This is a great thing to start up if you haven’t already.  Your own compost will save you money and  you can do your bit towards saving the landfill sites.

1. Place your compost bin on the bare earth or on slabs a couple of cm apart so the worms can get into the bin.

2. Make sure you can get to the compost once it’s made

3. Have a small container in your kitchen to make it easy to transfer it regularly to the compost bin

4. Make sure if you make your mixture is a 50 green /50 brown

5. It can take between 9-12 months before your compost will be ready at the bottom but you can keep adding at the top

6. When it is ready it won’t smell like anything is rotting it will just smell of earth

7. It doesn’t matter if it is a bit lumpy and twiggy as these will add to your soil when you add it to your garden

8. What can go in

Green Stuff:

* Tea Bags

* Old Flowers

* Bedding Plants

* Grass

* Peelings for Veggies

* Fruit Peel

* Nettles and Comfrey

*  Weeds without seeds

 * Used coffee granules

* Eggshells

* Bird manure

Brown Stuff:

* Egg Boxes

* Cardboard

* Free be papers

* Fallen leaves

* Sawdust

* Office paper

* Thin or chipped branches

* Junk mail

* Wood shavings

* Bracken

* Bedding from rabbits etc

Keep Out:

* Meat

* Diseased plants

* Dogs and cat faeces

*  Weed with seed heads

* Bones

* Cheese

* Cooked food

* Fish

* Nappies

Hot Compost:

 This involves quite a bit of work but means you will have good garden compost quickly.

1. You will need a lot of material to fill your compost bin/area at one go.

2. Everything needs to be mixed together at the same time

3. You need to create air spaces with scrunched up paper

4. You may need to add water (or urine 20:1 ratio can be used as an activator)

5. The heap will begin to get warm after a few days as it cools which happens after a couple of weeks you will need to turn it.

6. Bring the stuff from the outside in and turn it all over

7. If it is too soggy add dry material and if dry add water.

8. It will heat up again and continue composting down

You can repeat this every couple of weeks and you will notice the mound will heat up less as time goes on as the breaking down of the matter is finishing
Within eight weeks to twelve you should have a good pile of compost if it hasn’t quite finished let it rest for a couple more weeks.

Cold Compost:

This is the less energetic route
1. Place some twigs at the bottom of your bin to help with drainage

2. Then add contents as and when try and put dry stuff in after you have just put in your grass cuttings as this will help with aerating the pile

The contents of the compost bin will take much longer to rot down( up to a year) but if you have a flap at the front you can remove compost as you go and keep on filling it up

Most people do a bit of both:

This is just as it says doing a bit of both create it as a cold compost pile and then turn it over every so often to help it along, then you are not tied into doing it on a regular basis, but you end up with a slightly accelerated compost which you can use all around your garden and especially on your tomatoes .