unknown 0:53

I don't know.

Arthur Cole 1:14

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast. With me, Arth. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. This week we meet Pete, compost guru of the Newt. Pete takes us through the process of compost making from raw materials, microbial activity through to finished black gold. We learn about the key elements at work, the temperatures achieved, and the timescales required. He offers tips to the home compost maker and sheds a light on industrial scale composting. Let's jump straight into it. Pete! Hello! We're here down at your compost pad. This episode I feel has been in the making for a while. I think our audience are fellow compost lovers. And if you love compost, Pete, your playground is probably the Alton Towers of playgrounds, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yeah, it's perfectly designed to do it. And um especially having this concrete pad, and it's basically perfect conditions for us to make really good quality compost, and also we've got all the uh nice equipment to make it a lot easier as well.

Arthur Cole 2:49

Okay, so we're standing here at the entrance to the compost pad. We're looking north back towards where the formal gardens of the newt are. Just for anyone who's listening in from the other side of the world and who's never been to the newt and never been down to your compost pad, just give us a quick description of what we're looking at here.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

So I think it I think it's 10,000 square feet, concrete floor, and on the outside you've got these large bays, I'd say you call them, of varying size. The sides are three metres high, and in them you can store material. So, like mixture of those would be you know, wood chips we've got here from our tree work, all the green waste we turn into compost, and then you've got finished materials which we separate. So got bracken mulch, we get that from the Forestry Commission. So waste product they turn into compost, we haul it here, and then you've got all the aggregates, gravels, pathways. Everyone is always trying to use it in in many different ways. A lot of pressure to keep it in uh good condition and make it very um useful. Um, and then in the middle, that's where I do all the live composting. So essentially I shred all this green waste up, maybe mix it with some wood chips, and then I make what's called windrows, which are these long piles, so they're about two to three metres high, and they can be as long as you want. With those, if you're gonna turn them, you'll generally move them to another side and make another windrow. And I keep them in the middle here as well, so people can drive around them. It's like a compost roundabout, I guess.

Arthur Cole 4:18

Okay, let's start off at the beginning of this compost journey, Pete. We're going over into Bay One. As we approach Bay One, we are confronted with all manner of different organic matter. We've got looks like palm fronds, there's quite large pieces branches in here. Um, there are grass clippings, there looks like there's everything from leaf mould, onions, shallots, leeks, coffee. I can smell the coffee grounds. Also got some wood ash as well. Peelings, wood ash. Okay, so lots of colour, lots of texture, and lots of variety going on here. Exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

The aim of uh having a compost pad like this really is to try and get all these waste materials, difficult materials, you know, woody materials, stuff that people generally put in bins and get paid to get them taken away. And I'm trying to turn that into a valuable product. And at the same time, I'm trying to help the environment by making sure they don't rot down in the wrong way, release greenhouse gases, and all these uh they can make some other uh not very nice chemicals and gases. So that's essentially what it is, and I try and sort of accept as much as I can here to make it easy for the gardeners and the business to get rid of this stuff and then turn it into you know black gold, really. You know, been quite lucky really, because in terms of composting, green waste like this is almost considered the low-hanging fruit because you've got huge variety in there. That's variety of woody materials, so carbon and nitrogen materials, but also the way they degrade. So, for example, you'd think if you had a load of manure and a load of wood chip, you would make a really good compost, and you'd be right in a way, but you're actually really limited, you really have to structure that recipe to work. Whereas here it's so forgiving, I've got such a mixture of materials, and usually when you simply shut it up, I don't actually have to do that much.

Arthur Cole 6:20

So, how do you take large bits of woodiness, uh grass clippings, kitchen waste, and turn it into that black gold?

SPEAKER_02 6:30

So I make windrose that are classed as passively aerated, so even though I turn them, I don't have a forced aeration system, so I'm relying on oxygen in the air and wind to work by diffusion to get in there. So I need it to be quite a porous material, loads of pores. So, what I do is in order to make sure it's a nice structure, um, the compost, is um I'll use the telehandler and I'll put one bucket of wood chip into our big shredder, and then two buckets of all this green waste. I might adjust that differently if it's a bit wet, apple pumice, that kind of thing. Goes into a really big shredder we have. I think it's 50 cubic meters of material you could get in there if it's full. That shreds it up with blades and an auger, comes out, and you get this sort of early shredded uh material, and then that's when the sort of real composting starts, and that's when I'm trying to harness the process to make sure the right temperatures happen and the right microbes predominate in those piles because there's loads of different ones, you'll never have one type, you want one to certain types to predominate, and then to break that material down, I want to sterilize it in a way with high temperatures to kill weed seeds and pathogens, which is useful in a place like this, and it's very hard not to do with so much material. And then later on, I want to uh allow some of the lower temperature microbes to break down some of the more difficult material and also some of the toxic intermediary products that are created in that fast process, and then they also convert nitrogen into nitrates, you know, more stable inorganic form. Um, you know, they can make stable organic matter and hummus humifation, and then eventually screen it, goes in the bay. Gardeners just come in and pick it up and act like it was always meant to be there, I guess.

Arthur Cole 8:24

Okay, Pete's about to fire up his screener, and it's a vast green machine with an eight-foot-long tube that has a wire meshed around it, and he's about to get it going. Let's have let's watch compost screening in action.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Yeah, why not?

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Very fine contrast coming through almost like dust and out of the end of the two. We got quite things chunks of work coming out. You can tell that this process is tons of compost in a very short period of time. No one defeat and operate these fast quantities of waste and turn them into fast quantities of black gold. This is quite a process going on.

Arthur Cole 10:39

Well let's walk over now to these windrose. We've got three enormous looking piles, slightly different in colour and um slightly different in their texture. So can you describe for our listeners what we've got in front of us here, Pete?

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Yeah, so got three different ages of compost or vintage. Vintages, like it. So essentially, you know, I build up a certain amount of material, usually it's one month of material because I don't want it rotting in that green waste pay too long, letting all the you know nitrogen break down anaerobically or be released, and then so you'll you'll start off when I first shred it with a more immature pile like this, and you'll see the steam coming off, and that's really like really in active composting, and then as it progresses after I've turned it a few times and it decomposes, it will reduce in volume and will also reduce in weight as well, and then you'll start to get a more composted fine material. Then you'll get one here that's about two months old, three months old, and then I'll I'll let that uh compost for longer, and then eventually I'll put it in this maturation bay, and that's when you really it really looks like compost but with large bits of wood in there.

Arthur Cole 12:03

So, what is that timeline from a raw material hitting that bay one?

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Yeah, so this first pile it was made in the first week of March, so yeah, it's been on there for just over a month, and you'll already start to see you you'll start to struggle to recognise what is making the compost by then. Microbes will really have started to break these things down, still be very hot, and then here you've got compost that is nearing the end of its active phase. I wouldn't be surprised if we're at quite low temperatures than that. So that's from early January, and over here, mature pile. I believe that's from November. But what will happen is I let it mature as long as I can and then screen it. And I like it if the gardeners wouldn't use it until it's at least eight, eight or nine months old. Right, really mature, stable compost. Good for them, good for me as well. Gives me a bit of time.

Arthur Cole 12:57

Pete, I'd really like you to introduce us to your co-workers here. I believe that there is a lot of different characters in this story of making your compost. Can you introduce those players to us?

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Yeah, so it is uh composting is a completely natural process. So there's decomposition happening everywhere in the world. I think it's up to 90% of plant material that's created in the world isn't eaten by herbivores, it's broken down by these microorganisms who are converting it into down back into their nutrients, releasing carbon up, it's part of the short-term carbon cycle, and then that gets reabsorbed by plants. But by composting, you're accelerating this process. So although it's a natural process, you're very like unlikely to find a three-meter pile of uh leaf litter or you know green waste in the natural world. So I would say it's mainly a microbe-dominated process. Bacteria and fungi are the dominating microbes there, and I would say bacteria generally does most of the heavy lifting. I think it's in um you know, one tablespoon of compost, there's um about 10 billion cells of bacteria or something like that. Much less of fungi, but they're you know slightly bigger, they're not single cell. And then apart from those, you'll have uh larger organisms, maybe less so in the hot stage, but you'll have stuff like you know your invertebrates, all the way as small as little nebatodes, little round worms. And you've got you know springtails, protozoa, and all the way up to uh red worms, and then a lot of stuff that will eat all these other things as well millipedes, centipedes, predators. It's kind of it's essentially an ecosystem in itself, so it's a huge amount of biological organisms doing that, really. So bacteria are really good in the especially in the early stages, so they really like the really easily degradable material, so sugars, starches, fats, proteins, they just like their simple fast food essentially. Then there's fungi, also a type of bacteria called actinobacteria, and they do things a bit differently. They rely on rather than single cell, they create these sort of hyphae or filaments, and they start to uh release the more specialist enzymes and they can break down not just the cellulose and hemicellulose but also the lignin in the wood, the stuff that takes a long time. And generally find a lot of the invertebrates are sort of part of the wider picture, um, they will contribute to that decomposition, but a lot of the time they're interacting with a lot of that and eating each other and eating bacteria and fungi as well.

Arthur Cole 15:31

And to get it to this fine grade that we're standing at here, I mean some people might be surprised that we can't see any of these earthworms. Does that mean that this soil is inert or not healthy? Tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

You can find them if you if you look quite hard. But I generally find because we have this hot composting process, essentially, when I first read this compost up, as long as I make it over a meter cube, essentially, when all these bacteria and fungi digest stuff, the same with us when they eat carbohydrate, they release CO2, water, and heat. And then that heat builds up, and the bigger the pile is, the more it insulates it. And then as that heat builds up, enzymatic reactions will happen faster, so things break down quicker. But what will happen is there'll be certain organisms that can't handle the heat essentially, so then it'll become very bacteria dominated. Get what's called thermophilic bacteria, they like the high thermal temperatures. And although afterwards, when the piles cool down, they go to the mesophilic stage, which is sort of 20 to 45 degrees. Uh, a lot of these other organisms when we move back in, but it might take quite a long time for these, especially like red wine, for example, to move in. They might be working on the periphery, but you'll find those a lot more when you have quite a static, small, cooler pile, and they'll be doing a lot more of the heavy lifting because a lot of that material's there for longer, probably not here long enough for them to benefit. But this might look like it's finished, but actually, it will take many years for this compost to break down further in the soil and release all these complex bits of humus and you know, nutrients, and red worms are very integral for that, and other bacteria, so a lot's still happening, it's just maybe not dominated by wormery. So, if you're gonna make a wormry, you would have nothing like this, you'd have a small amount of material without it every week, really low temperatures, and you'd let them do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Arthur Cole 17:29

So, for those at home who are thinking about starting a compost journey, what would be your advice for the let's say the the average small garden holder?

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Number one advice is learn as much about how it works. So, everything I do was based on understanding the process as much as possible. And you don't have to go too deep into the science, but you have to understand what you're trying to achieve. Because it's essentially that it's these organisms that are going to do the work for you, and if you don't give them the right um conditions, they're not gonna come in. And if you break the wrong conditions, so too wet, not enough oxygen, you know, too cold, too exposed, you'll get organisms that can survive in that environment, but they won't be very efficient at making good compost, and that you generally get quite stinky material, not very usable. So, first I would say learn as much as you can about how it works, and then really look at what you're getting from your garden or from your kitchen scraps, and then work from there. Because I do see a lot of people they either just kind of guess and try and wonder where it goes wrong, but there's also people that maybe try and do too much, so they're desperately trying to make these hot composting bins and trying to get to temperature, and it you don't have to get to that temperature. It's great that we do, and it's great to kill weed seeds, but a lot of the composting will happen at smaller temperatures. Yeah, you might have some weed seeds in there, but you know, as long as you weed them when you top dress quite quickly, it's not a problem. And then obviously, there's pillars of composting, really, you've got to concentrate on, which is really so feedstock, so the carbon to nitrogen, so greens and browns, and then there's oxygen and water, and those are the things you really need to concentrate on. Things like pH and all these other things, you have to do something drastically wrong for that to go wrong. And at the end of the day, you know, it's a very forgiving process. Once you understand what's going on, and you're you're not breaking any major rules. I find it's quite forgiving.

Arthur Cole 19:26

Tell us more about that ratio of green and brown. Tell us a little bit about the water.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

So, yeah, green and brown goes down to carbon and nitrogen, so these microorganisms, they're looking for food, just like us, and they they need the carbohydrate to create energy, and then they use the nitrogen, it's really key to uh make new proteins, make new cells, and reproduce. Uh, it's why those two you know compounds are so important in all growing in all ecosystems, really. But the best thing you can do is try and find out which materials have have that right ratio. So 30 to 1 you're looking for. And general rule you find so a lot of brown material will be more carbon-based, and a lot of green material like grass, kitchen scraps will be more nitrogen. Good rules, thumb would be you know, one part green materials to three parts brown, mixing that together, and yeah. I always like to add wood chip to our piles. I think it's good to add to a lot of piles because although it's a high carbon material, it's very unlikely to add to the carbon in your compost because it will take so long to break down, but it really helps moisture and air to move in, makes it very easy to mix up, and I much prefer people use that than putting whole branches in. And you can have too much air, it can be like not homogenous enough to be too dry. So, yeah, I suggest that, yeah. And it moisture is one thing I think a lot of people overlook. So really important. So you're aiming for 50% moisture, which would be really, really hard to actually test for. So there's the squeeze test, which you can do at any point, but especially at the beginning. So you grab a bit of your compost when you're first making it, squeeze it, and then if it holds together in a ball, but then breaks apart, it's probably near 45 to 60. And then if you've got like a wet film on your hand, you're probably at 55, and then if a lot of moisture is coming out when you're squeezing it, you're probably going over 60. And that can really slow the process down, cause anaerobic zones in there. So all the water can fill the pores, also everything can be wrapped in this film of water, and that's what you want to be avoiding. Really, composting is an aerobic process, oxygen-based. That they're the best microbes you want, really. There are anaerobic bacteria that are good, but you might not always find them in uh in your compost heat.

Arthur Cole 21:46

So I can't really smell anything coming out of these compost fats, and in fact, as I reach my hand in and pull out this dark, moist, friable compost, there's really not much smell to it at all. Maybe a low, actually quite attractive earthiness to it, but not a pong. Is this a myth about compost smelling? And because some people really complain about it, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Yeah, so odour is a big problem, but it's also your best indicator that you're doing something wrong, in my opinion. Um and although there's loads of sensors for other other things, so there's oxygen sensors, there's temperature sensors, you know, the moisture tests, the best sensor a compost to have is is their nose. And usually if there's a smell, so you can get that eggy smell, which is hydrogen sulfide, methane is a really big one. There's all these other organic acids. Like imagine opening your food bin and it's been sort of slumped there, that kind of smell. What's happened there basically is decomposition has happened really, really quickly, and there's not enough air and space for all these beneficial organisms to break those little organic acids down further into something stable. So what happens is all that all those gases volatise into the atmosphere, and you're actually losing nutrients there, but it's also bad for the environment. So if you release a lot of methane from the compost, methane's I think up to 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide at a greenhouse gas. You can uh release ammonia gas, but you could also release nitrous oxide, which is one of one of the worst, which I think is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But generally, if you have a really oxygenated, stable pile, you should have a sweet earthy smell during active composting. That can be due to certain bacteria, certain compounds that will smell sweet, and that's generally good. And then when you get to this final stable mature stage, it shouldn't really smell of much at all if you've done something right. But when some people they're like, oh, isn't this great? This manure smells so strong, it's actually, I would say it's not very good. You probably just Smelling your nitrogen go into the air, really.

Arthur Cole 24:06

So looking at your compost pads here, this is clearly something that's appreciated by the rest of the garden team. But we're missing out the kitchen team here, and I know that they are really pleased that you've got to a point now where you're taking their waste from the kitchens. This is making our chefs you care a lot about the waste that comes out of their kitchens. This is making them feel good. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about why you're taking that waste.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

Well, I saw it as a bit of an opportunity, really, because we've got this big open compost pad here. So usually when people say about composting food waste, well, there's a lot of laws to do with it, you need it in a big vessel to compost it, make sure it's sterilized. But actually, if you look at a lot of the coffee grounds and veg peelings, as long as it's been separated at source, that's you know very similar to what a lot of the gardeners are bringing back, you know, weeds, you know, off-cuts of vegetables. So yeah, really wanted to reduce the waste going to not landfill, but you know, these big industrial places, and then bring it here. And although it's you know very good for the business and good for them, it's also quite good, good for me because I get this variety of nutritious feedstocks, and they're usually really high in you know nitrogen, really green, really good at firing up that hot bit of the compost at the beginning, which sometimes I can be short of, especially in the winter. Grass is the main one I look for in the salmouth, which is makes everything run quite smoothly. But yeah, it's good to make that kind of circular as well, because you know, most people, if they compost at home, they'll you know, they'll you know, grow some vegetables, put their food scraps in the compost, and then you would put it back on the land. So, yeah, good opportunity to keep it, keep those nutrients in-house.

Arthur Cole 25:55

Pete, can you tell us a little bit about what others are doing on a larger scale? I should think that most people in in Britain have a brown food caddy waste bin that the council picks up on rubbish collection days. Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on with that?

SPEAKER_02 26:14

I'm pretty sure a lot of it goes to anaerobic digestion plants. There might be some food waste places that they're making a comboss like this, an aerobic process. But I visited one as well. But when we were looking at one to do with the food waste, we visited an anaerobic digestion plant, and they make a big stomach essentially, similar to ours, really, and they make so you know low oxygen, but they inoculate it with these special types of anaerobic microbes and it digests it, and then it creates as a byproduct a digestate, which is sort of more of a liquid feed, so you know, the waste product, and then also some gas, a bit like our stomach, and then they harvest that gas, so they either burn it for energy or send it away, mainly methane, I think. So I think it's definitely more efficient than it going to landfill because when it goes to landfill, all that methane gets released to the atmosphere and it's quite detrimental. That's a more controlled environment. But I think as there's more pressure around the country to um recycle more food waste, I'd like to think there's gonna be more aerobic systems similar to this, but you know, fit for food waste, so that we can start to convert that more to compost for the for the land.

Arthur Cole 27:24

Looking into your crystal ball here, Pete, what is the future of composting at the nude?

SPEAKER_02 27:31

There's a lot actually, because a lot of people are very happy with what I'm doing, and they come up here and they say, Oh, this isn't this great, but I think we're I personally think we're just getting started, really. I feel like we've we've gone over the first hill and we made a stable product for mulching. But there's so much more we could do. First thing is I want to start doing more workshops and getting more people in, which we're going to do at the Great Garden Show. First time, have a public workshop up here to show what we're doing, but also uh hopefully help them try you know translate this into something they could do at home. But future things I'd really like to do forced aeration. I think you know, especially in the States, they're a bit further ahead with us with this, it's a lot more common. So essentially, I'd lay this windrow and I'd lay it on a long pipe, and at the end, you would attach a pump or a fan. So, what you do is you would turn the compost maybe less, and then you would physically push oxygen in and it fills up all the pores, and it makes sure that you know, I keep talking about oxygen and they need it and they're using it. You kind of provide it with that, and it you ought to be careful where you give too much. Um, but that would be um a real step forward and be quite um yeah, be modernising it, in my opinion. I and as far as I'm aware, I haven't really found many people in the country that are doing that. And there's loads of other techniques we haven't used yet, so there's like the Johnson Sioux Bioreactor, which is kind of uh a specific design. We'd only do it on a small scale here, but where you do like a circular cage with a lot of uh aerated pipes in, and you leave it for a year and you get a really fungal-rich uh compost, meant to be really good for regenerative soil practices. Also, there's a lot a lot of people use Pikachu, maybe on a small scale, much more light fermentation. Um, but I would like to try that as well. And then another thing would be compost teas. So never made a compost tea, but you essentially you get really good quality compost, put it in a aerated water mixture, and then you spray it. You essentially make an extract and you spray it, foliar spray onto plants. It's meant to not only provide nutrients, but it will inoculate it with all these microorganisms that can have a they can suppress diseases just by generally having so much competition and have other effects, so yeah, there's loads of ways we could go, you know, it's endless almost.

Arthur Cole 29:55

It's certainly the the introduction episode to the world of composting at the new. I think there's a deep, deep dive here. Pete, why do you care about compost?

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Uh well when I first started working here, I was quite green. I knew a little bit about trees, but I didn't know a lot about the natural world really. And we just kept having issues with soil. Everyone's complaining, you know, heavy clays, inert soil coming in doesn't work, but no one really had sort of solutions to it. And yeah, I like to think I'm a problem solver by sort of trade, that's how I work. So I went on this course that was about soil science, and it was definitely aimed at um regenerative soil practices, and obviously there's sort of you know the no, you know, no dig, low till, but when it came to sort of improving soils, one of the main solutions was compost. And I don't know, it just made very logical sense to me that we've got all this green waste and we could make it into something that can have so many benefits. And on top of that, I you know, I used to be um in a previous life, I was going to be um sort of working nutrition in dietetics, and I was especially interested in the gut microbiome, which I found really fascinating. It's kind of this it's a bit more mainstream now, but at the time it was a bit more um, you know, this untapped resource that there's all these microbes doing stuff for you, and you know, you haven't agreed to it, you're not working with them, but you could harness that to have better health, and that seemed to really closely translate into soil health and composting. So I found that I found that interesting. And also, um, I don't know, it just suited the way I work really. I used to be a chef as well many years ago, and it's a bit gives me a similar kind of feel to that because you kind of make something, and obviously recipes and that kind of thing, but also you have a physical result of your endeavor, you know, and and people are very happy with it. It's a bit like making a good meal. You get that instant hit, dopamine hit, you know, because I can do excellent work in the woods and prune loads of trees, and I really enjoy that, and it's great. But people don't come up to me and go, wow, that that's that's incredible. You know, they don't do that. Whereas here I've got I've got this physical result, and that's not the only reason I do it, but it's nice to put a lot of work into something and see the result of it.

Arthur Cole 32:25

So, Pete, we're standing next to the middle pile, the vast pile of compost here, and you are taking out some what looks like some precision equipment. What have we got here?

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Yeah, so this is a kind of a a pro or professional thermometer. I think it's 1.5 meters in length, the the metal thermometer part. It's actually designed to be used in food factories, so probably expected to spend its life in a 10,000 litre battered tomato soup or something. But I've uh I use it for uh composting, but you're trying to get to the core of the pile. So usually you go about two-thirds of the way up and push it in, then you start the temperature will start to go up. I expect to get up to 5560 at this stage, and yeah, we're at 55. So 55 to 70, 70 is quite high. Over 70, microbes will start to die, it's not good. You can also spontaneously combust, which isn't good either. But 55 above that is when you're gonna start to kill weed seeds, and you also start to kill other pathogens, so plant pathogens, human pathogens, and that's what we're aiming for. There you go, 61.

Arthur Cole 33:42

So, Pete, this pile could spontaneously combust at any time, yeah, pretty much.

SPEAKER_02 33:48

Uh try to avoid that, of course.

Arthur Cole 33:51

But some hot compost.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Yeah, well that's right. Combost is really good for like bioremediation, so it can break down all these things, like it can break down some pesticides and chemicals and stuff like that. But sometimes it needs high temperatures. There's some chemicals that they say, like these forever chemicals, they you know, people think they can be broken down by compost, but they need 900 degrees to break them down. So um, you know, I try my best, but 63 degrees and counting. I'd have to get the gardeners getting used to spreading ash on the on the on the vegetable beds, but yeah, but it's that high activity that's making it safe.

Arthur Cole 34:27

Yeah, it's great steam coming off the top there. It really should have brought some along some of the eggs because surely we could cook an egg in there.

SPEAKER_02 34:34

Yeah, you could do, yeah. Yeah, I've heard stories of people covering themselves in the compost on a winter's day to heat themselves up. But it's definitely heat you could harness, put a pipe through there and make uh put water through it and make make a compost shower, maybe. Yeah, you know, that'd be very, very, very circular and sustainable, wouldn't it?

Arthur Cole 34:53

Perhaps that's a new treatment at the spa. Have you spoken to the spa about bringing our hotel guests down here and giving them compost bathing?

SPEAKER_02 35:04

No, not yet, no.

Arthur Cole 35:05

I think maybe after the I think we're missing a trick here.

SPEAKER_02 35:07

After the cold dip. So there's a great book that I've got called The The Science of Compost by uh Julian Dobersky, I believe it is. So he's uh ecologist and um also has degrees in like zoology and forestry, and it really sort of takes you through almost a journey into the compost heap as if you're going on a safari almost, and it's really good. And it won't give you any tips about how to make compost, and it says that, but it it it really goes into the right amount of detail about what's going on, and then once you understand that very well, then I think that that will make you make better compost. So, yeah, top read, I think.

Arthur Cole 35:48

So, Pete, I think this is one episode of this journey of compost. This summer, if you're up for it, we're gonna get our entomologist, Dr. Bumblebee, aka Dr. Tom Oliver, get yourself, and let's put it out there. Let's find somebody if maybe maybe perhaps it is Julian Dobersky if he is available, perhaps it's someone from Exeter University. Let's get a real soil buffin in here, a compost buffin in here, and have the three of you take us for an our old safari through your compost heaps this summer.

SPEAKER_02 36:26

I think that would be really great. And also it'd be good to have a microscope up here and to sort of open our compost app to the visible eye and you know really see what's going on in there because there's so much going on and we can't see it. I think we just see the result of it essentially.

Arthur Cole 36:43

So we see and smell that, as we said, that sweet earthiness, but there's a sound to these compost heaps as well. And our producer, Harry Code, always behind the boom mic there, has actually recorded two of our Hoogle Culture beds in the kitchen garden with hydrophones over a weekend. We're going to be putting that soundscape on a listening post for our garden members to come around the gardens and listen to, and it captures the sounds of microorganisms and perhaps even the bigger ones and how they pass through this compost. Pete, who is out there at the moment in the world of compost who is inspiring you that you would signpost our listeners to go and look at their work?

SPEAKER_02 37:43

In the UK, I know there's I think there's a chap called Compost Tom in Brighton. He does a lot of um food composting. I've always wanted to go there and although I don't know a lot about it, I know the land gardeners, they they they're really um they're really making waves in the in the compost world. To be honest, I I really want to get out there more. You know, I I can't think of loads, which is I've only visited two compost sites, so one at Wesley and another private site in Hampshire. And the amount I learnt from that is huge, which is you know, I probably wouldn't have learnt that in or never even learnt what I learnt there. So my aim as well in the future, as well as all the other stuff I want to do, really, is to go around the country and um find these people who are doing it. They're probably people doing stuff like this forced aeration that I don't know about. You know, I'm pretty sure Eden Project are quite um big on their combossing, aren't they? Um, you know, zero waste from the the whole site. So probably something I want to look into, yeah.

Arthur Cole 38:49

For anyone listening into this, two names there, the land gardeners and also Eden Project, both are going to be featuring at the Great Garden Show this year. So, Pete, Pete's not so free compost, thank you very much for being on the Newt podcast.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Thank you very much.

Arthur Cole 39:18

Thank you for listening. Subscribe and tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.