Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Perfect Compost: A Practical Guide
    Perfect Compost: A Practical Guide
    Perfect Compost: A Practical Guide
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Perfect Compost: A Practical Guide

    By Simon Akeroyd and National Trust Books

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Learn how to make and use nourishing compost for your garden with this handy little guidebook from an experienced National Trust head gardener.

    Learn how to make and use nourishing compost for your garden with this handy little guidebook from an experienced National Trust head gardener.

    It's packed with useful tips for successful composting, from deciding what to put in your kitchen compost caddy to how to use the final product in your garden.

    The author discusses the various composting set-ups you can choose, from simple plastic cone-shaped ‘Dalek’ bins to ingenious hand-rotated barrels and elaborate solar-powered hot composting systems, and gives full instructions to make a professional-looking three-bay compost heap from old pallets. Also covered are unusual and innovative techniques such as keyhole gardening and lasagne planting, and there’s a guide to wormeries and, for the very adventurous, snaileries.

    He also reveals the many uses to which compost can be put in your garden, and not just to grow plants in – as a top dressing to keep your lawn looking fresh and green, as mulch for your flower beds, or, in liquid form, as a powerfully nutritious plant feed. And there’s a handy guide to which bits of kitchen waste you can put into your compost, and which you really shouldn’t. Finally, if you’ve always wanted an exceptionally environmentally friendly composting toilet, instructions are here.

    Beautifully illustrated throughout, this practical guide contains all the advice you'll ever need to get your compost going and use it to help your garden thrive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMay 1, 2020
    ISBN9781911657279
    Perfect Compost: A Practical Guide
    Author

    Simon Akeroyd

    Simon Akeroyd has worked as Garden Manager at both the National Trust and the RHS, and as a horticultural researcher and writer at the BBC. In addition to his writing activities, he is the proprietor of an artisan cider company. He is the author of Perfect Pots, Perfect Lawns, Perfect Pruning and The Good Gardener.

    Read more from Simon Akeroyd

    Related to Perfect Compost

    Related ebooks

    Gardening For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      True Blues

      Feb 22, 2019

      True Blues
      6 min read

    • Article

      Amazing Shade Garden Ideas

      Feb 1, 2022

      Amazing Shade Garden Ideas
      7 min read

    • Article

      Cover A Lot Of Ground With Winter Cover Crops

      Sep 11, 2020

      Cover crops have many benefits for your garden soil, and for the food crops you’ll later plant in their place. (See “5 Benefits of Cover Crops,” Page 55.) To reap these benefits, you’ll need to cultivate strong stands of growth that can suppress weed

      8 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Split It

      Dec 21, 2023

      Let’s Split It
      5 min read

    • Article

      Winter

      May 30, 2024

      Winter
      5 min read

    • Article

      Making The Cut

      Feb 27, 2019

      Making The Cut
      4 min read

    • Article

      What’s Pestering You?

      Jul 14, 2023

      Pest prevention wasn’t much of a problem in Nevada. Our biggest hazard was black widows. Carelessness meant painful bites and possibly antivenin. They crept in dark corners and under cabinets—essentially, anywhere we didn’t sweep often. Black widows

      2 min read

    • Article

      Hoya

      Apr 1, 2020

      Hoya
      3 min read

    • Article

      How to Grow Peonies From Seed

      Apr 5, 2022

      If you’re like me, you deadhead your peonies (Paeonia spp. and hybrids) right after they bloom to keep the plants neater, so you may never have noticed them setting seed. And they don’t regularly volunteer, or produce abundant seedlings, like other p

      3 min read

    • Article

      To PINCH OR NOT TO PINCH?

      May 23, 2023

      To PINCH OR NOT TO PINCH?
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Garden of Rebirth

      Mar 13, 2020

      The Garden of Rebirth
      10 min read

    • Article

      Make Vibrant Clay Paints

      Jul 12, 2024

      Make Vibrant Clay Paints
      7 min read

    • Article

      Found In Translation

      Apr 20, 2023

      Found In Translation
      4 min read

    • Article

      Smarter Gardening

      Jul 14, 2023

      Smarter Gardening
      4 min read

    • Article

      Propagation For Beginners!

      Jan 25, 2022

      Propagation For Beginners!
      6 min read

    • Article

      Saving Seeds

      Aug 7, 2024

      Saving Seeds
      2 min read

    • Article

      Our Plotter Of The Month

      Feb 22, 2022

      Our Plotter Of The Month
      3 min read

    • Article

      Home Grown

      Apr 5, 2022

      Home Grown
      8 min read

    • Article

      Herb Appeal

      Mar 2, 2020

      Herb Appeal
      3 min read

    • Article

      Colorful Character

      Nov 4, 2022

      Colorful Character
      3 min read

    • Article

      Get Your Kids Gardening!

      Nov 15, 2021

      Get Your Kids Gardening!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Cottage Garden delight

      Jun 24, 2021

      Cottage Garden delight
      6 min read

    • Article

      CUTTING & CONDITIONING FLOWERS

      Jun 2, 2020

      Cutting a stem does cause a flower a certain amount of shock but there’s lots to do to give it a happy indoor life. One of the most helpful tricks is to gather your flowers early in the day, while it’s cooler and the bloom is full of energy. The cool

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Perfect Compost

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Perfect Compost - Simon Akeroyd

      INTRODUCTION

      This book will encourage you to try composting at home. Not only does homemade compost make a great soil improver, it is also a practical way of managing your kitchen and garden waste.

      Despite all the known benefits of gardening, recycling and creating a sustainable planet, according to a 2014 survey conducted by the UK waste management company Business Waste, 97 per cent of the population have never composted or had a compost heap. This is a great shame, particularly as we are a nation of gardeners, with gardening recognised as the nation’s number one hobby.

      There are a number of possible reasons for this lack of composting among British households, but the main three are as follows. Firstly, people perceive it as hard, time-consuming work. Secondly, they don’t think they have enough outdoor space. And thirdly, they think it requires skills that they don’t possess.

      Additionally, very often composting is seen as one of the dark arts: an esoteric, magical process, as plant and kitchen waste is transformed into gardening ‘gold’ that only the horticultural equivalent of an alchemist is capable of achieving. It is often seen as beyond the skills and realm of the average person to produce good compost in the garden.

      This book aims to debunk these myths, and to show that creating compost doesn’t have to be hard work or time-consuming, hardly requires any space, and is actually relatively easy. Whether you have a tiny courtyard garden or a huge country estate, there is almost always enough room for composting. Compact, modern compost bin designs mean they can be squeezed into the tiniest of spaces. In addition, using contemporary, sometimes beautifully coloured materials for your compost facilities can look chic and fashionable and help you to show off your ‘green’ environmental credentials to your neighbours.

      This book is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, we outline why it is a good idea to make compost at home. Reasons for this include reducing our environmental impact on the planet, saving time and money, and improving growing conditions in the garden. In the second chapter, we explore the different types of composting facilities you can install in your garden, ranging from large composting bays made from recycled pallets to compact, labour-saving types that can be rotated simply by turning a handle. In the third and final chapter we cover how to make compost, including the science behind the art and a list of the top 10 tips on how to create perfect compost.

      Compost-making is very rewarding and you’re doing something great for the environment, but, most of all, it is fun, and it’s definitely worth giving it a try.

      illustration

      SPREADING THE MESSAGE

      Growing plants is good for the environment and yet, despite a general increase in gardening over the last few decades, green spaces are being lost all the time to property and land developers. In urban areas, owners are covering over gardens with concrete, block paving and patios, especially front gardens, which are often converted into driveways and parking spaces. This is damaging to the environment as it leads to a dramatic reduction in wildlife habitats and biodiversity, as well as a loss of garden plants, including the trees and shrubs that absorb excess carbon and pollution from the atmosphere and pump out clean oxygen for us to breathe.

      Almost as importantly, fewer plants in urban settings, coupled with more gardens covered with these impermeable surfaces, will dramatically exacerbate the problem of ‘run-off’ during the increasing rainfall we are currently experiencing, inevitably leading to increased incidence of flooding.

      Adding compost to your front garden and keeping your personal space green and full of life rather than turning it into a parking space will reduce considerably the likelihood of flash flooding, since the organic material not only improves drainage but naturally absorbs water like a sponge, gradually releasing it as and when plants require it. Because of this, it is more important than ever that people are encouraged to make their own compost and use it to grow better plants, which in turn may well inspire other people to create gardens, to value green spaces and to reverse this trend of rapid decline in urban and city environments. A gorgeous front garden, packed full of healthy plants because they are growing in lovely homemade compost, is a wonderful advertisement to encourage others to grow plants, reuse their own green waste and create a greener planet.

      illustration

      Adding homemade compost to a front garden can create a lush, wildlife-friendly space, looks more attractive than a driveway, and is better for the environment.

      illustration

      COMPOSTING ISN’T A DIRTY WORD

      The compost area is the engine room of the garden. A garden’s sustainability and environmental credentials are definitively improved by recycling garden waste.

      Sadly, in the past, many garden designers have treated composting as almost an afterthought, once all the niceties of designing and planting a garden have been done. Yet an effective and efficient compost site is probably the single most important aspect of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1