Most garden waste can be introduced, even weeds! The heat in a large composter will eventually kill off most weed seeds, but try to only put on young weeds that have not have not set seed. Never add pernicious weeds such as bindweed, or creeping buttercup otherwise you risk spreading them back in the garden.

You can also add straw (soak it first), shredded newspaper, animal manure (not cat or dog mess though), leaves, and even vacuum dust. Be a little careful with evergreen leaves, which take a long time to decompose and also woody cuttings, so shred them first to speed things up.

You can also add activators that help speed up the process, these include: grass, nettles, comfrey, pondweed, seaweed and manure. You can also buy activators from the garden centre, which introduce nitrogen to the heap one of the best being called biotal, or use blood and bone meal.

Types of Composters

You can get compost bins from your local council who will also provide an info sheet with it to help you along.

Alternatively you could try a worm composter. The worms chomp their way through the garden waste, much like when they are in the garden and really help produce fantastic quality compost (also good fun for kids to see!)

You know your compost is be ready when the contents are no longer recognisable! One final tip – it’s a good idea to have two slatted wooden heaps next to each other so when one is full you can turn it into the next to keep on rotting and then continue filling the first.

Sven