4 Easy Composting Methods to Transform Waste into Rich Mulch & Potting Mix | No Dig Gardening Tips

There are so many ways to make compost and I want to share with you some of the methods I'm using and to make compost with different qualities. It's midsummer so there's a lot going on there's a lot of fresh material new material to use this is a temperate climate with quite a lot of moist material and very suitable for well all applications really this is a wormery so I'm adding actually half composted material to this in small amounts the idea being that it never gets hot and that is just great food for worms so there's plenty in here they've gone down a bit actually in this weather it's been quite hot recently and they don't like that so much but that's one advantage of having wormery on the ground because in hot weather they can go down their best temperature is roughly 10 to 25 centigrade and the other thing is they like it really moist and my compost has got a bit leaky sorry the plastic there's leaving a bit of air on at the end so I need to water that so these need a bit of food and a bit of water ideally today which I'll do later and having a wormery keeping worms is it is a bit like having pets so you need to look after them and I keep the plastic on to help keep them moist and in the winter I keep it in a bit of warmth and then I keep the wood on because here this reduces sunlight on the plastic stops it getting quite so hot in there so it's actually quite well covered like that sometimes I see slow worms in there and also even occasional snake actually grasping it's quite a habitat and why am I going to all this trouble of making worm compost well it's for this reason that I've seen incredible value from it making potting compost and this is what we made last year mixed with a little bit of urban worm potting compost which is lighter and the thing I find with this compost is particularly when it gets wet you can see it here where rain has leaked in the it can go quite dense that's from the elder nearby and yeah it's not exactly solid but in a module container it helps to have a bit more air than you can have with this worm but the nutrient status I find with this worm compost is really good and I'm just going to ask Carly the cameraman to bring up the module container we will have a look in a minute actually when we get there because I want to show you that with the compost of this quality you can it means you don't need to feed your plant it makes propagation a lot easier and you don't need so much of it I find it incredible actually how well it works for plant raising so that for me is total reason why I'm doing a worm for potting mix and then for more normal garden use like mulching beds I'm no dig if I put it on top but if even if you're not no dig the value of compost is is the same basically and you know it's it's worth making it and if you've never done it before I know from what people say it can seem daunting because it's actually not difficult and you just need to get set up with a bit of kit like these I find really excellent that they're simple they're cheap you see here's quite a lot of grass mounds that were added fairly recently and it's a woody material so I'm doing roughly three parts green to one part brown or maybe two green to one brown it depends it depends on the time of year so green is fresh green material such as this like I harvested a cauliflower this morning and all of this outer leaf is good to go in I put leaves like this in whole even though they're big because it's basically green and that's quite tender but if that was a woody a piece of wood of that length I would cut it or break it into pieces no longer than that actually that's about the ideal maximum length so otherwise if you have too much hard wood packed it doesn't pack down or bed down and then you break down doesn't happen so we we want it firm but we also want it loose and open which might sound contradictory but the thing is the wood helps to keep it open so using this device which is a very simple compost aerator it's called screw down and you can lift up and see what's going on down there but also turning and aerating is a result of doing this and there we can see obviously much older stuff at the bottom looking quite finished actually and that's that's your call by the way you know when when people say when compost when is compost finished it's when you need to use it really you could use compost like this totally it's still slightly warm it's still breaking down a bit if you leave it for longer it will become even finer but yeah this is nice stuff already and you can see the brown bits in here so again that that's more what i should have put in um but the idea of brown material like this smaller pieces and not not too fat they it all holds a bit of air in the heat so we we want it but we also want it to pack down so when i'm adding i'm just like this one piling it in here let's do a layer of green on top there haven't put any in for a while and then you've got really fibrous things like this which is going quite woody so that the cauliflower stem i actually find using a knife to cut downwards like that opens it up and it's much easier than cutting across and one of the aims of this is to expose surface area to bacteria so it's bacteria that are doing a lot of the initial decomposition and it's them that make the heat if you get enough bacteria you get heat if you don't get heat you can still make compost don't feel you can't and you won't get heat though unless you add sufficient green material so this is quite a large garden here it's half acre market garden i've usually got enough green to like this is i was taking lower leaves off tomatoes this morning so much stuff coming in at this time of year and i would just break them up a bit to mainly to spread them out it's got a bit packed into that bucket there and there we've got a nice layer of green which actually could be a little bit more it's always looks more than it is with green material i would put probably another bucket on before i sprinkle a bit of brown which i will show you in a minute and then i generally keep the lid on to keep rain out if you have too much rain that just lays there and it's very soggy so thinking along those lines but having said that in weather like this it doesn't make much difference but the top keeps the warmth in as well while a heap like this is not warm anymore because it's mature this is compost we made in october and it's beautiful look at that still some worms in there so what we're seeing there is pretty much worm compost yeah this is a lot of this lovely brown soft stuff is what worms have excreted i mean that's what worm compost is it's their excretion and it has their enzymes and some lovely sticky glue from from in their stomachs which kind of holds it into agglomerate particles rather than too fine and that's one reason it's so good for plant roots there's a bit of air in there so this compost is ready to use whenever it's June now in fact so we probably won't need it till October so it's just going to sit there until then or until i maybe find somewhere to put it in sacks even and then we could turn this one into there because i do find turning valuable and what you can do with these lift them up you can slide them upwards and that reveals what's in there you can fork it into here for example that's one way of doing it and then uh some people ask what about the siting does it matter if these are in the sun or shade certainly in the sun at the moment and i can feel how warm that is but it doesn't matter that the heat mainly comes from um what you put in heat is coming from having sufficient green material to add to any heat and you know there seems to be a view that hot composting has to happen for it to work but it actually doesn't you know heat is is an option and you can see here the result of using these materials uh this compost on the bed so it is no big uh middle of June uh like lettuce that we've been harvesting got a few sweet potatoes there uh we're a temperate climate so i'm trying to grow these without uh with the fleece to get a bit of extra warmth and then amazing peas and this is a perfect crop for a temperate climate because they actually like it not too hot uh we have been watering these because otherwise they they don't grow so well but you can see the value of good soil structure through no dig and a bit of compost because i'm not i'm not using any feed or fertilizer it's just compost once a year one inch two and a half centimeters applied usually in the winter and look how green the leaves are right from the bottom up to the top and the variety is tall sugar which sadly you can't uh buy seed off anymore if any of you come to an open day here i could let you have some i'm not allowed to sell seed but there's other good equivalents coming through i hope i'm dragging these around because i forgot to say before i'm just going to chop them up and show you how i do that as well i found it always useful to have a knife in my pocket and these are that was allium seed heads and at the bottom of these it's quite woody actually that's the perfect ingredient for a compost heap it's got a hole in the middle just like straw is a perfect material it's a brown this is more brown than green it's probably 80 brown straws pretty much 100 brown if you can get it cereal straw uh and here's another brown that i use if you can manage to do something similar this is wood chip believe it or not and it's from the tree surgeon and it didn't come like that so it comes fresh i then keep it for 6 to 12 months and so it's half decomposed already and then i put it through a throw through 12 millimeter half inch stand alone sieve and i use it as a brown so it's got sort of brown fibrous quality and a bit of woody structure whenever i've put sufficient green material on i'll sprinkle a bit of that over the top so i'll just keep that ready i've got some more green material here in the same story with these heaps so these heaps are simply made of old pallets reuse recycled material monetary cost zero pretty much if you can get the old pallets we knock the bottoms off i found that makes them light to handle and give you closer access you haven't got the other bit of wood in the way two wires on each corner so it's four pallets two bits of wire nothing is anchored in the ground they don't blow away unless you have a hurricane and then we keep the sides lined with cardboard so every time we'll slot new bits of cardboard down to have card on the inside because despite what you may have heard compost heaps do not need air coming in the side that only has the effect of drying them out and cooling them down i want them warm and moist that's what makes brilliant compost so running with cardboard just works so well we get brilliant compost from these i'll just be in a minute that's the current heap here so we just keep adding adding adding until it's full what is full well it won't ever get literally full because it's always sinking literally always so often when it gets up to say the second to top pallet piece of wood i'll stop adding if you could you could fill these all in one go if you had a lot of material you could just pile it in here a mix of green and brown and you've got a full heap but that will sink very quickly so when you're adding over time they go up and down up and down but the overall level is rising slightly and when it's sort of about here i'll say right stop stop adding we'll cover it maybe with plastic or actually what we do here is slide the corrugated iron over so this is to keep rain off heaps that are finished and maturing as we'll see here which is the other end pallet so we've got three bays here and we never put fresh material in the middle one that's only to receive returned contents of the two end heaps together ultimately so this heap was finished about a month ago last edition was a month ago first edition probably four months ago and look at this in fact there's more worms in here and then the wormery i think and they it must be a bit really moist there that's where polythene on top can help especially in summer i'm going to disturb them a bit here which i don't particularly want to do but i want to show you what's deeper down here so this heap at the bottom is about four months old i don't know if i'll get quite down there even if i did whether i'd be able to put it up but now this device is pretty clever here we come so you're seeing now the sort of differences over time and it's a bit drier interesting that's okay moisture wise but it's moisture is another factor in making compost because we're in a temperate climate most of the green leaves we're putting in are quite moist already and as they decompose they release their moisture so that's the main reason i never actually water my heap it's one job less however in the summer we're having at the moment it's very dry we might need to add some water occasionally but i would say be careful in most temperate climates like the uk you shouldn't need to water your materials you're adding and it's actually better not to it's better to have it slightly dry than fully moist because what you can do when turning because what so what we'll do to turn it is we take out two wires you can open this it becomes like a door and then you've got access and fork it into there and that will happen in about a month maybe when that one's full because then we need to use this other end one and in here we have older compost about the same age as what we saw in that garlic just now in one conical bin and so this compost is wow it's a potting mix i might even sieve some of this out actually to use in potting because you'll see it's beautiful but it still has quite a few bits of wood in and yeah it's really nice you know you could certainly use that for mulching but i'm always looking at it because i do quite a bit of propagation thinking in terms of potting value as well or filling large containers but again i would add a little bit of something more aerated and fibrous like a kind of proprietary mix or some kind of ore not too much perlite a bit of coir maybe but neither of those have nutrient values so go steady on them within reason so that's the three pallet bay and i should have mentioned just there's another piece of corrugated iron which i just took off so what that's doing is keeping rain off the finished or maturing compost i keep open the currently because that's just much more practical and quicker we're adding all the time and finally i want to show you larger bays and also at the end of this little bit i'll show you the module trays that i mentioned showing the value of homemade compost with amazing plants you can grow with it and i'll just mention my compost book as well because last autumn 24 that came out dawling kendersley published and i've written quite a slim volume about how to make compost and it's getting nice feedback people say they could read it all in one go which i recommend actually because it gives you the overall picture when you understand what you're doing it just is more fun because you're not following rules kind of why am i doing this you can also develop your system according to you know your needs and these are big bays uh this is compost made only last winter so we started this week in december finished it in march and it's now june so bits of it are not decomposed this example of the woody material we're putting in which if for whatever reason it patches on the edge or it doesn't stay moist for long you know that still needs to decompose some more but when i'm spreading compost you know i'm not averse to using compost like this i'll just take out those bits maybe not quite as woody as that but i'm wanting to give you the idea that your compost does not have to look perfect for it to be usable and all of that would make fantastic surface mulch as there's some really good compost in there and there's some bits of fibrous material which will sit on top of your beds with no do particularly that works well and give you um a lovely ongoing mulch which microbes can eat and feeding the soil i'll just quickly use this and let's see what's going on here so this is on average say most of it at the bottom is december and the last bit was march so it's no more than five months old on average and again we're getting a nice result in a not a very long tube you know again that is usable and again the worms have got in them these worms by the way i never add them you don't ever need to buy worms or specifically add them but you can if you want and actually when i started my wormware i did just because i wanted a quick start but for normal compost heaps like i'm showing you all of these worms have come from eggs which uh hang around in soil they will appear when conditions are right and that's not in the first top composting phase which is bacterial not even so much in the fungal stage which is follows it a bit as it cools down and you've got half decomposed material there that's when the worms like to like to arrive the current heap of these large bays which are six by six feet that's roughly 1.8 meter square they they take a lot of material that's why i wanted them quite big and what i found actually is that the middle can get anaerobic so anaerobic means little or no air and that means smell so if your compost heaps are very smelly that's a sign and it's not the end of the world you know you can compost anaerobically and that's what is Bokashi for example which i don't because i don't need to you know i don't need extra compost like and it's another job you need to buy the organism it's just i don't really see the sense of it unless you living in a flat say in a city and you've got a lot of food to compost then it makes sense to have buckets but i'm putting on these heaps everything that includes food waste that includes food waste all kinds like rhubarb leaves and lemon peels some people say you can't do that but you can it includes weeds perennial weeds bindweed roots condorvulus go on here for example disease leaves like powdery mildew or courgettes and cucumbers no worries they can compost these are not random diseases they're going to spread all over your garden they're very plant specific and time of year specific they'll happen anyway but composting means that you them and also late blight by the way so my potato leaves all goes on here everything potatoes rotting potatoes um rotting onions you know i can't think of anything i wouldn't put on just so you know and then the advantage of that is you get more material and uh the heat is not huge at the moment but i'm happy with that it's around 50 to 55 at the moment on average which is a very nice kind of quite gentle heat actually um if you go higher if you go up to sort of 70 there above the red which can happen if you add a lot of green materials that can kill some of the beneficial microbes so generally that's an advantage of adding brown like i'm doing here and this is where the big salad pictures thing these are the reject leaves and below that is a bit of reject chard and outer leaves of kohlrabi and celery also and then we get down a bit further and this is where i'm starting to feel it pretty hot already and that was just two or three days before and you see a bit of cardboard as well i'm making that that's a good brown i'm not going out of my way to find cardboard to do this but if you've got a lot of waste cardboard it's a great brown and paper and again more woody bits so that's an idea but there's enough wood in here that uh woody material roughly the quarter even to a third that that moderates the heat and without that if it's just like old lettuce leaves grass mowing is a classic one you know they're great a fantastic addition to making compost but yeah that's where you need the brown so in the winter and this coming winter if you haven't got it already see what you can accumulate in the way of brown material and that would include old tree leaves just make a pile near to your composting setup and you can use them through the fall and summer 2026 in this case add to your greens grass whatever and you'll make great material uh great compost a few other browns um are soil wood ash i wouldn't add in huge quantities but they're all possible to add and one or two other greens is if you've got a few hens chicken manure fantastic green likewise fresh horse manure is a green and so are coffee grounds so they look brown but they are actually composting term three percent nitrogen that's a green so there we have it and i'm uh just going to mention turning one more time because how this can work what we do here is unscrew the sides and we actually have dates up here so that's the kind of clue 20th of may this heap started so that's roughly what exactly a month ago and that's what we've accumulated in a month together with the other heaps i've got so this one finished on the 19th of may that's this one here and it was started on 19th of march so that took too much to fill it was 50 percent higher than it is now it's sinking and to really get nice compost you could just leave it like that and use it say in november december but if you turn it once you will get nicer compost and that's what we're going to do so we'll unscrew this board here and fork it from this side you can see a video i made about that last September it's got the details of turning and showing how you can do it in a less hard work way so it'll end up in there turning will mix it and you can water it if it's dry or shake it out if it's soggy let some air in there that's what it needs and finding that balance is one of the arts of composting and i would estimate this will be ready to use within three four months from now so on average here i'm eight months i would say but you know these dates are not written in stone you sometimes i've used it four months sometimes well according to what's available when and before we end i just want to show you the plants which are over here because they are such a nice example of the the nutrients that compost can hold so like we put it on in the autumn or late autumn early winter it gets a lot of rain passing through before spring all this amazing growth you know if if nutrients leaked out of compost as would not be happening and with this so these actually these are lettuce that i sowed 18 days ago 2nd of july sorry june look at that plastic root structure these are module trays i designed specifically for this purpose not i didn't want large amounts of compost see these actually grow better in small amounts as long as you've got a nice tray with a smooth side so it can pop out like that and we planted quite a few of these yesterday at that very young age 17 days while here we have leeks that were sown 3rd of may so these are much older they're much slower to grow but as with the lettuce you know they've not been fed or anything so you look at that there you'll see a more developed root structure because of the age but that's four or five leeks growing that's they'll be planted as a multi-sown plant you know it's an option you can do and no feeding not a huge amount of compost two liters of compost is all it takes to fill a 60 cell tray like this and we're going to pop these on because the ground's not ready to receive them yet they're still growing potatoes but it just gives you so many options how you can raise plants and i hope you've enjoyed this little how-to and also the finishing off and what you can do