Tips for making compost (organic matter your garden will thank you for)

The fact that you need to add organic matter to pretty much every type of soil means you need to know what sort of organic matter to add. Slugs are technically organic matter, but you don't want to go growing your vegetables in a sea of live slugs, for instance (although I do seem to be accidentally making the attempt).

Meat and dairy are other no-nos. They attract vermin. What you want is compost:

The composter that came with the garden

Which leads to the question of where do you get compost from. Obviously, you can buy bags of it from a garden centre, but, for a much smaller investment in cash, but an admittedly bigger investment in time, you can make your own (and get rid of your garden and some kitchen waste into the bargain), so here are some tips for making your own compost.

Things you can compost:

• grass clippings
• leaves, stems and flowers from weeds
• roots from weeds or other plants that you know the plant can't grow back from
• vegetable peelings
• raw vegetables
• roots of perennial weeds or plants that have been soaked in a bucket of water for 6 weeks (this is excellent news, I thought I had to put my dandelion roots in the green waste the council picks up, but actually, I can just drown them into a state of decay they can't recover from)
• twigs and branches if small or chopped up small
• hedge trimmings
• dead or unwanted plants (if undiseased)
• hay/straw
• paper or cardboard*
• manure/droppings from herbivorous (vegetarian) animals such as horses, rabbits, guinea pigs (or you can just put this straight on the garden)
• egg shells

Don't compost:

• nothing but grass clippings, straw and hay (on their own they make bad compost)
• seeds
• raw or cooked meat, dairy, eggs
• cooked food in general**
• roots of perennial weeds or plants - but particularly of hard-to-eradicate weeds such as dandelion, bindweed or mare's tail (unless you've soaked them for 6 weeks)
• large branches or logs (unless chopped or chipped)
• diseased plants or leaves
• the poo of non-herbivorous animals (e.g. dogs, cats, foxes, humans)

* I don't advise intentionally adding lots of newspaper, paper or card and certainly not books or glossy magazines to your compost heap, because when I went through the compost the previous people in my house had made I found whole books and more or less still readable newspapers in the midst of otherwise well rotted material. I think the information that you can compost these things more means that when you clear out your guinea-pig cage, you can chuck all of the straw, droppings and weed-on newspaper straight into the compost heap and don't have to separate out the newspaper for separate disposal. In fact, cardboard is even part of the no-dig method of gardening. I'm also reassured that I probably can actually use the compost I found in my compost heap, the fact I found whole books and newspapers in it was just them being overly enthusiastic on composting paper.

** As far as we can make out, the ban on cooked food is because it usually contains meat or dairy or is oily and this attracts vermin. If you've got a bit of cooked broccoli with no butter or oil, it's hard to see the problem.

Other tips for composting:

• Worms help, they eat what you put in and excrete nice, usable compost, so encourage worms if you can. 
• If you can, situate the compost heap on soil rather than concrete. Micro-organisms from the soil will also speed up the decay and composting process. You can compost on concrete if you want, the people who made compost in my garden before me successfully did. It'll just take longer.
• Keep your compost heap moist (water if necessary), if it dries out, it will stop composting.
• If you live in a slug-prone area, don't leave your weeds lying on the soil after weeding, it encourages slugs and snails, put them in the compost heap (I'm not yet sure what the answer is to the fact that my compost heap also attracts slugs and snails).
• If you produce more grass clippings than your compost heap can cope with, you can use them as a mulch instead.