Garden Essentials : Compost

How to make your own compost, and a surprising use for your compost heap

As it has lots of images, this post may be too long for email -you can always look at it in the website/app instead

Look what you can achieve! Photo: Julia Reis

The magic from which a good garden comes. It isn’t glamorous, but oh my goodness it is the key to a happy garden.

I promise you, if you get your soil right, the garden will reward you.

We know that the secret to a good garden is the soil:

Soil. Yes, that dirty brown stuff.

It isn’t glamorous, but oh my goodness it is the key to a happy garden. I promise you, if you get your soil right, the garden will reward you.

Today we’re going to go on a journey into the alchemy of enriching the soil, with the assistance of one of our Gardening Mind members, who takes us gently, step by step, through the process of making our very own garden gold.

• There’s also exciting news about some of the new features coming up in The Gardening Mind over the next few weeks. This Garden Essentials series is one of them, along with more on Garden Design, and lots more. Keep an eye out for these as they roll out.

• If you’re new to gardening, you might like the How to Garden series which you can find here:

Getting to know your garden - Storecupboard Basics 1

Feeding the soil, has brought health and happiness to me and my garden.

Before we start, thank you for the love. When you press the ❤️ button, it means that this post becomes more visible to non-subscribers, and you are totally brilliant at this - I really appreciate it. Thank you for all the ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

A big hello to new subscribers, and if you’re wondering how to find your way around The Gardening Mind, please do come and join our Zoom on Tuesday 27th August at 6pm UK time. I’ll be explaining how to find your way around TGM and showing you its features, including the Chat - see below.

Feel free to come and join us for 30 minutes of getting to know each other and sharing garden queries and ideas - it’s an excuse for a get-together, and a thank you for your support!

• You’ll be pleased to hear that the Garden Design Course, for small gardens and for bigger gardens, will be starting again in the autumn.

• Over on the Chat, have a look for the new Midweek Mooch where you can post video updates.

• The Chat has become a huge part of this gardening community - if you’re a paid subscriber you can start conversations, ask gardening questions, and post photos. It’s taken on a life of its own, so do use it! On Sunday regular Show Us Your Plots on the Chat, you can show us what your garden, or any green space near you, is looking like - we’d love to see. We have members from all over the world. Please come and join in!

• As we’re moving into August, you might be looking at your garden wondering where all the colour has gone. If you’re new, you might have missed this post from last year on bringing colour to your August garden: I’ll be updating you on the buddleia extravaganza next week! I’d love to know if you planted any of these:

There are just so many things we feel we should be doing in the garden, and I know I dedicate a lot of time here on The Gardening Mind to cutting through the myths, and finding the shortcuts for you where there are any. I really don’t want to go the long way round anything, unless it’s scenic and pretty.

But when it comes to compost, things are different

We probably know that if we dedicate a bit of time to it, composting really is a low-cost answer to healthy soil and healthy plants. And we ALSO probably know that we can pretty much make it ourselves, utilising most household leftovers.

So why aren’t we all composting?

I’d say it’s possibly because we’re not really sure how to do it, and it’s all too easy to think of the process of composting as a Dark Art and a Faff.

I desperately wanted to demystify this garden essential and create an easy guide to doing it yourself: