Ian B wrote:

The garden isn't in bad shape but had got rather weedy as the previous
resident had died and thus neglected his gardening duties.

Best bet for the first year is only pull out the things you can
recognise as obvious weeds. Give the unrecognised stuff time to flower
and don't hit it all with herbicide there may be some hidden gems.

So I've bought a compost bin, which is an impressive square self-assembly
black plastic thing with doors in the sides and a lid, and started it off,
and looked on the internets for advice; but although there is an elegant
sufficiency of advice available it's a bit confusing for a berk like me. I'm
particularly concerned about this brown/green ratio and what counts as
brown. Some sites say the brown/green ratio should be about equal. Others
seem to say that the required ratio is 30:1, which doesn't sound right as in
my bin that would be basically filling it with twigs then putting about a
quarter of a lettuce in the middle. I'm also not sure what counts as brown.

Many internet sites, particularly Amercian ones obsess about the green
to brown ratio. You can put just about anything that once grew as a
plant into a compost heap and if it is a big enough one you can
practically ingore all this brown to green ratio rubbish. A small one
and you need to get conditions more nearly right if it is to rot quickly
and not go slimy smelly and anaerobic. To be on the safe side put the
heap as far from your back door and house as possible.

If you don't have a hot heap then dandelion and other prolific seed
heads are best not composted.

Some sites say, "leaves", while others tell me to put my leaves in plastic
bags with holes poked in and compost them seperately.

Leaves are best off composted in black bin bags - many contain powerful
antifungal agents and rot slowly which slows down the heap (2 years to
get decent leaf mould which is wonderful stuff and worth keeping
separate if you have the space). I use my recycling "green" bin for this
as I already compost much more stuff than you are allowed to put in it.

Also, a lot of sites
say not to put weeds in it, but if that's the case it kind of destroys the
point as I'd be hefting big bags of weeds off to the tip and my impressive
bin would have 3 tea bags and a carrot top in it. Also, there's no lawn so I
can't put lawn clippings in it either, which might be a good thing as
apparently too many of them turn it to green slime.

Although there is this myth that "too much grass clippings will turn to
green slime" it seems only to be a problem for small values of "too
much". I put around 1-2m^2 of grass clippings on my heap every week or
two and it is almost all gone by the next grass cutting. Reaches 70C
internally and will destroy thick woody stems - once it even started to
smoulder!

A good hot heap smells a bit strange for a couple of days at peak
fermentation sort of stale caused by volatile short chain fatty acids
escaping. If you take the top couple of inches off it can be too hot to
touch inside.

I constructed my bin yesterday evening and put it in a corner of the garden
which is a bit shady, which is apparently wrong also, but that's the only
reasonable place it can go. I started off with a layer of brown leaves that
happened to be conveniently lying around, which are mostly berberis from the
forbidding anti-miscreant hedge at the bottom of the garden. I moistenened
them, then flung in some of my weeds, which are apparently all things that
aren't supposed to go in for fear they'll live a zombie existence in the
bin; couch grass, dandelion, some creeping thing that sort of tangles around
everything, a few nettles including some from the untended thicket that
borders my garden since I read they're very nitrogenous and quite a lot of
what I thought were weeds but my sister thinks are poppies, so I've stopped
pulling any more of them up; also some bits of cardboard, a few twigs which
various sites say shouldn't go in either because they take years to break
down, and several tea bags. And some more brown leaves and so on, then mixed
it around a bit. This latter seemed to be against the principle of layering,
but I don't quite understand that either as the advice seems to be to make
layers, then keep mixing it all up, so I don't quite see the point of the
layering; is this two different approaches or am I missing something?

You want some porosity and air in the heap thin twiggy stuff or
scrumpled up strips of newspaper are OK for this.

Does all this sound right? I've got more green in there than brown, if green
is weeds and brown is leaves, but I haven't got any more brown to offer,
unlike the government, sadly, but like them I've still got more weeds to go.

I wouldn't worry too much about this balancing brown and green there is
a huge amount of rubbish written about it. You might get the compost bin
to go a bit faster by adding a proprietory starter culture like
"Garotta", but for a big heap it is unnecssary.

Since the garden is overlooked by huge lime trees that my neighbour tells me
will cover us later in an deep autumnal carpet (he shifted 30 bags of leaves
from his garden last year) I'll presumably have heaps of brown then but I
can't do much about that now. My bin is about 3 foot square and currently
filled something approaching 3 foot deep.

At that size there is a good chance it will heat up well enough to kill
weed seeds provided that you add large amounts of material all in one go
(and do not compress it).

I would bag the leaves for leaf mould or if there are far too many of
them put them into green recycling. They take at least 2 years to rot.

Other than while I was asleep I've been looking in the bin far more often
than I need to but nothing much seems to be happening yet, though at least
it hasn't produced any nasty smells so far. Perhaps my bin is faulty

It should not unless you allow it to get too wet and too compacted (this
is a common mistake with small gardens adding tiny amounts of grass
clippings and squashing it down).

I'm really looking for some people who are composting in small gardens (mine
is about 27 foot square in the old money); what they put in their bins in
what order and amounts and so on. Or am I on a hiding to nowhere and should
I just take the whole lot to the tip?

No. It will work perfectly well, you just have to be patient. You may
need a second one next year or at least space to dig out what is in now
to get the good compost out of it.

I'd also like some beginners' advice on how to tell weeds from real plants
before I fling a potentially beautiful summer display in my disfunctional

If in doubt do nowt. When it flowers you can quickly tell if it is
likely to be an ugly invasive weed with masses of seeds or a pretty flower.

bin. Is there an online poppy foliage indentifier site? Also what to do with
heaps of twigs and small branches from the trees. Tip?

I put small twigs and hedge trimmings in my compost heap helps the
airation (and counts as this mysterious "brown" material). Mine runs hot
so it will destroy chunky pieces of wood - though I generally burn
anything bigger than 2" diameter.

Also I have several peonies which are quite big (about 3 foot round and
something over 2 foot high) which are budding like mad; do I need to do
anything special for them? I have no idea what variety they are, sadly.

They should be flowering any time now. Enjoy.

Regards,
Martin Brown
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