Storing ingredients and making a compost in a bay

Storing Ingredients and Making Compost in Bays

If you want to make a compost cake but within a pre-existing compost bay, you can do so by following the same method, layering carbon and nitrogen within your bay.

When you begin, for the bottom layer you need to create an airy carbon base, using things like young branches, cardoons and artichokes.

Follow this with a nitrogen layer, but be careful when using lawn clippings as they are very high in nitrogen. If nitrogen-rich materials are layered too thickly, they will rot and add too much moisture to your heap. A warning sign that this has happened is if your compost heap starts to give off a bad smell.

It is good practice to keep a bale of hay next to your compost heap so you can ensure that you're adding enough carbon at all times. If you can't get your hands on any hay or straw, then add a layer of cardboard each time you add grass clippings or weeds.

The brown carbon layers will keep your compost heap aerobic and the green nitrogen layers will provide the heat.

Other materials you can add to your heap include:

• seaweed
• lime

Managing Your Piles in the Bays

The two weeds we try to avoid putting in our piles are ground elder and bindweed.

This is because this method of composting might not reach the required temperature to kill off all the weed seeds in your heap.

Using a Chipper

As your garden progresses, you'll probably find that you are generating more and more green waste - whether this is grass clippings, spent plants, weeds, or branches from trees and hedges.

In order to help us manage our waste, we invested in a wood chipper. This helps us to break our branches down into small pieces, which can then be spread on our compost heap. Chipping these larger bits of woody waste means that they will break down much more quickly.

Producing wood chips from smaller branches only will mean that your compost heap is able to break them down more easily.

How to chip and compost larger pieces of wood

If we have larger branches or trees to process, we will put these through the chipper and then leave them in a pile using the windrows method of composting.

We'll then leave this wood to break down for 18 months to 2 years, and it will produce a great fungal compost. We apply this finished product as mulch around trees, or mix it into our compost extracts.

Using chickens to make compost

Another trick we use is to layer our ramial wood chip into our chicken coop. The chickens will then feed and poo among the wood chips, creating an excellent compost mix that we can remove from the coop a year later and use on the garden.