Steaming heap

Yesterday I wrote a piece about The Peat-Free Diet for the Oxfordshire Master Composter’s newsletter, and a quick case study about why I got involved with the project for the handbook. (If you’re curious, I talked about that in episode 67 of the Alternative Kitchen Garden Show.)

On New Year’s Eve I went out in the garden for a low effort potter and discovered that some serious worm bin maintenance was in order – the worms were evacuating the WasteJuggler (which is like a mini wheelie bin with a tap), which is a sign that conditions inside are unacceptable. It was my fault; I’d known for weeks that the tap had become blocked and liquid wasn’t draining, but hadn’t got around to doing anything about it.

After a quick wardrobe change, I got stuck in. I emerged about an hour later covered head to toe in brown goo and smelling like I’d been rolling around in a pig sty. The worms had been rescued, the finished compost harvested and the worm bin set up again; but it was one of those occasions when I had to get undressed in the Futility Room as I was too dirty to be allowed into the house.

I was reminded of an anecdote from WWII where a Land Girl who was assigned to work with the pigs wore her dungarees until they were stiff with muck. Then she sent them home to her mother for washing; the mother, short on supplies for her own garden, soaked them in water to loosen the dirt, then used that water as a liquid feed for her veggies…. :)

There’s no doubt that gardening can be dirty work, and that there’s money (and inspiration) in muck:


  • Manure, particularly the elusive “well-rotted horse manure”, is a perennial topic in garden writing. But anyone who has a guaranteed source of the stuff is unlikely to share that information!

  • You can also branch off into manure tea and other liquid manure preparations, or go the vegan route and talk about green manures.

  • Humanure is a still an almost taboo topic, but composting toilets are becoming a little more acceptable.

  • My garden has been fuelled by chicken manure for six years now. I haven’t thought about the effects that rehoming the chickens will have, but a shortage of material for composting could well be one of them.

  • There’s also the ongoing concern of manure contaminated by aminopyralid, a herbicide that is supposed to break down but clearly doesn’t do so quickly enough to prevent damage to vegetable crops.

Magic is something else entirely. Magic is things happening in a nice clean, effortless way. Magic is about seeing the end result but not how it came about. You know, the way that nature does things ;)