The kindness of good people

 

I wasn't planning on doing an update on how my broken bones are healing, but today started with a knock at the door and a very pleasant surprise that gave me an idea for this blog posting about kindness.

If you aren't one of my regular readers, you might
wonder what I mean by "broken bones". Here's 
the evidence, a broken heel encased in a very
colourful purple fibreglass cast. If I behave myself
the cast comes off on December 15, a bit over
two weeks away.

Now, onto this morning's pleasant surprise. Our neighbour, Jane, from two doors down the hill, came to the door with the loveliest bunch of hydrangeas cut from the bush which is "going mad" right now in Sydney's spring. She had heard about my broken hoof and just wanted to wish me well. 

This simple, kindly gesture has become one of the themes of these last six weeks. Neighbours all around us have offered to help out however they can, especially with car transport. Close friends have actually done the driving for us when needed, delicious treats from friends' creative kitchens have been delivered, and all sorts of people have been in touch just to ask how we're both going. 

The kindness started even at the moment back in mid-October when I initially hurt myself. Later on, once I emerged from the hospital's emergency ward wearing a brand new plaster cast on my leg and wobbling along on a shiny set of crutches, two young men wearing turbans on their head rushed over to help me make it to the taxi rank. (I think they were Sikhs, but they were definitely also good Samaritans). One fellow whipped out his mobile phone and summoned a cab on his app for me, and when the taxi arrived they flagged it down so I only had a few awkward steps to make before I slumped into the back of the cab. My thankyous and their best wishes were warmly exchanged ... and now six weeks later I am still so grateful for their simple acts of kindness to a total stranger.

Meanwhile, I have discovered a completely new side to my darling Pammy. After 30 years of marriage we've got our respective household job descriptions quite nicely sorted. For all that time I have been the one to do the gardening and any heavy lifting, and she has been the creative person who comes up with ideas, who spots pest control problems on plants and generally offers good advice on what we should do next. We garden as a team, but I'm the one who gets covered in dirt.

The breakthrough to this old regime came early ... and it happened in the kitchen. We're keen on recycling vegie scraps, and composting is my job! So when the little vegie scrap bin filled up, she asked "what do I do with this now?". With my broken foot it's a very long way down to the back of the property and the compost bin, and my first utterly sexist reaction was to suggest we forget about the scraps and composting until I healed up. "Nonsense, where is it, what do you do?"

Well, the truth be told, compost bins are almost rocket science, but not quite. You see, you have to remove the lid from the bin, tip in the contents of the scraps bin, and replace the lid. So it's incredibly complicated. And worst of all, down there near the shed, it's a bit yucky, and there might be spiders there, too. 

And so ever since becoming compost bin attendant, Pammy has been adding my "boy's job" skills to her repertoire, each time doing it with effortless aplomb.

She's been watering the garden on all the days when rain hasn't been forecast, pulling out weeds, picking up fallen fruit and trimming back over-growth. And the garden is looking quite nice, actually.

Then Pam very sensibly decided that we needed to get in a professional team of heavy duty gardeners for a few hours, and two strapping lads whipped out their chainsaws and powered hedge trimmers and in a cacophony of noise and activity all manner of overgrowth was cut back, carried to the truck and disappeared. That's how to manage an overgrown garden!

She has been magnificent over these last six weeks, especially when you consider that she's as busy as can be with her art teaching at the same time.

And so, to finish off this update on the fun and games at our place, here's a few photos, taken this morning, to share.

Our potted New South Wales Christmas Bush has never looked
so red nor lasted so long. It usually colours up in late October
and runs out of puff well before Christmas, but at least it will
provide good festive colour well into December this time.

I planted silver beet seeds just a few days before I broke my
foot, and so all this excellent progress is due to the watering
skills of my watercolour girl Pammy. 

And on the same day I planted the silverbeet seeds I also
planted a Jap pumpkin seedling, and it too is loving life.
Our original thought was to be bossy and cut it back if it
spread too far but right now we're thinking of it as a
"very big groundcover with edibles" and we like that idea. 

And so the news here from the land of the broken-footed gardener is that for the last six weeks I have been surrounded by the kindness of strangers, of friends, of neighbours and, most of all, my wonderful woman. I am truly a very lucky boy.

The 10-Year Rewind – Part 14 – Compost Recipe

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 13 is this one — Compost Recipe — from August 2009. It starts with a carefully styled photo of our vegie scraps bin, the kind of thing only a compost-maker would bother to do!

Last night we had some friends around for dinner and I cooked a Moroccan-style tagine recipe called 'Lamb Tagine with Seven Vegetables', served with couscous. So this morning my vegie scraps bin was almost looking photogenic, which is not the word you'd usually use to describe it! And the thought soon popped into my head that this would be as good a time as any to do a little blog on the recipe I use for cooking up compost here in Amateur Land.

There's all sorts of things in here: carrots, beans, onions, garlic, zucchini (courgette), pumpkin (no seeds though), turnips, chick pea husks, strawberries, scraps of mint, coriander and parsley, plus apple and pear cores, a banana skin, tea leaves, coffee grounds, etc.

And this is where it goes: into the tumbler bin. The problem with all these lovely scraps is that they are a bit wet, and also a bit acid, too. Hence the need for a compost 'recipe', as the vegie scraps are the things most commonly added to this bin.

Next ingredient: dry stuff, in this case two handfuls of sugar cane mulch, the cheapest and most plentiful mulch available here in Sydney. Sometimes, if I could be bothered, I use shredded office paper, but mostly I go for mulch, as it's in a big bag in the shed, about 10 feet away, and it's easy. Shredding paper is very boring, and I don't think it's as good as mulch at soaking up moisture, anyway. Dry leaves are another option, if and when you have them. So, virtually every time I add a bin of vegie scraps, I add a few handfuls of mulch, as well.

Next ingredient is a good heaped handful of dolomite lime. This 'sweetens' the mix, keeping its pH closer to neutral. Before I got onto using dolomite, my composts had alarmingly low pH levels, which acidified the soil here, which is inherently acid anyway. I don't add the lime every time I add a bin of scraps. About once a month seems to be enough. 

The next (and last) ingredient is air, and it's probably the most important one, in fact. I give the bin three or five spins, making sure that the end that was facing up prior to the tumbling faces down at the end of tumbling. (Not sure whether this hopelessly disorientates all the poor worms inside the bin! And there are quite a few in there, as I also add in a bit of worm-laden ordinary garden soil to help the whole composting process to get going.) 

Dolomite lime is readily available at any local garden centre here in Sydney. It's just crushed rock, and looks and feels like a soft yet grainy powder. As well as using it in the compost bin, I also use it in the vegie garden regularly, when preparing beds for planting (about a handful dolomite lime per square metre, mixed in with lots of compost and a handful per square metre of chicken manure). Dolomite lime also adds good amounts of magnesium and calcium to the soil, which is generally beneficial for plant growth and health. And, best of all, its action is gentle, so it's the stuff to use. It works slower than ordinary garden lime and it's unlikely to get you into too much bother if you're a beginner by either using too much or using it near the wrong plants. The only exception to that little comment is, of course, if your soil is already alkaline. You'd be mad to add dolomite lime, or garden lime, to already-alkaline soils. In Australia, acid soils are the rule in most areas, including mine, but alkaline soils are common in some areas around Adelaide and Perth, for example, where the underlying rocks are limestone. 

This is the alternative to dolomite lime: garden lime. It's faster-acting and stronger than dolomite lime, so you need to be more careful in applying it. It doesn't contain the magnesium that dolomite lime has, but it's loaded with calcium. I never add it to my compost bin, and I rarely use it in the garden, as it's a bit too heavy duty for my needs. 

So that's my el-basic compost recipe. 

kitchen scraps + mulch + dolomite lime + air

Mix, and repeat endlessly!

It was a dirty job, and I did it ...

And now, for my most irrelevant and deceptive opening photo to a gardening blog ...

Isn't this helleborus flower nice? It's a bit floppy eared and misshapen, but it is a new addition to our garden, springing into showbiz mode from a helleborus plant which just self-seeded into life in a new spot a year or so ago. Hellebores like to do this "traaa-daaa" stuff, and they are well-known for producing new, sometimes-wonderful and sometimes-weird, flowers from random seedlings.

Why is this irrelevant and deceptive? Well, it has nothing to do with compost, and that's what this blog post is actually all about. 

Last Saturday I spent more than an hour shovelling compost — lots of compost — from one bin to another. It was a dirty job, I was the only one prepared to do it, and it was all very worthwhile. Its main drawback as a blog topic is extremely ugly and dull photographs ... hence the helleborus to start ...

Pictured below is my ancient black "Dalek" compost bin now filled to the brim with beautiful, ready-to-use compost, which I made in my much more efficient tumbler compost bin.

Because you can spin it to aerate the compost, the tumbler bin breaks down the organic matter fairly quickly, but it's a devil of a job getting to the made compost inside the tumbler. So, once every 18 months or so, I do the "Big Transfer" job using a shovel and trug — and garden gloves — and all the made compost is moved over from the tumbler to the Dalek, where it is easy-peasy to scoop into a bucket and add to my vegie beds.

And now for an even more boring photo!

Here's the almost-empty tumbler bin, ready for me to add loads and loads and loads of clippings from the garden and vegie and fruit peelings from the kitchen. I always leave a small amount of made compost in the bottom of the tumbler as a "starter culture", as it has worms and all kinds of helpful bacteria down there that will multiply like crazy and get the composting process roaring along again.

And so that's what I did on Saturday. Nobody noticed, not even Pam, and when I pointed out to her what a useful job it was, she still wasn't especially impressed. Just another one of my peculiar enthusiasms.

I don't blame her. Compost is pretty boring, even if it is one of the most essential jobs you can do to improve your soil in the long run (not to mention earning brownie points for recycling, which I hope are eventually redeemable at Heaven's Pearly Gates).

Maybe I should see if there is a special society of unheralded compost makers that I could join? No, I'm sure they'd be really boring and would only want to talk about compost, which is too much for even me. I'm happy to talk compost once every 18 months. That's enough.

Next posting, I promise will have nicer photos and be about vegies and flowers, probably ... although I do have some thoughts on mulch I could share ...

The Hills are Alive

Listening to our favourite Sunday morning music show, Chicken Hotrod on 2RRR community radio, I was struck by the idea that there's a hundred different ways to sing a song and come up with good results.

Well folks, it's the same with growing potatoes. There's a hundred different ways to do it, and all of them can come up with good results. 

I was Googling "when to hill around potatoes" and I came up with (maybe not a hundred) but lots of different ideas. Some said to start doing it when plants are 6 inches high, others said to wait until when plants are 10 inches high, when plants are 12 inches high, even one daredevil advocating waiting until her plants were 16 inches high. 

As to "what" to use when hilling around your spuds, some said "just use compost", others said "just use straw", others said "mix up straw and compost". There were votes for "potting mix" and some for good old "garden soil".

I'll bet you that all these good folk advocate their methods because they worked for them. So, I think the big message to newbie spud growers is just to relax. No matter what you do will probably work just fine. So, here's what I did this morning.

Here's my bag of spuds with the plants about 6 inches high. So you can call me an "early hiller" if you like. "Why this thing called 'hilling'?". Excellent question. That's the one thing the spud growers of the world ALL seem to agree on. If you mound up soil around your growing potato plants you will get a bigger crop of spuds, and you will also get a bigger crop of spuds that are edible. If growing spuds are exposed to sunlight they will become green, inedible potatoes, so hilling serves to cover up the crops of spuds forming.  

 I've shared my excess spuds and extra spud bag with my good friend Jolanda, and she has a bag of compost which she will be using to hill around her spuds. I'm doing it slightly differently, mostly because I like the way it looks. Yes, it's that irrational, folks! I'm mixing up my own homemade compost with handfuls of straw in a roughly 50:50 mix.

The easy way to mix it up is in a bucket or trug. Compost is an excellent choice because it's a gentle fertiliser that helps to feed the potato plants. The straw is nice and light, so the drainage of water through the bag should be nice and free. Besides, I just love the look of straw ... it's so farmyard.

It's so simple. Just pile in your compost, or your straw/compost blend, leaving the topmost leaves of the plants exposed.

 

I've got a couple of little "later starter" shoots poking through, so I'll give them a few more days to grow taller and catch up with the others, then I'll finish my first hilling job next weekend by hilling around them. 

About a month from now, the plants should have grown even taller. Next time I'll unroll the sides of the bag so it is at full height, and I'll complete a second and last "hilling" around the plants. After that all I have to do is water the bags if Huey hasn't been kind enough to help out with some rain every couple of days.

Getting a wriggle on

This morning, after feeding my little goldfish, Paul, I popped down to the rear of the garden and opened the lid of my compost bin to feed it yet another batch of kitchen scraps. As soon as I opened the bin I could see dozens of little worms greedily, happily wriggling their way through what must seem to them an endless supply of yummy food. "Oh good, we love soybean pods!"

Having just fed Paul, at that moment I wondered whether I also have pet worms? Probably not (calm down!). But I do like and care for the worms with the same enthusiasm that I look after little Paul. 

After I settled down from that little buzz of wormth, it did occur to me that my compost bin is half-way between a compost bin and a worm farm. And my secret ingredient is mulch. I think it's time I did some explaining, with pictures to help.

No, this person doesn't have a name, but all
 I know that s/he has hundreds of relatives
cohabiting in my tumbler compost bin.

I bought this many years ago, and it is still
working fine. They're not cheap, I think
somewhere around the $175-$200 mark.

There's a lid at both ends, so however many times you spin
it, access is easy enough.

This morning's kitchen scraps includes soybean pods, potato
peelings, orchid flowers, spinach and other salad leftovers.
What's wrong with this is that on its own, this stuff is too 'wet'.

Here's my secret ingredient, the bag of sugar
cane mulch in my shed, 10 feet away from the
compost tumbler bin. I use this because it is
plentiful and relatively cheap.

I grab a good-sized fistful of mulch....

... and sprinkle it over the scraps after I add them. Lid back
on, a couple of tumbles (hopefully spun so that this top end of
the bin ends up down at the bottom afterwards). And spinning
the bin is essential, every time you add scraps, and for us that
means at least three or four times a week. The spinning adds
air to the compost, which speeds up the composting process.

I'm not totally fanatical about adding the
handful of mulch every single time I add the
kitchen scraps, but I do add that handful of mulch
a good majority of the time. The worms love it.

You could add dry leaves instead of mulch, but I don't have a big enough supply of them. And you could add shredded paper, but it doesn't break down as quickly or as nicely as mulch does, and shredding all that paper is a remarkably boring chore over the course of several months. I tried that and gave up, and switched to my bag of mulch, and it suits me a lot better.

The final thing I should mention about my tumbler bin is that it does have one fairly important drawback to be aware of. It never gets 'hot' like a proper compost heap is meant to – and that means worms thrive but seeds from kitchen scraps such as tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicums etc never cook down. So, the important thing to do with this type of bin is to separate the seeds from the scraps back in the kitchen. We've got into this routine and so it's easy to do. If you don't exclude the seeds, when you spread the mulch you'll get far too many 'volunteer' tomatoes, cucumbers etc sprouting everywhere, and that's more of another weedy pain to remove than anything else.

True compost heaps work on heat to rapidly break down organic matter (and cook all seeds thoroughly). They need to be quite big to do that heat thing properly, about a cubic metre in size – and that's a whopper of a pile of stuff when you think about it.

Here in our small backyard with just the two of us churning out little buckets of scraps daily we're never going to create a cubic metre of stuff to compost down in one go. Very few average backyard gardeners do this. We just add our scraps in dribs and drabs as daily domestic life goes on.

And so our cool little compost tumbler creates beautiful compost, thanks to all that spinning of the bin, plus a mountain of chomping from thousands of worms, but without the dry stuff, the mulch, to balance out the wet scraps, our bin would be an uninhabitable swamp in which few worms could live. With the dry mulch there to balance things out, these worms are like contented cows munching grass in a lush paddock.

Finally, where do the worms come from? The garden. I occasionally add a small spadeful of garden soil to the compost bin. Real garden soil is not just full of worms, it's a whole community of beneficial micro-organisms, and it's a free and fabulous 'compost booster' that is well worth adding to your bin, to get it going well.

Charles Darwin's Strawberry

Call it an unexpected bonus or, better still, something for nothing, but we've got a strawberry crop on our hands here – without planting strawberries.

Well, we have a crop of one strawberry so far, and so I guess technically it's just still a single fruit. But when the second strawb gets to 'condition red' we've got a crop on our hands, and it's courtesy of our compost tumbler bin that we have this sweet little developing patch at all.

I don't know what variety it is but let's call it
Strawberry 'Supermarket Surprise', because that's
where it came from. Pam loves strawberries and
we buy them year-round at the supermarket. All
the hulls left over from preparing the strawbs
go into our compost bin (as do all our fruit and
vegie scraps), and so all we know is that one of
those hulled bits of strawb survived composting
last year, and when I spread another load of
compost around late last summer, a few weeks
later, up popped a healthy young strawberry plant.

This plant has grown like crazy all through autumn and winter, sending out runners in all directions, so I've kept on feeding it and mulching it, ripping out the weeds (especially the rotten oxalis), and now we have a bona fide strawberry crop on our hands. Probably not a heritage type, more likely a gorilla of a modern hybrid, but it's flowering its head off right now and baby fruits are forming here, there and everywhere.

This strawb probably deserves a better name that mere 'Supermarket Surprise'. I like to think of it as 'Darwin's Natural Selector', as its story is a classic tale of survival of the fittest. There's something very vigorous and healthy about this plant which, amongst several hundred strawberry hulls tossed into the compost bin last year, managed to keep enough of its vigour and strawberryness intact to hit the ground running the moment it got a chance.

Maybe I should call it 'Gorilla'? Or 'King Kong'? Gosh, this naming new plant varieties thing is complicated. Maybe I should stick with 'Supermarket Suprise'?

Compost harvest time

One of the really handy things about some blog postings is that they are a diary entry that I can refer back to months or years from now. So let it be noted that on this beautiful, warm and sunny Saturday, April 9, 2011, I 'harvested' my latest batch of compost. Whoopee! Well, I don't think it's going to make the 6 o'clock news, but if I say so myself it might just be my finest batch yet, and I have scientific evidence to back up this claim. I had better start explaining, though...

This is only some of the latest batch, but as this is the nicest photo in this set (and let me tell you, compost is not photogenic) I will start with this one. This is compost as I like it: dark, crumbly, gently earthy in smell without any really noticeable smell, and certainly without any kind of unpleasant 'pong'. And while I'm lingering on this shot, aren't trugs wonderful things? I have several, because my garden is too small for wheelbarrows. Anyway, back to the compost, please projectionist!

Told you it's not photogenic. But here's the compost being extracted from my large 'tumbler' bin which does all the composting work around here.

And this is where the latest batch of compost goes: into my original old 'Dalek' bin, which is a pretty hopeless compost bin, but a perfectly good place to store lots of ready-to-use compost. The tumbler bin is a much better bin because it's easy to spin it around to aerate the compost. Air is one of the most important ingredients in compost and Dalek bins are fairly hopeless because it's not easy to use a garden fork to get in there and 'stir' the contents, to introduce air into the heap.

At the end of the half-hour operation to transfer all my made compost into the Dalek bin, the tumbler is ready to do it all again. I always leave a couple of shovels-full of made compost in the tumbler, to help get the breaking down process going again on the new stuff. And here's the first lot of ingredients ready to go in: vegie scraps from the kitchen (these are fresh 'wet' ingredients) and to balance them out some 'dry ingredients', fallen leaves from around the garden. When there aren't fallen leaves available I use a couple of handfuls of straw garden mulch from the mulch bag, or if I'm really desperate, shredded newspaper (but the newspaper always seems to take ages to break down, so it isn't my favourite). However the main thing is always to balance out the 'wet' with the 'dry'. Maintaining this wet-dry balance and aerating the heap are the two main basics of composting to pay attention to.

However there is another magic ingredient which has turned this compost batch (I only make one a year, on average, by the way) and that is lime. And here's the 'proof' I was talking about earlier.

Go on, call me 'a bit keen' but I pH test my compost! It's a bit hard to see the colour of the compost sample in the photo, but in natural light it's speckled with darkish green dots, and you match the colour of the sample to the chart provided to establish the pH reading. Here, the acidity of my compost is somewhere between 6.5 (very mildly acid) and 7 (neutral).

This pH testing idea occurred to me a few years ago. I thought that with so many kitchen scraps in our compost, there was a chance it might be too acid. And pH tests confirmed the hunch. It's just silly to dig in stacks of overly acidic compost when what you're really trying to do is improve your soil, not ruin it. And since then I have been adjusting the acidity of my compost as I go, by adding in some dolomite lime from time to time.

You can use horticultural lime to raise the pH reading if you like, but I prefer this stuff, dolomite lime, which is essentially just rock crushed down to almost a powder. It is slower and gentler in its action than lime, but it gets the pH adjusting job done. As the packet says, it's also a good source of magnesium and calcium.

I don't add in the dolomite lime every time I add some vegies and dry stuff to the compost bin, but I do probably end up doing it once a month, roughly, just whenever I remember. A good handful each time.

What do I use compost for? I dig it into vegie beds as part of soil preparation. I mix some in with potting mix to beef up the mix with some home-made goodness. When planting seedlings I like to dig a hole, fill it with compost, then plant the seedling into that. Vegie seedlings always seem to belt along when planted into compost. You can use compost as a mulch, too. It's great stuff, just not photogenic!

Compost recipe

Last night we had some friends around for dinner and I cooked a Moroccan-style tagine recipe called 'Lamb Tagine with Seven Vegetables', served with couscous. So this morning my vegie scraps bin was almost looking photogenic, which is not the word you'd usually use to describe it! And the thought soon popped into my head that this would be as good a time as any to do a little blog on the recipe I use for cooking up compost here in Amateur Land.

There's all sorts of things in here: carrots, beans, onions, garlic, zucchini (courgette), pumpkin (no seeds though), turnips, chick pea husks, strawberries, scraps of mint, coriander and parsley, plus apple and pear cores, a banana skin, tea leaves, coffee grounds, etc.

And this is where it goes: into the tumbler bin. The problem with all these lovely scraps is that they are a bit wet, and also a bit acid, too. Hence the need for a compost 'recipe', as the vegie scraps are the things most commonly added to this bin.

Next ingredient: dry stuff, in this case two handfuls of sugar cane mulch, the cheapest and most plentiful mulch available here in Sydney. Sometimes, if I could be bothered, I use shredded office paper, but mostly I go for mulch, as it's in a big bag in the shed, about 10 feet away, and it's easy. Shredding paper is very boring, and I don't think it's as good as mulch at soaking up moisture, anyway. Dry leaves are another option, if and when you have them. So, virtually every time I add a bin of vegie scraps, I add a few handfuls of mulch, as well.

Next ingredient is a good heaped handful of dolomite lime. This 'sweetens' the mix, keeping its pH closer to neutral. Before I got onto using dolomite, my composts had alarmingly low pH levels, which acidified the soil here, which is inherently acid anyway. I don't add the lime every time I add a bin of scraps. About once a month seems to be enough.

The next (and last) ingredient is air, and it's probably the most important one, in fact. I give the bin three or five spins, making sure that the end that was facing up prior to the tumbling faces down at the end of tumbling. (Not sure whether this hopelessly disorientates all the poor worms inside the bin! And there are quite a few in there, as I also add in a bit of worm-laden ordinary garden soil to help the whole composting process to get going.)

Dolomite lime is readily available at any local garden centre here in Sydney. It's just crushed rock, and looks and feels like a soft yet grainy powder. As well as using it in the compost bin, I also use it in the vegie garden regularly, when preparing beds for planting (about a handful dolomite lime per square metre, mixed in with lots of compost and a handful per square metre of chicken manure). Dolomite lime also adds good amounts of magnesium and calcium to the soil, which is generally beneficial for plant growth and health. And, best of all, its action is gentle, so it's the stuff to use. It works slower than ordinary garden lime and it's unlikely to get you into too much bother if you're a beginner by either using too much or using it near the wrong plants. The only exception to that little comment is, of course, if your soil is already alkaline. You'd be mad to add dolomite lime, or garden lime, to already-alkaline soils. In Australia, acid soils are the rule in most areas, including mine, but alkaline soils are common in some areas around Adelaide and Perth, for example, where the underlying rocks are limestone.

This is the alternative to dolomite lime: garden lime. It's faster-acting and stronger than dolomite lime, so you need to be more careful in applying it. It doesn't contain the magnesium that dolomite lime has, but it's loaded with calcium. I never add it to my compost bin, and I rarely use it in the garden, as it's a bit too heavy duty for my needs.

So that's my el-basic compost recipe.

kitchen scraps + mulch + dolomite lime + air

Mix, and repeat endlessly!

Fun with compost

It was the perfect day for the annual compost harvest here in Amateur Land. Cool and cloudy, with very little chance of working up a sweat. Given that there's always a fair bit of heavy lifting, shovelling, forking and bending involved in my little compost harvesting operation, I couldn't have asked for a more helpfully miserable day. This is a once-a-year job, and it's always well worth doing, as I now have all the compost I could possibly use in a year, and another batch on the way.

Here's this year's batch of sweet-smelling, dark and crumbly compost. It has actually been ready to use for the last couple of months, and I have been using it in the garden, too. But there comes a time each year when I do what I call my 'harvest' of the compost. I remove all the good quality, ready-to-use compost from my efficient tumbler compost bin, and store it in my other, more basic bin, one of those inefficient black Dalek bins.

This photo just barely squeezes in the Dalek bin on the left (and also in the mirror reflection on the right), and the tumbler bin is in the background. All this is hidden from view by a small hedge of murrayas.

Traa daa! The empty tumbler bin. It holds quite a lot (full capacity would fill five or six of the pictured trugs), but its one real design fault is that getting the compost out of the bin isn't that easy. It involves a lot of scooping and shovelling and, towards the end, tipping the bin straight into the plastic trugs. (As my garden is too small for wheelbarrows, my trugs do all the wheelbarrowey work around here. I love them.)

This is the harvested compost from the bins. As well as using this stuff to fertilise garden beds and especially vegie beds prior to planting, I also use my compost as a potting mix 'extender', mixing it 50:50 with a good quality potting mix. As all modern potting mixes are just a glorified and expensive form of compost anyway, adding my rich, home-grown stuff probably improves its overall quality. My other use for compost is when I plant seedlings. After preparing the planting site, I add a good scoop of compost, firm it down, then plant each seedling straight into that. They usually roar away in that rich little environment.

The old black Dalek bin plays an important role here, but it's a pretty hopeless compost bin. Its main role is to be the 'overflow' bin. Once the main tumbler bin is absolutely chock-full in late summer/early autumn, I stop adding stuff to it and let it break down for several weeks, tumbling it over regularly to help everything break down faster. Meanwhile, all the fruit and vegie scraps from the kitchen, plus suitable garden clippings, go into the 'overflow' Dalek bin for however many weeks it takes for my tumbler-bin batch of compost to fully break down.

Today's big harvest operation is laborious, but it's essential. I take all the 'made' compost out of the tumbler bin and set it aside in the trugs. Then I transfer all the contents of the Dalek bin into the tumbler. Then I transfer the made compost into the Dalek bin, which then becomes a mere storage unit for ready-to-use compost. Sounds like hard work, but I try to think of it as good exercise! And for the last few years it has let me both make and store all the compost I could ever wish for.

As you can see in the photo above, one of the magic composting ingredients I have discovered is cheap garden mulch. Every time I add a bucket-full of fruit and vegie scraps from the kitchen, I add a handful of straw mulch. Any old straw mulch will do. Here in Sydney the cheapest stuff is sugar cane mulch. This 'dry' straw balances out the relatively 'wet' fruit and vegie scraps, producing a nice, not-too-dry, not-too-wet, mixture. To further balance out the acidity of the fruit and vegie scraps, I add in a handful of dolomite lime when I add the straw. This keeps the acidity (pH) of the compost somewhere near neutral. You could add shredded newspaper instead of straw, if that's plentiful, but I tried shredding my own office paper and tired of the workload of doing that. Just opening the shed door, reaching in and grabbing a handful from the bag of mulch near the door works a lot better for me!

Another magic ingredient in composting is air. That's why the tumbler bin is so superior to the Dalek bin. Trying to poke a garden fork down into a Dalek bin to give everything a stir is too much hard work even for me, and I'm a glutton for punishment when it comes to composting! By comparison, giving the tumbler bin a spin is easier, although when my large bin is close to full it does take a fair bit of strength to turn it over.

My final 'magic' ingredient in composting is good old garden soil. It's full of worms, microbes and life, and so I usually add one or two scoops of ordinary, fertile, healthy garden soil to help get a batch of compost going.

Hopefully a few of these tips might be useful to someone who's trying to get their composting system working but is finding it hard to get the formula right. It took me several years to get the hang of making good compost, and so it's definitely not as easy as some people make it out to be. But then again, it isn't rocket science either. Just a bit of persistence, adding a steady variety of ingredients to the bin to achieve a good wet-dry balance, plus remembering to turn the heap over regularly, should do the trick.

Behind the scenes in Compost World

Composting is a lovely blend of art and science, exactly the kind of natural mystery that appeals to the amateur scientist lurking within me. I'm getting better at it after several years of mixed results, but it's certainly not as easy as it seems. As I've just spent a few hours this cool morning spreading around my latest batch of compost, and it's probably my best so far, I thought I'd talk nothing but rot today.

At my place, Compost World is hidden by this simple little hedge of two Murraya paniculata plants. Murraya is a wonderfully easy-care hedging plant with fragrant white flowers, and it's also a good nesting site for small birds such as bulbuls, which build a nest there every year.

And here's a peek behind the hedge. It's where the compost bins live, along with the spare pots and a small assortment of ferns, all under the shade of an olive tree and Pam's office/shed.

And here's this morning's harvest of compost from the big tumbler bin. This batch is probably the best ever – dark, crumbly and sweet smelling.

This tumbler bin isn't perfect, but it's the best choice for my garden. It scores 10 out of 10 for aerating the compost, but its one drawback is that its contents never get hot enough to kill off seeds from vegie scraps such as tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and capsicums. I just try to keep as many seeds out of the compost as possible in the first place, but after spreading the compost out there's usually a small workload of 'weeding' the unwanted seedlings that pop up here and there.

An essential part of my composting set-up is the 'spare bin'. This was the original, and not very efficient, compost bin I had in the backyard 17 years ago. It's still extremely useful, because I always say that the minimum number of compost bins in any backyard should be two. Let me explain: I always get to the point in autumn where the big tumbler bin is chock-full. I then stop adding kitchen scraps to the tumbler bin and let it break down into compost (which takes three or four months, provided I keep on turning the tumbler bin over every few days). So this spare bin then becomes the bin where I keep on adding scraps during the months while the tumbler batch breaks down. Without a second bin, I'd stop recycling perfectly good kitchen waste for months on end, and that would be a criminal waste!

Now we're getting into the nitty gritty! A peek under the lid of the spare bin shows a couple of important composting lessons I've learned over the last few years. To get compost working well, you need to add a balance of 'wet' and 'dry' ingredients. Wet ingredients include scraps from vegies and fruit, which we have in abundance as we both do a lot of cooking using only fresh ingredients. However, 'dry' ingredients are in much shorter supply. They might include fallen leaves, shredded paper, old potting mix, or straw, for example. I've found the easiest way to supply dry ingredients to the compost is to add some straw mulch, each time I add another bin of scraps from the kitchen. Any old straw mulch will do, and here in Sydney sugar cane mulch is cheap and plentiful, so that's what I use both on my garden beds and in my compost bin.

When you get the balance wrong inside a compost heap, the process of breaking everything down slows down, either because it's simply too wet or too dry. The worms let you know whether you've got it right. They thrive in good going, and they are scarce when the mix is wrong.

The other magic ingredient in my compost bin is dolomite lime. I discovered a few years ago that my compost was too acid (probably due to the large amount of fruit scraps), so I've got into adding regular handfuls of dolomite to the compost bin to sweeten it all up. I just tested a sample of the latest batch, and it's still a bit too acid, around pH 5.5. Fortunately my soil is around pH 6.5, so when I dig in the compost to a garden bed for vegies, I add more dolomite to help raise its pH. A reading of 5.5, as shown here, still isn't that good of course, so I'll just have to keep on working on adding more dolomite over the next year!

Compost is wonderful for all garden plants, and this morning's 'harvest' of compost was prompted by the need to hill some soil around my potato plants. I simply didn't have enough soil to do the job, so I mixed it 50:50 with some compost. While I was at it I also pulled out the failed crop of Brussels sprouts and prepared that bed for planting zucchinis soon. After adding lots of compost, chicken poo, dolomite and digging it all into the soil, I'll wait a week or two before planting the zucchini seedlings that I'm raising from seed at the moment.

I love the way that composting is the very essence of the endless cycle of life, decay and regeneration here on planet Earth. I don't feel so bad about the prospect that one day I, too, will become compost returned to the earth. It just seems the natural order of things, and I wouldn't have it any other way.