 Growing Gardens
with Julia Hancock
Load of old rubbish
 Worms: an essential ingredient to good compost.
The importance of looking after our soils cannot be stressed strongly enough. Soils which are barren and arid are unable to support life, not just plant life, but the millions of microbes that go to make up a healthy earth.
The process of biodegradation is constant and relentless - the sun, the wind, the rain, the temperature, human and animal activity - all play a part in its process. In areas of intense cultivation, it is up to us to make sure the process continues, and the easiest way to guarantee that it does is to make compost and feed it back into the earth.
A lot has been written and broadcast about how to make compost, and there are some very elaborate contraptions and recipes available to those people who want to do it properly.
But what about us lazy folk who can't be bothered with all that mucking around? We just want to get rid of our rubbish without getting all scientific. In our climate, organic waste biodegrades rapidly, which widens our options for dealing with it.
The simplest thing to do is dig a small pit and pile in all your scraps, mowings and prunings. Pretty soon it will sink down, and the beauty of this arrangement is that the worms have easy access to all the goodies, which they'll then spread around as they move through the soil profile, excreting.
If you've got a large rambling garden, you don't even have to dig - just pile it up in a discreet spot, water it, and cover it with newspaper or cardboard (weighted down and disguised with mulch) and let nature do the rest. Of course, this only works for small pieces of refuse but its precisely these that make up a large percentage of each day's garden and home debris, particularly if you mix in junk mail and waste paper.
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