LAST year I moved into a house with a garden with enough space for a compost bin, found a phone number for an organisation that gives them away free and rang them up.

A week later I opened the front door one morning, to be greeted by a life-size black plastic 'Dalek' standing on the doorstep – the compost bin had arrived!

It was 5ft tall with a lid at the top to add the raw materials and a sliding door at the bottom for easy access to the end
product. It came with a small green kitchen bin for vegetable peelings and a roll of biodegradable bin bags.

After stationing it at the bottom of the garden in a sunny spot, we started collecting peelings, egg shells, apple cores, banana skins, old teabags, etc, to go in it. Toilet rolls and scrunched-up
cardboard eggboxes and cereal packets are good for creating pockets of air, which speeds up the composting process. Don't add cooked foods to the compost as these may attract rats.

All summer lots of weeds, grass cuttings, shrub prunings, and other excessive jungle growths from the garden went in too. The compost bin filled up. And got full of flies, worms, slugs and snails. But this is all part of the process. It filled up again and again as summer wore on. And every time I went to empty more into it, the level of compost had gone down. It had simply vanished – amazing! It's fascinating to see it change so fast, from peelings, weeds, and cardboard – into a kind of black soil-compost, in fact.



Like any kitchen bin, empty the scraps bin into your compost bin regularly to stop it smelling. When your biodegradable bags run out – you could buy more, but it's cheaper and better for the
environment to use newspaper instead to line the kitchen bin, as then you're not using another thing manufactured for the purpose. You can add some leaves, but large quantities of autumn leaves should be
composted separately as they take longer to decompose.

Sun
Don't add really evil weeds like bindweed, couch grass or ground elder, put these in a black plastic bag in the sun for a couple of months, to kill them off before composting.

The compost is ready when you can no longer recognise the original ingredients, and is dark brown or black. It should smell 'good' too – like rich soil, not decaying matter! If you've added to the heap gradually it will probably take about 12 months to reach this stage.

The longer the compost is left the finer the end product will be.
And then what to do with it once it's 'matured'?

Dig in to the top 15-20 cm of soil, in the warmer months, for vegetable plots, or use as a mulch on top of the soil around plants to prevent weed growth, and slow moisture evaporation from the surface of the soil.

Composting kitchen scraps not only reduces waste going to landfill, but creates a free compost which will improve the quality of your soil and increase the productivity of your garden. It also means you won't need to use artificial nitrogen-based fertilisers which add to greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and so adds to global warming, and can leak into water courses.

Any questions or problems, or to get a free compost bin, contact Lancashire Waste Partnership home composting project on 0845 658 8550, or see www.compost-it.org.uk.

The Sustainability Partnership brings together local groups and individuals to actively pursue a better quality of life for all. The partnership has developed a comprehensive vision and strategy for sustainable development in the Lancaster district. For more information see the council's website: www.lancaster.gov.uk/sustainability