Cycle Of Life

Homemade garden compost is an essential part of gardening with nature. Monty shares his advice on how to achieve the ideal mix to ensure thriving plants

When I was a child growing up in a large garden, my brothers and I always had to do a job before we were allowed to go and play. The very fact that this was always referred to as a ‘job’ tells you a lot about my parents’ Calvinistic approach to gardening and child-rearing, but it was not up for discussion. They ran a tight ship and the work was expected to be done and done properly.

By and large I went along with this and eventually grew to see the garden as preferable to the playing. But for years there was one job I hated more than any other, which was turning the compost heap.

I dreaded it and regarded it as a particularly cruel punishment. This was for two reasons. The first was because I had once seen a rat in the compost heap and was thereafter convinced that it was permanently riddled with them, and disturbing it in any way would send them all running up my legs. I am not joking. I really believed this. The second was that the smell made me retch. It seemed to cling to me for days and everything I ate took on its faint but malodorous reek.

Perhaps the great care I take about making compost goes back to those early fears. Because good compost, made with care and attention, should be sweetsmelling, vermin-free and emanate a particular brand of goodness and wellbeing to gardener and garden alike.That goodness is not just down to its agreeable texture, colour and smell –although all those qualities are a good measure of whether your compost is turning out well. It is much more profound than that. Garden compost should be seen as a repository for the very essence of life in the soil without which few plants will grow and none will thrive. Get your compost heap working well and your garden will be well. It really is as fundamental as that.