'll call them carbon rich materials and then food scraps and fresh green leaves, fresh materials from plants, lawn clippings will be considered green materials or nitrogen rich. I don't particularly like calling them carbon and nitrogen because I think it unnecessarily brings scientific language into it and the scientific language isn't very accurate because all life on earth is carbon based and there's loads of carbon and nitrogen containing compounds in both of those groups so there probably is a slightly different ratio of each but what's the point in making that distinction? If we're going to be broad then let's just keep it simple and call them greens and browns, they don't necessarily all have to be green or brown in colour but you get the picture if you just think about them like that it's helpful because it's useful to have a good mixture of both and I generally keep it about 50-50 so half and half and people can argue the toss over this but I don't measure it particularly and I just add it as and when I need to add it based on the amount that I have in the garden at the time rather than, you know, I'm not baking a cake so I don't particularly care if it changes the outcome of a batch of compost by a little bit, it doesn't really matter to me, I'm not a professional grower or anything so I don't need to know specifically and measure everything so it doesn't really matter so if you want to measure that or you want to be really accurate with it you do you but for me it's all going in, get over it. The browns help soak up some of the excess moisture that's in the fresh or green material so it doesn't go all soggy and it also provides some fairly useful structure to keep air into the whole pile because the more anaerobic it becomes the more smelly it becomes and so if you've got lots of wood chips and things like that it's keeping lots of little air pockets in there and so it just means that there's plenty of oxygen in your pile and it just tends to work out better that way so make sure you've got plenty of that. Too many greens, particularly grass clippings, and it will start to go a bit soggy and gooey and it smells funny. I'll assume you know the benefits of using compost for your soil and focus on what I do to make mine. It's easily manageable and most of the time I can forget about it. Although it is possible to get fixated by compost, which any of the guests at my house can attest, as they pretend to be interested and awkwardly stand there as I stab a thermometer into my compost and demand they act like a misogynistic builder cat calling. But realistically you probably just want a method to get rid of some garden and kitchen waste that helps with the fertility of your garden. It's a great way of solving a load of problems at once and it's also great for wildlife. By feeding the decomposers in your garden they in turn feed or make food available for other organisms. What do I compost in? Well I actually use a fly-tipped fridge freezer. It's basically an insulated box. I've used loads of different methods to make compost, from pallet bins to the cylindrical compost bins widely available, and I've also done a fair bit of worm or vermi composting in buckets. But this fridge is my preferred vessel for this size of garden. A hot bin will do a pretty similar job but you might need more than one of them and they're pretty expensive so a fly-tipped fridge will probably do you just as well and it costs nothing. And the reason why the insulation is so important is because you're not producing the quantity of material that's required to have a self-insulating heap. Whatever heat is produced by the bacteria in the decomposition process you need to keep hold of it so insulating it is going to make a massive difference to helping your bin to heat up. And hot compost has the advantage of sterilizing lots of different materials that you either can't put into a cold compost as well as dramatically increasing the speed at which you can make it because the reaction's happening far far quicker because the temperature is higher. So you don't have to be so careful about putting weeds and living parts of weeds or seeds into your compost if you know that you can get it hot enough. That being said you can still avoid putting those sorts of things in if you've got a particularly sensitive bit of your garden that you don't want to just cover it with weeds. You can play around with that and see how it works for you because it's not going to sterilize 100% of it. You could go on and heat treat it yourself if you wanted to if it was really important that you had absolutely no weed seeds and things in there. So I add a load of brown material to begin with and then I top it up with fresh wet material as it's generated and as it sinks down a bit I'll then start to add a little bit more brown material if I need to because I've got it stockpiled and I leave it in bags right near where I'm composting. So I'll put in the first bit of the batch like I said with a load of brown materials and some of the green materials that I've got to hand at the time. I'll gradually add the green materials as I produce them over the next month or so with food scraps and little bits and pieces from the garden as I need to get rid of them and then I'll leave it to cook for a further two to three months before I then take it out and leave it in a bag to mature for a little bit longer. You can probably produce it a little bit quicker than that but once you've got a continuous batch going you're not quite so desperate to be using it all the time and so that tends to work out well for me and the compost is at its best by that point so if you can wait it's better. The only thing that my method requires is just an area where you can stockpile things and actually do the composting which tends to be a fairly cluttered and messy part of your garden. I've got some trees and shrubs that sort of hide it so in the very smallest of gardens it's probably a little bit harder and it's probably easier to try something like vermicomposting which is where you're using worms to do your composting and some people even do that just underneath their kitchen sink. You can do that in a small space because in the smallest of gardens it may not be realistic to have a composting area because you do require have an area of your garden that isn't getting the sort of use that you probably want from it if it's only a little courtyard. But I do have a video about vermicomposting where I just did it in some buckets and it worked perfectly well so if you're interested in that here's the link to that video. Thanks very much for watching and I hope you got something really useful out of this and I hope that just sharing the fairly mundane process that I've been using is useful to you and if it is then I hope it'll be enough for you to want to subscribe and stick around.