Walled Garden 2 - Compost Bins

Composting regulations arouse strong feelings and can lead to compliance or non-compliance.  The walled garden where we volunteered had extensive bays, situated towards the bottom by the glasshouses.  Each bay had a notice forbidding or encouraging the gardeners to place particular items there.  Perennial weeds and other bulky woody items went to a separate pile and were burnt at a later stage.  It was a bit of a bind to wheel a barrow uphill and out of the walled garden to find this dedicated spot, but when twenty or so other volunteers are also present it is harder to cheat.  It is also easy to become censorious on finding that some person has chucked in a nettle or a buttercup for example.  Sometimes food items which I regarded as perfectly able to be salvaged found their way onto the heap, beetroot or over-large and woody parsnips for example which would not sell at the coffee break, and, after checking, these usually found their way home with me for soup.  Those who I will entitle 'guardians' of the heaps had strong views, and were best treated with tact and discretion.

Unfortunately our allotment site had notices aplenty but little compliance. Looking back, I attribute the latter to the lack of a formal allotments committee.  Our skip, after one final clear-out, was withdrawn by the council because its use was being abused by persons who brought household items such as old paint cans, large items of wood and broken clothes racks and deposited them there.  The compost areas, unlike the walled garden ones, had no notices instructing us to, 'fill this bin now' and so tended to be filled in a haphazard fashion.  Woody stuff which does not break down easily, such as vine prunings, regularly found its way there along with blighted tomato plants which is an insult to good plant hygiene.  Individual plot holders decided when best to take compost out of the bins.  The notices besought us to compost as much as possible on our own plots, but in some cases to no avail.  And because of local government regulations on smokeless zones, burning was traditionally limited to one night a year - Bonfire Night.

Up here we have our own three bins at the back of the garden.  Once again we are faced by a local government challenge - we have paid for the first time for our garden waste collection, but the council will no longer collect food waste.  Should we compost this ourselves?  This is under discussion.  Meanwhile we have a household system that works well.  My husband is in charge of composting and lets me know which bin to fill first.  We source horse manure from the local constabulary and leaves from the church garden where we volunteer.  He is in charge of inspecting, layering and turning this. Perennial weeds and woody stuff like hedge cuttings still go in the garden waste collection.  All is on a small scale - so far so good.