Compost - Ken Thompson

Compost the natural way to make food for your garden. By Ken Thompson.

You may wonder why on earth you , I or anyone , would buy a whole book about nothing but rubbish !
You are right to be curious and here is the reason.....

I have a vegetable garden. I have been 'helping' the vegetables to grow in it for the last two years. I say helping because I cant really claim to be actually making the plants grow. I mean, ...
...the book..

Compost in the natural way of things, makes itself. The weeds or plants die and the dead stuff rots down and is eaten by worms and lived in by insects and gives itself back to the ground but we gardeners know better! Well we think we do. We pull out the plants and throw them away or burn them and the earth sits there being earth, it has lost its goodness because the plants used it up and sooner or later if nothing is done, ... more

Compost the natural way to make food for your garden. By Ken Thompson.

You may wonder why on earth you , I or anyone , would buy a whole book about nothing but rubbish !
You are right to be curious and here is the reason.....

I have a vegetable garden. I have been 'helping' the vegetables to grow in it for the last two years. I say helping because I cant really claim to be actually making the plants grow. I mean, I cleared the weeds away which were quite happily taking up all the space and planted seeds there instead, of things we could eat but they do all the growing themselves.
I'm more like their keeper.
Anyway to get to the book..

Compost in the natural way of things, makes itself. The weeds or plants die and the dead stuff rots down and is eaten by worms and lived in by insects and gives itself back to the ground but we gardeners know better! Well we think we do. We pull out the plants and throw them away or burn them and the earth sits there being earth, it has lost its goodness because the plants used it up and sooner or later if nothing is done, the earth is like dry concrete, nothing will grow there.

I needed help! No not at the hospital or in therapy :)

I needed a way to get the stuff I took out of the mud, back in again.
I went to the bookshop and stared at the gardening books in rows clutching my £10 WHSmiths voucher. I kept passing over a fat light brown book entitled compost Ken Thompson.
My eyes would halt for just a moment but my brain said "don't be daft £10 gift vouchers are for books about gardening not how to collect rubbish, I need a book about the whole rigmarole."
However my hand went to the book and I opened it.
Just recently we had cut the whole hedge on one side and it is all sitting in bags hidden behind the shed. I thumbed through and found 'woody garden waste' and followed the references until I found a whole lot of suggestions for what to do with my clippings. My hands shook.
Having just hacked a renegade and ancient rose to the ground where it lay in a heap scratching our legs and avoiding the mower,
I looked at good and bad clippings and discovered that rose is great for composting .Yes!

I bought the book and took it home ,reading the whole thing that evening. My husband kept giving me odd looks.

The book itself is a hardbacked edition with coloured photographs on every second page and is divided into 5 sections

Understanding compost...........................The right stuff
Yes I know it is an odd title but it does make sense. Firstly Mr Thompson tells us about how compost is made naturally and incorporated by the plants and animals.
He looks at what compost is composed of and which things are beneficial and which are detrimental to the process. He discusses the elements needed and which plants have them.

Making Compost.......................................Paper,Prunings and Patience
Next we learn about different ways of making compost including the hot method of making a heap and turning it often, the leaving it to get on with it ,itself method (sounds good to me) and the problems of too much grass,wood etc . This is an very interesting section if you are finding your compost is not really getting any oomph! It discusses how much of everything should be included in the compost for the perfect recipe. I was interested to see that paper and egg boxes and loo rolls were beneficial.

Compost bins.........................................Wood ,wire and worms
This is the section on which kind of bins to have. If you are thinking of starting your own composting ,this section is worth buying the book for alone.
It covers which kinds of bins are available commercially and looks at wether they are actually worth it. I was interested to see that the end over end tumbler bins which are very expensive, were heavy to turn and didn't do that much better than ordinary cheap bins (Wow! I had , had my eye on one of those, Mr Thompson just saved me about £60). There are suggestions for homemade bins which are very interesting, including some made of wire and cardboard, pallets,plastic bags and builders bags. He mentions moveable bins which you can site on your veg plot to take advantage of the runoff and there are even bins that look like bee hives.
He talks about making use of the heat from the compost in growing things and includes a bit about wormeries too.

Using compost.................................digging is for dummies
This bit is really about how to tell wether the compost is ready and what to do with it when it is. How to use it as mulch and why it is not always worth digging it in.
He even mentions making potting compost which is very handy for me as I got through bags and bags of shop bought potting compost the first year I turned veg gardener.

No heap,no problem........................grow your own compost
This bit discusses what to do when you dont want an actual bin of compost in your garden but would still like to compost anyway. It suggests using shreddings and mowings directly on the garden and keeping a small plot of your garden for a direct composting approach. We did this with a bean trench last year, just chucking the kitchen waste into a long hole all autumn and winter and then covering with a bit of soil. The beans loved it. There is a small section about green manures which are actually plants you grow to just chop up and dig into the soil . We tried this with mustard and also grazing rye it does seem to have helped the potatoes this time around.

Troubleshooting
This handy little section is only 3 pages long but very useful.Giving the downfalls and solutions to composting.

Right at the back is a double page of useful addresses.
...........................................................................................................................................

I found this book very very useful. My first impression was that it was another book padded out with colour photographs as seems to be the norm lately but I changed my mind the minute I started to look through it properly in the shop.

Luckily this book is reduced to £9.99 in WHSmiths at present from £12.99 so my gift voucher covered the whole cost hooray!

Compost the natural way to make food for your garden by Ken Thompson
Published by Dorling Kindersley
ISBN: 978 1 40531 103 8 

...less