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GUIDE

Making garden compost

5 steps

How to do it

  1. 1Aim for roughly equal volumes of green (grass clippings, soft prunings, kitchen peelings) and brown (cardboard, dry leaves, woody stems) as you build.
  2. 2Add in layers rather than a binful of one thing at a time; a whole mower box of grass on its own turns to slime.
  3. 3Keep it as damp as a wrung-out cloth, and covered, so rain doesn't leach it and sun doesn't bake it.
  4. 4Turn it once, three or four months in. One turn is what most heaps realistically get, and it is enough.
  5. 5Use it when it is dark, crumbly and smells of woodland floor — nine to twelve months in an unheated heap.
COMMON MISTAKE

Putting perennial weed roots — bindweed, couch grass, ground elder — on a cold heap. It never gets hot enough to kill them, and they are then spread across every bed you mulch.