I was gardening today. The jobs I tackled were determined in a rather back-to-front manner, revolving around the compost bins. We currently have four bins, each just wider than a large garden fork and about the same height and depth. All were full, or nearly full, and looking at the quantity of herbaceous stems and rampant growth on the ivy hedges waiting to be cut down and put in them, it was obvious that I was going to run out of space. Meanwhile, we still have a fair quantity of planks left over from the old decking, which have been piled up in front of the dahlia bed all year. Some still have nails sticking out, and every so often I turn one over or try and rearrange them to hide the nails before there can be a disaster involving the cats, or us, come to that. As I tottered over the heap yesterday afternoon to get to the dahlias to cut them down while supervising the chickens' exercise time, I decided that I was completely fed up with the pile of planks, and that it was high time they were put to good use.
The obvious solution was for the Systems Administrator to build a new bin at the end of the row, which would give me extra space for prunings, and use up some of the the planks. However, the space by the bins is currently taken up with a fine crop of nettles, and the remains of the long barrow free-form compost heap like a neolithic burial site that we made when we first moved in, before introducing bins plus a no weed seeds or roots in compost heap policy (weed seeds in this context includes those from garden plants that I like, but not in unlimited quantities. Verbena bonariensis springs to mind).
I set to digging out the nettles, which needed doing anyway before they spread into the bins, and optimistically threw the roots on the bonfire site, which is in danger of becoming another free-form compost heap. Proceedings were slowed down when I hit chicken wire, the legacy of a previous and unsuccessful attempt to restrain the great compost barrow. I found various pieces of sticky tape, left over from my phase of adding brown cardboard boxes to the heap. Yes, the cardboard composts perfectly well, but the tape holding the box together lasts well over a decade. I cleared the weeds off the top of the barrow, so that I could shovel the weedy compost from the site of the new, hygienic heap on to the still substantial remnants of the old one, until I judged I had a large enough level and clear space for another bin.
Then I began to move the contents of the penultimate bin into the end bin, since that was only half full. I found some strange pieces of man made fibre, which must have been the remnants of either an oven glove or a dish cloth, since I now put anything made out of cotton on the heap if it's too knackered for any other form of recycling. Also a mysterious circular nest made of grass and leaves. I don't know what that belonged to, but hope it doesn't mean we had rats breeding in there. If something was trying to hibernate in the compost then I apologise. It is good for compost to turn it, which mixes the ingredients more thoroughly and introduces air into the heap, and I reckoned that there was space to budge the contents of the first three bins up and clear the left hand bin entirely, ready for the great autumn cut-down. The original plan was to turn the compost regularly, moving it in stages from one end to the other until it emerged from the final bin as beautiful, crumbly brown soil conditioner. By the time I'd cleared half the contents out of the penultimate bin the end bin was piled up to overflowing, but by then I'd hit usable compost in the bottom half of the bin I was emptying.
It seemed a terrible waste just to bury it again, and the obvious solution was to use it, but I didn't have any part of a suitable border all weeded, tidied and ready for compost. It seemed best to use it on the smaller, more delicate plants and woodlanders that might not appreciate a mulch of spent mushroom compost, so the next step was to start weeding the ditch bed, which contains primroses, hellebores, cyclamen and other small things. At the moment it also contains a great many hopeful young plants of Herb Robert, which I now know not to leave to grow to maturity. As babies they are very sweet, and native wild flowers to boot, but when fully grown they are great smothering things that you don't want in a border, not if you want the primroses and hellebores to get a look in.
By four o'clock when I wanted to let the chickens out I'd managed to use two barrow loads of compost, and there is still enough compost left in the bin to fill the barrow another two or three times. It was all good useful work that needed doing eventually, but I can't say that I got out of bed thinking that today I was going to start weeding the ditch bed. Once the chickens were unleashed the order of gardening events was determined by where they decided they wanted to go, and fortunately they wanted to stay in the front garden, scratching around in the turning circle, so I was able to get on with chopping down flower stems and trimming the ivy around the long bed, which was why I wanted more space in the compost bins in the first place.
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