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by Laura Wilson

In 2005 I moved into my first home with a garden, I was so excited about the possibilities of this outdoor living space and it really was a blank canvas ready for me to make my mark on. Looking around the dark wood chip covered area my mind sprang into action with all the things I could do with the space. One thing was clear I was going to need compost and lots of it.

Having just become fanatical about recycling I decided that the need for compost was just a good opportunity for me to expand my green horizons and make my own compost, turning the food we would throw away into something we could use to cultivate our perfect garden.

I hit the net and discovered that a wormery was the most suitable way of composting for us. However not keen to part with very much money I decided to make my own version using an old water butt as the container and ordered the worms online. In 2 days I was all set to go. Placing the required elements in the water butt and the worms I was really pleased and excited about the compost these little worms would be generating for me soon.

However the next morning disaster had struck. All the worms had escaped, never being one to give up that easily I decided this was only a minor set back, the worms would be doing their wormy magic in my existing soil and I would just have to use the water butt as a regular composter. Over the next few moths I religiously place all vegetable waste in the composter and turned the compost as much as I could.

When summer finally arrived I was excited about putting my compost to good use in the garden, excitedly I opened the water butt only instead of finding wonderful compost ready for use I was greeted with a foul smelling mass of half decomposed food. And the immense problem of how to get rid of it!

It took several trips to the tip in order to dispose of most of it and we did bury some of it in the garden. It has to be said the area of the garden where the slurry was buried does really thrive however I think the moral of this story and what my garden was trying to tell me, all be it the hard way, is that if you're thinking of creating your own compost buy the correct tools for the job first!

Learn more about this author, Laura Wilson.

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True gardening stories: What my garden taught me - the hard way

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