Black Gold

No, not oil. Not Guinness either. I'm talking about compost. I've been making my own for a while with variable results. The result of the last twelve months' effort imply that I'm getting the technique and ratio pretty good. Pretty simple recipe. I compost everything from the kitchen, except meat, in my plastic compost bin. This includes all peelings, trimmings, tea bags, spent ground coffee, egg shells, egg cartons and kitchen roll tubes. Some people advise avoiding too much citrus fruit but that isn't really a problem. When the plastic bin is ready, which you can tell when you turn it with a fork, I add it to my 2 cubic metre compost store. I also have a three sided bin for leaf mould that is filled to overflowing every autumn with leaves from our plane, lime, sycamore, apple, chestnut and cherry trees. The leaves break down into leaf mould at different rates with the plane leaves (my most abundant from two mature trees) taking longest. In the autumn, I emptied the previous year's leaves to the two cubic metre compost store and mixed it well with the contents of my plastic bin. It has not been touched since.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, as I am feeling better and the garden has been neglected for a while due to the weather, I used my dark, rich creation to mulch the sad looking borders. Aside from providing an instant dressing to the exposed soil, the mulch is protecting the early spring growth from our next frost or snowfall and giving any active worms some delightful organic matter to drag back down to their homes, thus providing extra nutrients to the roots of all the plants.