At last, something that's easy

Hurrah! It turns out there is one thing that we've been doing right all these years. And that thing is next to effortless. That thing has just rewarded us in an unexpected way.

That thing is making compost. You'll remember that while my patch of garden has suffered from years of general neglect I have, from time to time, had these small and temporary bouts of determination. In one such flurry, I bought two compost bins from my local council, stuck them in the garden and read a thing about how to make this "brown gold".

Recipe

The good news is that all you do to make good compost is bung all that crap from your kitchen and home into the bins. When I say "all that crap", I mean:

Fruit and vegetable peelings and offcuts

Coffee grounds and used tea bags

Eggshells

Black and white newspaper, cardboard and printer paper

Grass cuttings and most other vegetation

The white cover that The Guardian Weekend comes in now

What you shouldn't put in:

Meat, fish, bones, fats

Coloured or shiny paper

Weeds of the spreading kind

And then: forget about it. Yes, it's that simple. You can go in and turn it, and the gardening books advise that you do, but we didn't touch it and seems to have made no difference.

We basically did nothing other than throw things into the bins for several years, until we found ourselves gardening in lockdown and compost is not that easy to find. Tentatively, we opened the doors to these old compost bins. And while we've been forgetting about the garden, the crap has been busy turning itself into beautiful, soft, crumbly compost.

Lakeland, shame on you

Bit of naming and shaming here though. Ages ago, I bought a sort of caddy for used tea bags from Lakeland, which came with "compostable" bags so you can just lift them all out and bung them straight into the bin. After a while we couldn't be bothered to keep buying these bags, though we still shoved the tea bags into the compost. We reckon it's at least five years since we last used a Lakeland "compostable" bag. And yet there they still are in the compost bins, perfectly intact and not broken down at all.

Feeling somewhat cheated about this! So if you see these things in the shop and you're tempted, don't succumb.

I can honestly say I am as excited at seeing the results of the composting as I am about some of the (teeny) green shoots that're peeking out of the pots. If you do nothing else, do composting!