Our composting workshop is the place where everything ends and everything starts again. A beautiful corner hub where we store our garden tools and work hard to turn the site’s “waste” into nutritious compost, with the help of millions of bugs, bacteria, fungi and microbes.

 

We have two composting methods, a three-tier open-air compost system and a hot bin. In our open-air compost heaps, all the “waste” from our gardens and cooking, both the carbon-rich browns (dry leaves, dry woody plants/stems, shredded/chipped wood, straw, cardboard) and nitrogen-rich greens (fresh grass clippings, weeds/trimmings, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and tea) gets layered in the first pit (dedicated to the undigested stuff). Effective layering means making a lasagna with a ratio of two parts brown and one part green. Once some of these has been digested, it is moved to the second pit, where it keeps digesting. The final pit contains the totally digested matter, a crumbly mix ready to go back to the soil as nutrient-rich compost. 

 

The hot bin is a closed bin where we can compost food scraps including meat, fish and dairy, weed seeds and diseased plants, which should not be composted in the open air.