Muck spreading and soil glazing

This morning the weather was perfect for a spot of gardening. I'm being very sensible and not rushing to sow any seeds. Luckily, in my super compost bin,  there was some lovely compost all ready to spread about the Garden of Love. 

 

After emptying one compost bin, we transferred the contents of the other bin to give it all a good mix about. Look at the clever red worms breaking up all our food waste.

Meanwhile, Jon started taking apart our old windows and dotting them around the garden to start warming the soil up. It's not quite a coldframe yet, but we're getting there.

Modifications

After mixing up my tasty compost with my Mum the other day I realised that our compost bin was a bit too tall. It was hard to reach in when moving my compost and I got a bit grazed heaving buckets of the good stuff in. So I decided to take the top off. Jon bought us a new saw and we got to work.

The good stuff

Mum Guthrie came down to keep me company during my 2 weeks of unemployment and do some gardening today. This seems like a good excuse to show you some pictures of my Alys-wanna-be garden.

Look! Isn't it beautiful? And I can eat almost all of it!

Can you spot Mum doing some weeding next to the sunflowers?

Courgettes and beans and calendular and sunflowers!

Strawberries and chives and thyme!

Red chard and purple cabbages bring some tasty colour to the garden. I can't believe how far it's come in so few months. Can't believe what it looked like in December!

While Mum was here I also made her help me turn the compost into my new bin. This is because it would be dirty and a bit smelly and require heavy lifting and these are some of the things my Mum likes most about gardening, along with serious pruning.

Putting the tasty brown stuff in the new bin.

Giving it a good stir.

Red worms! Scrumptious!

Composting

While I was spending a few days swanning around Pisa with my cousin, Jon got his parents over to the House of Love to put in some work. I came back to a tidied front garden (how does it get so messy and weed-strewn?), some lovely new daisy-like flowers in the back garden, and my longed-for second compost bin.

This means I'll be able to move my compost from one bin to the other getting lots of lovely air in there to help the bacteria break everything down that little bit quicker. It also means I can have one compost bin for collecting and one for using, no more having to decant the compost bin into bags!

They sensibly built the new bin over the MASSIVE tree stump in the garden thereby using up some otherwise dead space.

Look, it's got a special door to help me get at all that lovely compost.

What a stylish compost bin, made from reused pallets don't you know.

So now I have a black bin to put all the yuk in while it breaks down and a nice wooden bin for all the lovely tasty nearly ready compost to do it's last rotting.