Yes in My Backyard

‘Gallus gallus’, the red junglefowl, once roamed wild in the forests of South Asia, but has, through long years of selective breeding, become quite a different creature. Despite this, ‘chooks’ – as we like to call them in Australia – still love to scratch and forage for their food, roll in the dust out in…

This week the Compost Conversation has enlisted the help of local vet and large animal specialist, Dr Paul O’Connor, to better understand horse health and what that means for our compost. Paul grew up on a farm, has a long-term affinity with large farm animals and is a partner at Kangaroo Flat Vet Clinic. In…

Animal manures can be fantastic additions to our compost recipe, in fact their use pre-dates deliberate compost making in the Western tradition. In traditional English and European agriculture, animal manures, rather than compost, were the main form for returning fertility to the soil. Farms almost always included a diversity of animals; horses, ‘house’ cows or…

Back in the early 20th century, Sir Albert Howard (often called the father of modern organic agriculture) brought the Indore method of hot composting from the farms of India and China to a ‘western’ audience. Hot composting, as we now practise it, is a direct descendant of that work. Howard was born in Shropshire, England,…

Can I put wood ash from my fire in the compost? It’s a question we are often asked here at YIMBY. As with anything involving living systems, the answer is never an easy ‘yes’ or ‘no’. So, let’s have a little dive into ash and its potential uses. Ash is the non-combustible residue that is…

Managing the outputs of a cool compost bin can get complicated, particularly if we only have one bin, where we can find ourselves with finished compost in the bottom and fresh food scraps at the top. Cool composting is so much easier if we have two bins that can rotate functions, an active one for…

I’ll let you in on a little compost secret. A well set up cool composting bin and a worm-farm are pretty indistinguishable. Scandalous, I know, but here’s the reason why. Good compost is made with a good balanced blend of materials (if you have missed it you can read up on our favourite topic at…

The logic of compost tumblers goes like this: Lack of aeration makes compost piles stinky and slow. By turning the compost regularly, we add air through the pile and the compost will break down faster and not smell. Sounds good… in theory. If our approach to composting is to ‘Tip and Run’, a tumbler will…

For many people, the compost pile is as far away from the house as it can be, tucked right down in a back corner of the garden. Unfortunately, most of the things we need to make good compost, like garden tools and access to water, can be out of reach in these neglected corners.Let’s have…

There is nothing quite so satisfying for me as heading outside on a frosty morning to feed the chooks, passing the compost pile and scratching the ice of the thermometer dial to reveal it is a very steamy 65 degrees in there, just under the straw. Now, you may have heard (because it is repeated…

“In a good economy there would be no such thing as waste” writes farmer and poet, Wendell Berry. We know this is true of natural systems, where anything that builds up too much, soon becomes a resource for another species or part of the system. Our industrial economy hasn’t quite comprehended this yet, with ‘wastes’…