compost delights

Living in a house with six people, we create a lot of green waste. Lacking any alternative, these wonderful scraps full of nutrients were being thrown out in plastic bags instead of feeding our new little veggie garden. What a waste! And so the creation of the compost began!
Buckets of dandelion leaves were gathered from our wild back yard, and cow poo from Leah's permaculture friends. Old autumn leaves and a bundle of hay.

The idea is to layer the compost like a lasagna, alternating between nitrogen substances and carbon in order to get the right ratio for decomposition, with a little bit of soil or compost in-between.
So first, we lay damp cardboard down, then on top placed our structure made of chicken wire to keep everything nice and tidy.
Then went the first carbon layer - a combination of straw, leaves and twigs from the backyard.
This was followed by some ready- made compost, then the nitrogen layer of fresh and green dandelion leaves and cow manure.
Then another carbon layer.
The next part was to compress it all by mashing it down with a thick piece of wood, a bit like a giant mortar and pestle. This makes sure there are no air pockets.
This patten continues until the are a few layers to the lasagna.

A beautiful Lasagne Compost! Unfortunately I didn't get any photo's of our creation so I nicked this from someone else, but ours looked very similar to this beauty.

We let it settle for a few days then started to add the kitchen scraps, yippee!

A few weeks on it's giving off heat which means there are lots of happy little microorganisms. Each time we add some greens we sprinkle it with a handful of mulch and let the compost work its magic. This is our very first compost, so it is still a learning experience for us, but so far so good!

Summer.