In the middle of March the power sieve and generator arrived. During all of our building works a lot of good soil was probably taken away. In hindsight I wish I had done more to try to save it. But the time was just not available to us then and our priorities were focussed on other things. The turning of the compost was very time consuming before the power sieve arrived.
I am rather obsessive for some reason about compost. I love the idea that I can take my old plants, old tired compost, all my weeds, leaves, duck bedding, dog hair, house dust and even my old Christmas trees and mix it up to make lovely compost.
Just after Christmas last year we shredded three real Christmas trees and put them in three dalek compost bins mixed with grass cuttings and leaves. We layered the tree shredding’s in between the other items in thin layers and left them to rot down. The bins were not completely empty when we started and did contain some existing weeds and grass cuttings from earlier last year.
Nearly four months later and it was time to test the power sieve on the compost in the three daleks.
The results using the power sieve were really pleasing producing nine large bags of what should hopefully be ericaceous compost from the Christmas tree needles.
There was lots of matter not quite yet ready, which was easily filtered out with the power sieve and put back into the daleks for bagging up later in the year.
A week later I started on some of my other compost bays. These bays generally consisted of grass cuttings, leaves, weeds and poultry bedding. The plan was to get as much usable composted material out of the first bay to use as mulch in my flower borders, then to put any only partially composted material back into the bay. Then to repeat for the other two bays.
I got most of the bay cleared that day, but did return a couple of days later to just finish off the last bit.
The job was made harder by the long distances barrowing the finished compost to the flower beds which were located completely the other side of the plot.
