Compost is a fantastic resource that helps your plants to grow bigger and stronger. A favourite product of any avid gardener, it can be found in pretty much any garden centre in the country. However, did you know that it’s now easier than ever to make your own compost?

Making Compost is simple, and straightforward, and only requires a few bits and bobs found in your house and garden to get started. Check out our guide to compost below, which tells you everything you need to know about how to make compost at home.

• What Are the Benefits of Homemade Compost?
• How Do I Layer My Compost?
• What Goes into Compost?
• What Shouldn’t Go into Compost?

There are several different types of compost, with the most common being ericaceous compost and peat-free compost. Ericaceous compost is more acidic and allows for a certain type of plant to thrive within it. However, it can be too strong for other flowers and produce to thrive. Peat-free compost is more organic and made without peat materials. With peat bog depletion a serious problem in the UK nowadays, composts that are peat free tend to be favoured by the environmentally conscious. Homemade compost is different from both of these, though will be more similar to peat-free compost. 

There are plenty of benefits to homemade compost. Predominantly, it’s a great way to get rid of the waste that would usually go to a landfill. It also provides a home with a variety of wildlife throughout the winter months, when hibernation spaces are important for animals to find. The primary visitors to your compost heap will be insects, particularly worms, woodlice, and centipedes. These help to break down the waste on the heap into compost. 

If you’re a gardener, creating your own compost is a no-brainer. After all, it saves you money and increases the organic content within your soil. You don’t even need to stop buying compost from the shops if you don’t want to. Simply mix it with your homemade compost to vastly improve the quality. You can also mix your homemade compost with regular soil to give it a crucial boost in nutrients. 

Using this compost in your planters or raised beds can greatly boost fertility, which in turn helps your plants to build up resistance to natural threats such as disease and insect attack. Both of these threats tend to thrive in the late spring and summer months, right when your plant should be thriving. Therefore, it is important to ensure they are protected however you can. 

Compost is best layered in a certain way – this allows the different products to combine and break down more effectively, resulting in a more consistent blend of compost that is sure to yield more impressive results.

Layering your compost is a very simple process that requires only a few household or garden items that should be collected and placed before beginning your heap. Below, we’ve broken down how you should layer your compost from top to bottom.

Before you begin, you’ll need the following:

• An assortment of evenly sized bricks (for creating the base of your heap)
• A range of sticks (various shapes and sizes) to help with the draining of your compost heap
• A barrowful of manure or soil to help break down your compost
• Compostable ingredients
• Mulch matting or old carpet

When it comes to layering your compost, you can follow this handy guide:

Top Tip: As you continue to fill your compost heap, you won’t need to ensure soil-to-compost levels are completely even but be sure to top up your heap with soil, manure, or the droppings of vegetarian animals (like sheep, horses, or chickens) to continually breakdown your ingredients.

After around 3 months, you will want to turn over your heap. April is the best time to do this to avoid any animals, as hibernators will have left the heap to fill up on food and find a mate. Breeding animals will have also yet to set up a nest, meaning you’re far less likely to disturb any families when you’re turning over your heap.

There are a lot of waste products that can go into compost made at home, and the greater the variety, the better quality your compost will be. However, you should make sure that there is a good selection of nitrogen-rich waste (green waste) and carbon-rich waste (brown waste).

The chemical reactions these items will cause when placed in your heap will help to break waste down quicker and vastly improve compost quality.

Examples of green waste include:

• Annual Weeds – terrific for your compost heap and can be placed straight onto it once you’ve pulled them out of the ground
• Grass - a great way to dispose of your lawnmower clippings is to empty your bag straight onto your compost heap
• Nettle Leaves – nettles are another common weed that can be easily disposed of in your compost heap (just remember to wear gloves and long sleeves when handling)
• Teabags – make sure the bags themselves are biodegradable before placing them on your heap
• Fruit and Vegetable Peels – these break down effectively and are full of additional nutrients for your compost heap

Examples of brown waste include:

• Paper or Cardboard – both will decompose quite effectively once mixed in with the rest of your heap
• Straw – compost heaps are a great way to dispose of excess straw from your stables and hutches
• Sawdust – whether you’re a pet owner or a woodworker, disposing of your sawdust onto a compost heap will save you a great deal of hassle
• Pruning Remnants and Hedge Trimmings – if you’ve just given your hedges a trim, dispose of your clippings properly by placing them in your compost heap

Compost heaps are not alternatives to rubbish bins and should not be treated as such. While they serve as an excellent means of disposal for old vegetables and plant remnants, there are plenty of other things that can seriously harm your compost heap.

One of the most important pieces of waste to avoid placing on your compost heaps is meat. Meat decays in a very different way to compost-friendly waste matter and requires an entirely different clean-up team of creatures for it to properly decompose.

These creatures – which include everything from foxes to rats to maggots – are sure to come into direct conflict with the animals your heap is meant to aid and provide for. These creatures are also far more likely to spread disease.

For similar reasons, bones should also not be placed on your compost heap, and neither should the faecal matter of dogs or cats. This is because these animals eat a lot of meat, and again their droppings decompose in a distinctly different way to those of predominantly vegetarian animals such as rabbits, horses, and chickens.

You should also avoid the following waste:

• Dairy Products – similar to meat in the way it decays and the animals it is likely to attract
• Diseased Plants – may allow for disease to spread throughout your heap, threatening the creatures inside as well as surrounding plant life
• Printed Paper – slow to decay and will leak harmful chemicals into your heap.
• Perennial Weeds – will possibly re-root and spread all over your compost heap.
• Citrus – rots at a much slower rate and is also acidic, which makes it dangerous to worms
• Cooked Food – will likely decompose differently and prove incompatible with other compost-friendly waste matter
• Metals and Plastics – will not decay effectively
• Autumn Leaves – while not as harmful as other waste matter on this list, these can be used instead to make leafmould