Turn Turn Turn

It's a while since I did a compost-heap work-out. Can it really be three years since I did this? It certainly didn't feel familiar when I set to the task mid-morning on 10th Sep 2024 [heck'n'jiminy, that's two weeks ago]. It also seemed a bit redundant, because I still had two bags of 'friable loam' = sieved compost from when(ever) I last did it. Nevertheless the primary input bin was getting kinda full and something had to be done. It was higher than it might have been because I had been mucking out under the trees where the sheep are wont to rest up; and I'd added a bagful of dung to the compost bin. I sort of wrote off Bin3 of the three-bin process because the second bin (having been festering for an unknown age) felt and looked pretty good after I'd sieved it through a Tesco-crate. Here's what's left [zip zero zonders] in the second bin after an hour of shovel, sieve and bagging:

Note the white floor: two corrugated election posters effectively stop tree roots from robbing the nutritive value of the compost from below. I went back to the task at tea-time and forked the intake-bin into the vacated middle bin:

I left a few scoops of starter in the intake bin, added a basket of grass clippings and another bag of sheep-shit then gave it all a good stir. It's now ready for kitchen waste and rhubarb leaves.

Did I say I sieved the stuff before bagging? I did! This has a number of benefits 

① It breaks up the clods and allows obvious nettle-roots to be discarded
② It develops upper-body strength
③ It turns up a lot of things before they go back to the veg-beds. Things that do not compost include wine corks, avocado stones and teabag bags. 

The white bucket [R above] is mainly full of grey rags which once held 2g of tea and now remind me of nothing so much as the wretched public laundromat in Tramore eeuw!. I've implemented a 2024 regime of ripping open and emptying tea-bags into the compost to scotch this problem at source. I am also being encouraged to use more loose tea in a pot.
w.t.f. are teabags made of?; and do we really want to be consuming a hot-water infusion of the stuff??

Judy and Pete do Turn turn turn