The compost obsession

I never believed Linda Woodrow (and a host of other gardening books) when I first read that it's all about compost.

That was then, before I got my head round gardening in the same place for more than one year. Now I am obsessed with compost. A wonderful friend from Auckland came to visit this afternoon and of course we were talking about gardening. She asked if I had a compost. Just one?!? It was a long answer, involving various manures, seaweed, comfrey, lawn clippings and leaf mould (I might have that last word wrong. There is, I think, a special word for composts made entirely of leaves).

The new garden bed I created this week and reported on here, cost me $18 to make. $16 worth of pea straw and $2 worth of horse manure. Which is pretty good value for the size I made. Not content with that, I've started a new garden bed quite close to it and have the goal of creating it without spending any money. Yesterday I laid out lots of newspapers, passed on to me by my cousin. Then I put some fine river sand on it, left over from when we filled the sandpit at Christmas. Today the children and I headed to Rapahoe, which looks like this:

It has also had some super high tides lately I suspect, which have brought up lots of kelp. It took very little walking to fill the equivalent of five supermarket plastic bags. Back home I tipped out one large horse feed bag's worth of mixed bark and chicken poo on top of the sand and then put half of the seaweed on top of that. The rest of the seaweed went on my main, oldest compost site.

Later in the day I drove to the local rugby grounds near our house qand filled up an enormous IKEA bag with semi-composted grass clippings. That went on top of the seaweed and I think I'm about half way to the height I want that bed to be. I still have one more bag of chicken poo mix which will go on top and then another, thicker layer of grass clippings. Being a slothful person inside, I have several months' worth of fluff from the tumble drier sitting in a container on top of the drier. That can go on the pile just before something heavy so it doesn't blow away.

I'm getting comfrey leaves ready for cutting and composting or digging straight in the garden every week from one plant. The second is starting to grow better now. Not much sign of it getting invasive yet. I'd find it quite convenient if my comfrey grew madly and spread.