Day 5 – A Week of Work in my Summer Vegetable Garden

Day Five – Time to tidy up the piles of organic material that have been accumulating over the last four days. Before I can get the new compost built I need to sort out the existing composts by flipping them into new bays. Then the build can begin!

There is so much work to do in my garden at the moment that I thought I’d challenge myself to get out there every day and get something done. To keep me on track and sticking to the program I’m also releasing a video every day for a week as well. If I commit to you guys then surely I’ll get all that work done!
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Hi there I’m Linda and this is Hutton Valley permaculture well it’s day five of my week of work in the summer vegetable garden over the last 4 days I’ve done quite a bit of work and created a big pile of garden waste so to deal with all of that today we’re going

To make a compost before we get started on making the new compost I have to sort out the three compost bins that are here already this one is the one I’ve been grabbing compost from for my garden now there’s just a small amount of compost

Here but what I like to do with that is just get all of that fine compost off the um bottom of the area and put it in a bucket and I usually siiv that and I use the compost uh then for seed raising and I found that that really helps the

Seeds along enormously now this one I’ll flip then into there and the third one which is the newest compost I’ll flip into this spin so that the new compost can be made down the end so for the moment I’m just going to scrape the top

Off and then before I do my htting mix I will sift all of this so I’m just getting the soort of the top layer and I just try to avoid getting into the soil but just getting all of this beautiful stuff which is perfect once you get it sved now I’ve

Got some of that gold saved I’m going to get this one flipped into there there’s some evidence of Little Bush rats I have quite a few little rats in the front garden and uh they often like to make a home in my compost so

That is one of the reasons I do like to kind of flip them every so often just to move everyone on now when I’m flipping I do try and get the drier outer edges of the um compost into the middle first before moving all the sort of more de

Composed Center area and that can go on the outside in the new pile there’s all the workers there they’re busy in this pile got that bin all empty now and flipped into this one now that compost is decomposing nicely but I’ll give it a bit more time and that will allow all

That uh dry material that we put in first to moisten up and decompose and I’m just going to Chuck all this cardboard back on top it kind of helps to keep the the moisture in it was a one solid piece when I put it on and now we’ll just do

The same with this one and flip it into this bin I built this compost oh a month or so ago you can see it’s sort of dried out on the edges so I’ll see if it needs any more moisture once we’ve flipped it I didn’t really cut down the pieces very

Small so it might be challenging to move but I find um chopping it all up just takes a lot of time and I don’t always have that time I’ve still got the little thermometer in the middle and uh just in the green section it was it did

Heat up quite a bit initially so we’ll see how we go moving this one but I’m anticipating a bit of a workout you can see all the life scarring about in this compost they underneath that fairly dry layer and this is more the um manure layer I did

Water this down really well well there’s some of my green plums looks like they ripened in the compost so we’ll get this moved now yeah a lot harder when you haven’t cut up all your material to flip it this Bay is as empty as I’m going to get

I don’t mind having a little bit of the old compost waiting for the new one to be built it just helps it get started really now this compost it looks quite dry on the outside but this is what the bottom layer look like and it’s decomposing really well there is quite a

Lot of moisture in there and I don’t think I need to add anything else to it but I will get a uh bit of cardboard board and cover that over just to make sure that moisture stays in place so now we can get on to building the new

Compost now I’ve got my old Garden waste here from the last few days and some from previous as well I’ve also harvested the rest of the comfrey that was down in my veggie patch and that’s all there you can see the difference between the fresh stuff and this is the

Um comfrey that I harvested the other day which is already composing I have been out to the pasture and collected a few buckets of manure so I think we’re ready to build I’m just going to start the compost with some of the running grasses I really want them

To be exposed to heat so it really kills the root so I’m getting a lot of those in first or in the lower layers and I’m Trucking some of my fresh comfrey and some you are there’s going to be a lot of nitrogen in the compost pile from all

The garden waste so I like to add in plenty of shredded uh wood chips and uh branches and stuff to balance it out and increase the carbon and once I’ve got a few layers in I’ll just make sure I get it really moist then I just keep layering it

Up I generally try and spread the manure around oh nice big fat worm in our compost pile look that one for beauty it’s like a little little snake oh poping back back in there you go mate there he goes and a bit more water pretty basic uh method of

Containment but it seems to work okay now I can get to filling it right up just a a couple of layers left to go one of which I nearly forgot I’ve been helping out at an alpaca shearing day for a couple of days and still got a

Couple more to go and rather than sending all of this to landfill um I offered to compost it I do have a other piles which I’m going to use for mulching trees but this is the bits with all the bits of manure and uh really uh contaminated FL

So that will be good all recycled in my compost now fleece and hair do add quite a bit of nitrogen to a compost so that should break down nicely bit more water and a cover of cardboard and I think we’re done well that’s just a bag of compost that’s

Going to weit down the uh cardboard now I will be adding some of the garden trimmings that I didn’t quite fit in today as it sinks a little bit over the next uh 3 or 4 days and then I’ll be flipping it all out once it’s hot and

Then back in again and then generally I’ll let it sit there for a while I will flip it down the track like I have done with these other two just to get the edges in and make sure they’re decomposing as well but other than that um you know a few flips and that’s

That’s good to go in my book I hope you’ve enjoyed day five if you haven’t seen day 1 to 4 I’ll leave a link to your playlist thanks so much for watching and bye for now