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Photo by net_efekt.

This is a guest post written by Emma Cooper. She’s a freelance writer and podcaster from the UK. Check out Emma’s gardening blog at http://coopette.com/blog.

“Making your own compost has lots of benefits for a garden. Adding homemade compost to the soil helps to improve the soil structure without digging – meaning that the soil will retain water for longer in dry weather and yet drain better in wet weather. It also encourages a healthier soil environment, which leads to healthier plants.

Homemade compost can also be used as free fertilizer or mulch, or as part of potting mixes, saving you money. And by reducing the amount of waste we send off to be buried or incinerated, we’re helping to reduce the strain we put on the Earth. Even the wildlife in your garden will be grateful if you compost – rotting organic matter is food for lots of beasties at the bottom of the food chain.

There are lots of different methods of composting, and some of them can be quite daunting. If you want to build a ‘hot’ heap then you have to collect the right sort of materials until you have enough to build the whole heap in one go, in alternating layers. Once you’ve built the heap, you have to keep turning it every two or three days to get enough air into the compost to keep the temperature up. If you have the time, space, and energy it’s a great way to make compost – but it’s not the only way.

A simple and easy way to make compost is to build a ‘cold’ heap. In cold composting, you add materials to the compost bin as and when you have them – and you don’t have to turn the heap. The end result is still compost that’s perfect for using around the garden.

The golden rule of any sort of composting is that you need a mixture of materials. ‘Green’ materials are rich in nitrogen and include grass cuttings, kitchen waste and fresh plant material. Not all ‘greens’ are green, though! Coffee grounds are rich in nitrogen, too, and are a great addition to the compost heap. ‘Brown’ materials are rich in carbon. They include woody material like twigs, and also cardboard and paper.

The composting process relies on bacteria, fungi and small animals breaking down the things you add to the heap – and they need a balanced diet. In most households, it’s easy to feed a mixture of materials to the compost. Kitchen waste and garden waste can be balanced out with scrunched up cardboard or shredded paper.

If you add too many ‘greens’ to your compost then it will go a bit slimy and smelly; too many ‘browns’ will make it very slow to rot down. Compost can also be too dry – it needs to be quite damp, and you can add some water if necessary.

With a cold compost heap you have to be careful not to add any waste that could attract rats, and weed seeds and plant diseases that won’t be killed during the cold composting process.

‘Greens’ you can add:

Vegetable and fruit peelings, any uncooked vegetable waste
Coffee grounds and filters
Tea and tea bags
Wilted cut flowers
Old bedding plants
Young annual weeds
Poo from vegetarian animals

‘Browns’ to add:

Torn up cardboard
Egg boxes
Scrunched up newspaper or shredded paper
Twigs
Some fallen leaves (although a lot of leaves are better turned into leaf mould)

Don’t add:

Cooked food
Meat, fish or dairy products
Poo from meat-eating pets
Perennial weeds
Seeding annual weeds
Diseased plant materials

A cold compost heap doesn’t heat up in the same way as a hot heap, but it does get warm (especially in summer) and if you add waste every few days then one day when you go out to the bin you will notice that the volume of your compost has shrunk – a lot! At this point it’s useful to have two bins – so you can let the first one rot down and start filling the second – but it’s also possible to keep filling one bin from the top and extract the finished compost from the bottom as a continuous process.

Cold composting takes several months to produce finished compost (longer in the winter), and the longer you can leave your compost to mature then the finer it will be. Even so, when you remove your compost from the bin you will probably need to pick or sieve out some larger items that haven’t completely rotted down. You can add those back into the bin to start the next batch of compost. Homemade compost doesn’t look like potting compost that you would buy, it’s usually rougher in texture, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done it wrong!

Compost made this way isn’t ideal for starting seeds – it isn’t sterile and is likely to be quite rough – but it has plenty of other uses. Homemade compost is great used as a mulch around the garden, to cover bare soil or to feed hungry plants like fruit bushes. Just spread your compost on top of the soil, and let the earthworms do the hard work of incorporating it into the soil for you. Or, if you’re digging over a bed anyway, add the compost in as you go.

You can also use your compost as part of a potting mix in containers, by adding garden soil, sand or leaf mould. Sieved compost, mixed with sand, makes an ideal top dressing to feed the lawn. In fact, homemade compost is perfect for improving the soil anywhere in the garden, and feeding plants without using fertiliser, and the only problem you’re likely to have is making enough of it!”

Photo by Lin Pernille ♥ Photography.

I have learned quite a few new words since the beginning of my gardening journey. Here they are:

Biodynamic

This is a way of growing plants that takes the stars and the moon into consideration. In this theory it is important on which days of the month you sow and on which days you harvest, since the star constellations are different. In theory the different constellations influence how plants grow and apparently this is also shown by scientific evidence. Originally developed by Rudolf Steiner and later verified by Maria Thun.

Chitting

When you let potatoes put out sprouts by placing them in a warm and light room. After that they will be better prepared for the life outside in the ground.

Companion Plants

Some plants deter a certain type of pests while other plants deter other pests. When you mix your plants correctly in your garden you have a natural way of fighting pests by designing the problem away.

F1 Seeds

Seeds made by genetic manipulation that will produce uniform offspring. F1 seeds are the result of selective breeding in a controlled environment and therefore generally more expensive than other seeds.

Fruit

The part of a plant that contains seeds. Fruit is often sweet and edible, but not always. Cucumbers and squash contain seeds but are not sweet.

Heirloom Seeds

Seeds from open pollinated plants passed down from generation to generation. Often kept as a family tradition.

Mulching

Putting some kind of shredded plant material on top of your soil. This will prevent weeds from taking over your beds and it will keep moisture levels high in your soil.

Raised Bed

A box placed on top of the soil. The box can be made from different materials, for instance wood or concrete. You’ll be less inclined to walk on the soil in the raised bed, since it usually only covers a limited area. This gives the soil well-drained properties.

Root Cellar

A cold small chamber below ground, which normally only contains vegetables. Often used in earlier days before the fridge was developed and used today for small footprint living.

Season Extender

A small box that traps the heat from the sun, thereby raising the temperature inside where the plants are grown.

Self-watering

A clever designed box that once filled with water will provide the plants with the correct amount of water at all times. Useful when you go on vacation and therefore can’t water your plants regularly.

Trellis

A construction made for supporting climbing plants, like for instance beans.

Urban Homestead

Bringing the good old self-sufficient style and principles of living into the city in modern days.

Volunteer

Plants that show up out of nowhere that you didn’t intentionally put where they choose to grow. Volunteers are often found near the compost heap.

Bumble Bees are responsible for pollinating our tomatoes, so why not give them a helping hand by providing a nice office in the backyard? There are two compartments inside this design, divided by a piece of wood with a hole in it, so the bees are able to crawl from one room to the other.

Start by cutting 9 pieces of wood. The long ones are 41 cm (16″) and the short ones are 15 cm (6″). I have used some spare wood with the dimensions 9.5 cm x 2 cm (3.7″ x 0.8″), but something else can be used instead:

Drill three holes in the middle of the short pieces: Entrance, middle corridor and peek hole. The piece with the peek hole I made with a 10 mm (0.39″) drill:

The holes for the entrance and the middle corridor needs to be 20 mm (0.79″) in diameter:

I didn’t have a drill this big so I used a file to make the holes bigger:

A Dremel can also be used if you’re impatient

I found that if I drilled first with a 2 mm (0.079″) drill it was much easier to get the screws in when assembling the nest:

You can use an electric drill for the screws if you want to work faster:

Left side assembled:

Left and right side assembled:

The three walls are fastened to the left side. The front compartment is 15 cm x 15 cm (6″ x 6″). This is where the bees can set up a defence against the outer world. The nesting compartment in the back is 20 cm x 15 cm (7.9″ x 6″). The walls are 2 cm (0.79″) thick:

I put in two pieces of cardboard as floor, which should make it easier to clean after the season, but I’m not sure, if parasite eggs will survive in the joints of the box, so that I’ll have to scrap the whole box and build a new one next year. I have to do more research on this.

Moss has been put in the larger nesting compartment:

The two pieces to put on top as roof have been glued together to keep the rain from dropping down from the joint:

The finished nesting box is lifted from the ground to keep it dry:

Then we’ll just have to wait for a queen to find the nest in the spring. The plastic bag of peat moss you see on the left was the nest of last year, so there should be a chance that a queen will stop by and move in.