Ah, I crested the wave of a newly learned skill, and I was turning over huge, hot compost heaps in six weeks. I thought I had cracked it. But I think, in all my excitement, I lost sight of something terribly important. Maturation.

Time.

The kitchen garden, once a lawn, has never grown the same as the flower field. The difference between a leaf of Swiss chard with its roots in the dark, rich (although if I am honest, slightly on the clay side) soil of the field and the rather thin, dry stuff in the kitchen garden is night and day. If I want glossy vegetables, they have to share with the flowers in the field.

Last year, I’d had enough of this, and I poured my best bio-char enriched compost on top of it. I am a true believer in the Charles Dowding school of digging (and not just because I’m lazy – you must respect the soil biome). I felt sure that would do the trick. I grew on some plugs, put them in, and I waited for bounty. They got eaten by slugs. So, I grew on some more, and bought in some organic ones to get ahead of the game.

They have done ok. I have been harvesting Cavolo Nero but in handfuls not armfuls. (Netting is non-negotiable.) The swiss chard has filled a few gratins, but it’s not thriving. Even the roses don’t look thrilled to be included in the ground so close to the house. I think I know what it is. I was too keen. Somewhat out of character, I was too quick, too on it. Not my usual problem.

Like all good things that involve very small forms of life (sourdough, wine, cheese) my gloriously beautiful compost heap could have done with some more time to develop. Because the issue with compost that isn’t absolutely ready, is that it keeps going with the decomposition process in the garden, and this uses up nitrogen. It has to take in before it gives out. I think I may have inadvertently starved anything planted in the top level of soil. Sadly, this did absolutely nothing for the bindweed, which seems to have the ability to thrive in any conditions at all.

The good news is, there is always another year, and there is plenty more compost coming. This is the easiest time of the whole year to be making compost (in summer, there are too many greens; in winter, too many browns) but hedge clippings are the gift that never stop giving. I swear by my chipper, but any chopped up mix of fine, whippy hedge clippings when the leaves are green and the stems are brown represents the ultimate compost mix. If you don’t have any hedges, other greens include:

• Grass clippings

• Vegetable leaves and kitchen waste, anything you pull off when you are preparing vegetables from the garden. I am also adding a huge number of windfall apples.

• Deadheaded flowers, or flowers that are over and you are pulling out

• Green, sappy weeds

I also have a lot of pumpkin vines that I have been cutting back so that the sun, so recently disappeared, can get to the pumpkins. They are green colured and there is a lot of leaf, but the stems are quite strong now, so I imagine they are a bit like hedge clippings, green with a bit of brown.

 Although greens are generally quite soft, cutting them up and increasing the surface area will always help with the rate of decomposition and therefore how fast your compost gets to its final stage. But you cannot make good compost with just greens. They collapse into themselves, turn into slime, and then sort of just disappear. Which leads us to browns. The greens start the decomposition process going but in many ways, what gives your compost body is the dry bits of organic matter, mixed in with the greens. The combinations of the both is what gets the magic process of composting.

Browns include:

• Anything woody

• Paper, cardboard, or egg boxes

• Autumn leaves

• Straw or hay

• Bark chippings (I am evangelical about bark chippings as a top mulch, but I think they are the most problematic of things in terms of nitrogen stealing. Don’t dig them in, and if you use them in a compost heap, you really do have to leave them long enough to really break down. Yes, I should have left them a lot longer. )

Top tips:

Keep some cardboard handy

You are likely to need more greens than you imagine, and you need to have your browns ready to go when your greens are piling up. If you leave greens for any length of time and composted they become brown.

Surface area

Chop, chip, or snip everything you can possibly bear to, as small as you can possibly manage. Not only does this make everything go a bit quicker, but if you are going to turn it, you will thank me.

What to keep out

Do not let bindweed anywhere near your compost heap. Charles Dowding says that his heaps are hot enough to kill it, and maybe they are, but I am not risking it. Those bright white roots send shivers down my spine.

Barefoot bays

Your compost heap should always be on soil, directly on the ground, not only to allow any excess water to drain, but also to let the IMOs (Indigenous Microorganisms) and bacteria come into the decomposing materials. These are present in the soil already so putting your compost heap on top will allow them to move into your heap quickly and easily. Putting your compost heap on a particularly rich area of IMO life is even better. My bays are tucked into a hedge in a corner. They were sited here because of being out of the way but easily accessible. It was serendipity that this was the ideal place for inoculation. Areas where leaves fall and rot are rich in IMOs, you can see this in the richness of the soil in woodland.

Cover up

Rain cools a compost heap, but a dry heap will run out of steam quite quickly. It just sort of desiccates. Rather counter-intuitively, I suggest you cover your heap with a layer of cardboard (old school allotmenteers use carpet but I worry about micro-plastics), but only once you have tipped a few buckets of water into it.

If you can measure it, you can manage it

Honestly, a compost thermometer is the best £12 I have ever spent. Actually, £36, but I lost one and put a spade through another when turning the heap. But every morning, I potter around poking the probe into various heaps (I have a new heap, a cooking heap, a ready heap, and a winnow of thatch) and this brings me indescribably joy.

Turn, turn and turn again

I am intrinsically lazy when it comes to hard physical labour and I always put this task off for as long as I possibly can. It is one of those things that the reality is significantly less arduous than the anticipation. If I tackle this first thing, my air of satisfaction lasts the whole day. About six weeks after your greens and browns mix has reached the top of the bay (it will sink alarmingly so this might take longer than you think) and it has built up some good heat, now is the time to turn. Turning does two things, it reduces the temperature so that it does not get so hot that it kills the beneficial microorganisms, and it introduces more air so that the process of decomposition can continue. Yes, it is exactly like stretching and folding sourdough. This is the moment where you will thank me for the chipping. If I have a spare bay I will turn into this, but more often I lay a tarpaulin out next to the heat and just dig out the layers. Once it is all out on the tarpaulin, I will have a check through for any dry bits, branches that are too thick or woody to be breaking down, or any lumps which need distributing. Sometimes bits of cardboard stick together and need a bit of shaking out. If this is a really hard physical task, this probably means that your heat gets too wet, it should be fluffy rather than claggy. Sometimes my bottom layers are not composting at all and are almost preserved. This means that these patches are to dry.

Given that the temperatures are slowly falling, expect the decomposition rate to slow too. By the end of the month, I want all of my heaps ready to slumber and mature over the winter. Turned, the right moisture levels, covered and warm, rather than hot.

Because here’s a bombshell. I am going raised beds in the spring, and I am going to need every scrap of compost I can get my hands on.

Please note, the image below was staged for photographic purposes. As soon as the shoot was over, I pulled everything out, chipped it, and put it back in.