Titanarum

Yes yes. I’m still doing it. 3 carrier bags full of my veg debris have gone into the composter on the allotment. The first one was well yucky. I hadn’t lined the bucket with newspaper (also recycled!) so slime I shall not describe slid onto my shoes in transit. But you live and you learn dontcha? If a certificate for the serious composter exists I feel I deserve one. With stars and distinctions. From my elegantly photoshopped and incredibly sharp picture you will see that I compost a variety of items. Most notably heather and orange peel. You may think heather rather strange. Am I cooking with the stuff? Thankfully no. That would be as revolting as cooking with lavender, if you ask my opinion. I found it on a walkabout in my locality and thought it pretty. Upon returning I attempted to put in a vase but it was too far gone. Heather flower after heather flower fell all over my work tops and floor. So in the compost it went. And as for the orange peel all there is to say is that I’ve eaten rather a lot of them lately. Simple really. But you can compost anything without causing a stink as long as it hasn’t been cooked or comes from an animal. Happy composting.

Carrots, aren’t you sick of them? Or is that just me? Every bloomin’ time I try to grow them I end up disappointed. And it isn’t because I expect the impossible. I know I’m unlikely to have those beautifully long tapered things you see on the packets because I don’t put each seed in a foot long plastic tube immersed in hand mixed sandy soil (that is how the winner of best carrots of the last 20 allotment show grows them). I know my little carrots roots are up against stones and clay clumps and what not on their way down. I know they will be bent. And because I don’t thin them very well I’m under no illusion they will fulfil their individual potential. All I ask is that they are carrot root fly free and taste the way a fresh carrot ought to: sweet. But they never. Even when I’ve gone to all sorts of trouble, like digging first and reading up on the kind of soil and nutrients they like, I am rewarded – not! – with gnarly growths void of flavour and often riddled with the larvae of the carrot fly despite the variety being supposed to be resistant. I give up.

What do you get if you mix cabbage leaves, egg shells, cardboard, potato peel, apple cores, citrus peel and whatever else uncooked material you want rid of and leave it for six months? Brown, moist, nutritious compost is what you get. And hundreds of slithering red worms who have munched through whatever you threw at them and bred hundredfold.

I am new to all this recycling and composting lark. My previous lack of committed, regular effort may well have notched the global average temperature up a degree or two. But I am a changed person and feel duty bound to spread the knowledge. Thanks to London Community Recycling Network and their volunteers I have been educated (less than an hour, it took) and given my very own composting bin. Free of charge. I don’t know about you non-composting people out there, but I say, give it a chance. Bring compost into your lives. Anybody with a strip of garden out the back can do it. Anybody with an allotment can do it. Anybody with a dark cupboard and a plant in need of re-potting can do it.

And why bother? (Apart from saving the planet)? Because plants we grow love it and need it. Different plants prefer different kinds of compost but more of that another time. And what about the (completely un-slimy) red wiggler worms, a k a earthworms? Well, they aerate the roots, thus enhancing the absorption of nutrients, they dramatically improve the soil structure and they increase the yield enormously for many crops. Composting is a beautiful thing in itself, but if that won’t sway you, think of the planet. I’m serious. As only a newly converted composter can be.

P.S. These websites could change your life: www.lcrn.org.uk/projects/compost,
www.communitycompost, www.earthworm.org