With up to 50 people to feed, we need to produce roughly 10 tonnes of compost at Pencoed Community Garden! Ordinarily it takes a year to break down, but there are methods to speed things up. Here's what we've been trying:
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1. Identify what you need. Great compost requires a mix of three components: Green (your nitrogens), Brown (your carbons) and Manure.
Lovely pile of poo!
2. Collect your ingredients and organise them into separate areas e.g. a dung pile, a pallet for sawdust/straw, another for garden waste, food etc.
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3. Mix your ingredients layer by layer, which will help the microbes break everything down faster: Green, Brown, Manure and repeat..
With our green food waste we've been experimenting using smaller bays lined with chicken wire to keep out the rats. For garden waste we're trialling longer "compost sausages" which are more open to the elements.
Compost Bay: Food waste, sawdust, manure.
Compost Sausage: garden waste, straw, manure
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Step 2
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Step-by-step guide