How to Make a Cheap Compost Heap

Every garden NEEDS a compost heap. We've know this for years and we've made feeble attempts at having one but it's never been in an effective or formal format. Recently though I've spent hours researching and planning what to do with our organic waste (not the veggie scraps as these go to the chickens and worm farm - more the chicken manure and straw from their enclosure) but every option turned out to be prohibitively expensive... We thought of using wooden poles to build 3 side by side bins (until I got the quote for the poles!) Everything I thought of was to build square structures. I picked up an old gardening magazine this week that had a picture of a wire heap with no instructions or even a caption (maybe it wasn't even a compost heap at all!!) which got me onto google to find the best dimensions, etc. Loooong story short: the dimensions aren't very important! Turns out I had about 6 meters of sturdy wire mesh from fencing off chickens (it's about 1.5m wide) which I cut in half to make two 3 meter loops. All the designs I saw suggested using wire to connect the ends. Not this time! I decided to use cable ties (every 4 or so gaps) which are much more girl-friendly than wire and cutters and twisting :) Feeling a bit like a genius at this point (for this I apologise but will continue to bask until I do the next very blonde thing that makes me feel dumb again!). The structure is light enough for me to move all by myself which is great when you don't have male muscles readily available!

To start the compost building process you need to layer composting material: a layer of sticks at the bottom (helps with aeration) and then layers of green and brown until it's full. Green includes coffee grounds, manure, grass clippings, green leaves whilst brown is straw, dry leaves, paper, saw dust, twigs.

The biggest plus on this design is the cost efficiency: absolutely no expensive materials were needed to build it. On the negative side unfortunately it's near impossible to turn this pile. The only way I can think of off the top of my head is to pull the wire off the heap when you need to turn it and then turn but digging it back into the structure in a new location... this might work if you've got a bit of space between your two heaps for this purpose.

Happy Gardening! :)