OK, So Maybe TWO More Bins will Fix it

When it comes to composting, I’ve found, there are a number of camps: those who make a rough bin out of pallets, those who swear by the compost daleks, and those who prefer the high-tech compost tumbler approach. And then there’s our garden, in which we are now resorting to all three in a bid to somehow be able to compost plant material faster than the garden can produce it.*

In the past couple of months, the tumbler has not been keeping up with the mowing and the daleks have not been keeping up with the weeding, after a bit too much neglect in spring meant the weeds have been even more rampant than usual (perhaps its compost Tardises we need). The resulting emergency piles of vegetation left lying around the garden were beginning to take on an air of permanence so the other half has cracked and repurposed some pallets and doors in time-honoured fashion to add more capacity to compost corner:

Any illusion we might have had that this might be a permanent solution was dispelled by a morning’s work (although to be fair that was mostly moving the giant haystack of weeded material off the back patio into its new home). Hopefully it will bed down a bit before the next bout of weeding so we don’t have to start the second bay prematurely. But I’m ruling nothing out.

* Visiting last month, my cousin estimated that if we turned over two-thirds of the garden to compost management, the resulting loss of weed-growing capacity would mean we might just about break even.