I can confidently say that my enthusiasm has not waned in the days that have passed; in fact I'd say that I have found myself forming a mild obsession with one fundamental element of the no-dig approach..... composting.
Compost, I now understand, is the cornerstone to the whole approach and I have been wracking my brains for a way of producing enough compost to keep my plot ticking over. It's the first year of my new veggie plot, meaning I need a lot to get me started. I got things moving a few weeks back by taking a delivery of 4tonnes of well rotted manure, and forming beds - a considerable amount of work and material to cover a plot of this size, but I'm assured that the first year is the year you use the most.
One of the multitudinous issues that I now realise I have, is related to tilth. The manure I have had delivered is smell free but quite wet. It had made it quite difficult indeed to break it down into useable chunks, until it dries out a bit. Let's just say that having surveyed the soil quality at Homeacres and compared the texture of manures & composts with my own, there is still a considerable gap to bridge.
As you can see, it's a very variable size and profoundly labour intensive to break down any further...as it's wet, raking isn't working
Secondly, the gaps between my beds are visibly too wide - and I don't have enough manure left to decrease them
going to need more compost/material!
So it looks like I'm going to be ordering a pallet or so of nice organic compost. It's probably about £100 delivered which is a bit expensive but at the end of the day I want to do this properly. I've plumped for a mushroom compost as I think it'll give me both a nice alternative texture, and more nutrients along with its water retaining properties. Hopefully this will be the last time I have to build beds from scratch so I'm fairly happy to invest this time around.
However, the big question which I haven't covered yet is; how the hell am I going to produce composts in decent quantities? It's seemingly an innocuous question - but the more I think about the amount of ground I'm going to be mulching with an inch or 2 each year, the more I realise that I need a proper composting strategy and not just a token few bits of potato peeling chucked in the pallet composter every now and then!
Thinking back to Charles' square footage dedicated to either storing or producing compost, I'd take a punt that the 3 separate areas under tarp plus his amazing composting bays were probably equal to about 20% of the area of the growing beds. Using this equation as a rough rule of thumb, I'm going to need a whopping chunk of mine to be dedicated to growing and/or storing composts.
Asides from buying it in, I have thought seriously about dedicating a chunk of the plot to growing 'Bocking 14' Comfrey - a less invasive strain of the plant which barely self seeds. However when I mentioned it to Charles originally, both he and Steph urged caution as it's an allotment - and that any successor may struggle to remove it. So the jury is still out!
If anyone can recommend a heavy cropping, (cut 3 or 4 times a year) plant exclusively for composting, please do let me know in the comments as I'm a little confused.
Asides from this I have also bought myself a twin 48l kitchen bin - so that I can separate compostable material and bring it weekly to the compost pile. As a very rough guess, based on the last few weeks, I have been gathering around 20-25l of waste per week including cardboard and useable paper, as well as the food scraps. Based on this kind of continual volume I will probably be bringing around 1200l of raw waste per year - which will probably reduce down to around....300-400l of compost? I can bulk that out with shredded cardboard from work too - in pretty much limitless quantities.
It certainly is an interesting topic and one I see regularly discussed online. There's the obvious leftovers from when plants/veg are grown and harvested, but until I've run the plot for a few seasons I'm going to be clueless as to how much that will generate. I want to get into good practice now, so this really will be my focus until I get into planting season.
But for now I just find myself looking at every and any remotely compostable item at work/home/the plot and wondering how I can get it into that bin...
It's becoming as addictive as one of those simple games like Angry Birds or Tetris.... but probably a little healthier!
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