Compost Lover had nearly 1500 visitors last month (the most in one month so far) so thanks to all who made the call. You seem to be liking the how to make a dry stone wall blog, the low carbon garden - wattle blog and the bean pole archway blog the most so I’ll keep putting up practical stuff and mixing it with the news stories as I go. I’m making a garden table out of some chestnut and oak at the moment. It’s going to be big. Like a giants table looking over my Welsh valley, with big rustic stools to sit on. I’m not great at carpentry but I’ll put a blog up about how to make a basic table using untreated durable timber and let you find your own way to someone more skilled if you feel inspired. Tomorrow I’m at the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds in Builth Wells at the Smallholding Show. It’s a great show with loads of opportunity to buy local and get coppiced products and information and advice too. There’s usually a fantastic tool stall there too so I’ll be there looking for something old and unusual - and I don’t mean the people behind the counter.

So thanks for visiting and keep coming back.

Best wishes
Allan

I made this with the help of Grace Crabb and Bob Shaw at the Centre for Alternative Technology’s coppice crafts course. During the five days we learnt how to split and turn wood, make charcoal and weave a wattle - all of which more later.

This is how I made the gate.

I started of by measuring the size of gate I would need and drew a rough plan on a piece of paper, with measurements. There are lots of different gate designs and as I drew my own its probably not as effective as some of the more traditional time honoured designs. If you get into it I’d recommend one of the green woodworking pattern books, which are just fantastic and will give you endless hours of creative opportunities.

I’m using freshly cut so called ‘green wood’, which means that I’m working it before it dries out. This makes it easier to turn on a lathe, and cut. This gate design requires no turning, but it does require a few basic green tools - a draw knife, a Froe (a tool for splitting the wood), a tapometer (a large piece of wood or mallet used for tapping the froe into the wood to start the split) and a cleaving break (which helps you split it). You’ll also need an axe and drill for making the tenon joint, a tape measure and a pencil.

I used ash to make this gate but you could use chestnut for a longer lasting gate. I tried splitting willow too but willow twists when you split it which makes it difficult to use for mortice and tenon joints. Chestnut and ash split very well in a straight line down the middle.

Step one - Start with some round pieces of wood, measure and cut the pieces you need to the size required. To make this gate you’ll need the two end pieces, the three cross pieces and the four smaller uprights across the bottom of the gate. 

Once you have cut the round wood into the sizes you need to split it with a froe. This is easier to do on a cleaving break.

The cleaving break as you can see here is the frame into which Bob Shaw our teacher has placed the round wood. It is made quite simply with three old fence posts bashed into the ground with two pieces of wood laid between the posts at slightly different heights. If you look closely at the picture you’ll see what I mean. This is great frame for sawing wood too. Bob is holding a froe with his left hand and what he calls the tapometer in his right. This is like a Captain Caveman club, a big piece of wood for knocking the froe into the round wood to start the split (or cleave) off.

Always put the blade of the froe in the centre of the wood, right in the heart, which you can usually see in the middle of the rings. Once fixed into the wood you can discard the tapometer and start to cleave the wood. This is easy to do in the cleaving break. Because the wood is held between two other pieces of wood the pressure keeps the split in the middle of the wood so you just have to exert a slight downward pressure on the froe and the wood will start to split.

As the wood splits you can move the froe further down the wood and keep on exerting the pressure as you go. To make the gate you have to split one piece of wood to make the two side pieces, four pieces of round wood to make the three cross pieces and the four small uprights.

Once you’ve split the wood, you need to take the bark off. This is very easy too but requires skill in handling a draw knife well. Taking the bark off helps the wood last longer and gives it a nice finish. You can also use the bark peelings for lighting fires. The process of removing the bark is made easier if you have a post vice but you could do it any vice.

The tool Bob is using is a draw knife. He is keeping the wood in place by pressing his foot down on a hinge on the post vice. To remove the bark keep the blade face down and gently pull towards you. It looks slightly dangerous but actually its very safe so long as you do it gently and don’t try to force the wood off. It’s also very satisfying.

Once you’ve got the bark off you can start to make the mortice and tenon joints. To do this you have to take the cross pieces and point them to fit into the holes you will make on the two end pieces. Traditionally you would use a template to make each of the ends and the holes but you can do it by eye, although it is less easy.

You can see from these two pictures how Bob holds the wood to point the ends. Use an axe to make the points. Actually the word points is slightly misleading as you don’t want points you want tapered ends that end with a flat butt rather than a point. You just work on one side of the wood and taper that side so it runs parallel to the other.

This is so the wood will fit snugly inside the holes when you match them up. Once you’ve tapered your cross pieces you need to mark where the holes need to go on the end pieces. Measure up from the base where each piece should go and mark a hole the size of the tapered end of the cross piece you are going to use in this position.

Then do the same with each cross piece marking the correct size hole to match the end of the cross piece. You should label the hole on the end piece to match the end of the cross piece you want to place in it. So match a one with a one, a two with a two and so on. That way when you come to assemble the piece you know where everything will fit.

Once you have marked the size of the holes you can use a drill to make the holes. Drill twice using drill bits to match one half of the size of the hole and then chisel off any rough edges in the hole.

You can then fix the cross pieces into the sides. Once these are in position you can fix the uprights using nails. 

The first time you make a gate like this there are bound to be problems unless you’re already used to carpentry. I feel my next gate will be much more correct but as a first attempt I don’t think its bad, and I really enjoyed the process of making it, the feel of the wood, being outside, listening to the bird song - a complete pleasure.

And here it is in situ at home. The ties are made from chestnut bark I peeled off some fence posts I split. I’ll show you how to split wood another time.

If I haven’t made anything clear enough ask a question?

I’ve been fencing off the garden plot with various styles to experiment with different techniques and get a feel for what it takes to fence off a plot of land properly. Thankfully I don’t have to worry about rabbits, foxes, deer or badgers so I’m just concentrating on keeping the sheep out. The next few blogs are all about making gates and fences - starting with this article I wrote for Garden News about my experiences trying to get totally green timber, which turned out to be slightly tortuous.

Garden News article - Timber Treatment
Un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump: sometimes knowing one to five in Welsh just doesn’t cut the mustard. Especially when you’re standing in a rain soaked wood negotiating a price for chestnut fencing posts and railings with a father and son sales team that fall back on their native tongue when negotiations reach a critical point. I’m lost in a flurry of constanants. It’s like a bad day on Countdown.

Buying the greenest possible fence – locally grown unseasoned chestnut cut from coppice (which lasts longer untreated in the ground than any other British wood) – has got me – if you can excuse the pun – stumped.

It should be possible to pop down to the nearest retail park and pick up local woodland products just as you can go to the supermarket to buy organic fruit and veg. The stick to go with the carrot: so to speak. But Focus obviously don’t Do it All and until they and other shops like them do there’s always going to be a sense of adventure about buying truly green wood.

So why do it? Well the answer for me, apart from supporting my local economy, is timber treatment. Its nigh on impossible to get untreated wood for fencing at a conventional shop and wood preservative used to stop rot contains fungicides, herbicides and pesticides, which seem to me the least organic addition to a garden I could imagine.

It’s also much harder to dispose of treated wood at the end of its life because the treatments are often quite toxic. Pre 2004 the most common garden wood treatment was Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA), a compound of Arsenic and Copper. Arsenic is one of the most dangerous substances known to man and has been banned for many years as a pesticide but is still used in timber treatment. In 2004 a European directive prohibited its use in gardens, presumably because it is highly toxic when burnt on a bonfire. In preference it should be disposed of in a lined landfill site to stop the poisons seeping into the ground. If you have old treated wood lying around take it to a designated recycling unit and place it in the timber section of the yard.

Never burn it. The rain can soak through the ash and take some of the poisons into your garden soil. Even the use of treated timber in raised beds has been questioned by some people because scientific studies have shown that higher than normal levels of arsenic can be detected in the soil a few inches from the boards.

The benefit of treatment is that it allows us to use cheap fast growing but quick to rot softwoods instead of longer lasting slower growing and more expensive hardwoods such as oak and chestnut. Modern economics sometimes makes poisons cheap and natural risk free materials more expensive. Go figure!

Thankfully the newer preservatives, if not perfect, are considered to be far less dangerous. They are still made using energy intensive industrial processes though and have to be dealt with at the end of their useful life. Untreated wood on the other hand carries no risk at all, no waste, nor any extra hidden environmental problems. When its useful life is over it can be left to rot in the corner of your garden providing a home for beneficial organisms and allowing the fertility to go back into the soil. It is quite simply compost waiting to happen. And to that I say Diolch yn fawr iawn. Or as they say over the border thank you very much.

I used more beanpoles to provide the frame for this temporary shade provider. I pack it up at the end of each day and take it back inside. The deckchair I found at the local junk yard. The previous owner said it was dangerous to sit in but a year on I’m still waiting to fall flat on my…

Eco-tip
There is one UK grown coppiced product you will find in many garden centres and DIY stores – barbecue charcoal. It’s much better for the environment than all other charcoal because it is made from wood grown in our own coppiced woodlands and not - as many others are - from rainforest, other old growth forests or plantations. You have to look closely at the label to get the good home produced stuff. Check out regional variations such as the Dorset Charcoal Company and the nationally available Bio-Regional Development Group charcoal. If you’re looking for a local supplier of untreated wood for garden projects try your yellow pages for timber mills, woodlands, the Forestry Commission or even stately homes with large gardens and estates. For coppiced products check out www.coppice-products.co.uk/Directory www.ecolots.co.uk, www.woodlots.co.uk and the Association of Pole Lathe Turners (www.bodgers.org.uk); or regional bodies such as the Welsh Timber Forum. For more info on treated wood try www.ecologycenter.org/factsheets/pressure-treated_wood.html.

Yesterday I decamped from my own garden to spend a day with my friend Sue Harper at her organic flower field. Her and her husband Pete work so hard to get the flowers and the field looking fantastic and beautiful it was great to spend a day there just barrowing mushroom compost around, weeding, watering and doing general sorting. Pete planted a hedgerow a few years back and now its mature and thriving, full of birds and insects. It provides great shelter too, helping to stop wind damage, so being there for a day is a wonderful experience. Pete and Sue aren’t on the Willing Workers on Organic Farm scheme but it reminded me of my days helping people farm their plots of land the odd weekend. If you’re looking for wedding flowers visit www.sweetlovingflowers.co.uk. If you want some great voluntary experiences check out www.wwoof.org.

Yes but. I’ve called this a ‘yes but’ because you can compost some weeds, but you have to be careful. For example if you’ve got a patch of nettles, you can harvest the leaves and stems and put them in a compost heap. They are in fact a rich source of nutrients. However its best to keep the roots out, which may start to grow in your heap. This is true of the roots of many hard core perennial weeds. Some weeds, such as Japanese Knotweed, reproduce vegetatively - which means they sprout from a cutting (and in the case of Knotweed from the root as well) - and should be kept well away from a cool compost heap. You should also be careful putting weeds laden with seeds in a compost bin. Seeds can survive cool composting and come up in your veggie plot the following year.

There are alternative ways of composting difficult weeds. In his book Weeds: An Earth Friendly Guide to their Identification, Use and Control, John Walker suggests using an old potting compost bag, turning it inside out, puncturing it with holes and leaving it in a sunny place. He also suggests drowning perennial weeds in a bucket, where, starved of air, they turn into a slurry like liquid, which can then be poured onto the garden.

Organic gardeners like to have something in bloom throughout the year to encourage wildlife activity and part of my goal this year is to keep a note of what’s flowering when to build up a picture of what’s missing so I can cover the gaps next year. Actually my records haven’t been that great so far because I’ve been concentrating on the construction phase of the garden, so it was really good to get outside yesterday and take some note at the glory of spring flowers. All of these flowers are self seeders. I did notice one thing which I thought was slightly peculiar. It was a blisteringly hot day but there were very few insects on the old apple tree which is blooming so well at the moment. I’d say normally it would be covered with bees, wasps, hoverflies and flies. Has anyone else noticed a lack of insect activity this year?

As we are never more than 6 few feet away from a rat (or 8, 10, 12 or 20 depending which particular website you believe), its a good idea not to encourage them to get any closer, especially as they carry the rather unpleasant Weil’s disease. For most compost systems its best to keep meat, fat, bread and cooked food out of the bin altogether, and as an extra precaution wear gloves when you handle compost. You can create or buy compost bins that are said to be rat-resistant or rat-proof (such as a tumbler bin. You can also use a food digester like the Green Cone or the much larger Swedish bin The Green Johanna (www.cat.org.uk/shopping or www.greencone.com) though you have to put two parts food waste to every one part garden waste. This isn’t a very good ratio if you live alone and have a large garden. Another popular method of treating meat is Bokashi, and you can find plenty of advice all over the internet about that. Visit www.recyclenow.com/home_composting for general advice about compost.

You can make quick compost with grass clippings and leaves, so long as you chop and turn the mix every three days. You can also mix two parts grass clippings with every one part manure for another relatively fast compost, with no need to turn. You can also use grass clippings as mulch (lay it on 3-4 inches deep), to suppress weeds and keep moisture in soil. Or use them as a green manure. Scatter them on the soil and dig in. You could also change your mowing regime and leave the clippings on the lawn. This helps protect the lawn during long dry spells. Don’t let grass grow longer than 4cm between mowings and cut when lawn is dry.

This is last weeks Compost Lover article from Garden News - just in time for Compost Awareness Week.

My article this week is wedged in between a brace of celebratory events organised to promote good gardening practice – National Beanpole Week and Compost Awareness Week. As May is also the first month in the year you can start ordering comfrey plants from the Organic Gardening Catalogue (and because I did bean poles in my last article) this week seems like the best to talk about the subject to which this column owes its name: compost. And in particular the compost plant: comfrey.

Composting has a distinct cyclical rhythm so although it’s the ninth article in the Compost Lover series it seems right to talk about it now. At this time of year the creatures that make the compost start to become more active, move back into the heap or simply come alive. If you’ve never done it before take a hand lense or microscope to your heap and watch the life there. It’s one of the most interesting nature reserves you’ll ever visit.

I have a slow or cool compost heap which takes between six and twelve months to mature, with much of the exciting decomposition activity occurring between now and September. You can make compost a lot quicker using the hot composting method but you need a lot more waste materials to get started. The cool composting method is best for a small garden like mine.

To make the most of the main composting season you need to get started as soon as possible. After September most of the micro and macro organisms that make compost are absent from the heap, dormant or dozy. If you leave it much longer you wont get a good amount of finished compost until the end of next summer.

Throughout the winter I’ve been topping my heap up with nitrogen rich kitchen scraps (vegetable peelings, fruit skins and cores, tea bags, coffee grounds, but not meat, dairy, bread or fats as they all attract rats) and any carbon rich cardboard I’ve accumulated through my normal shopping habits (cereal packets, egg cartons, food boxes). This carries on through the rest of the year and seems to stabilise the heap successfully. Generally too much nitrogen makes a heap smelly and soggy and too much carbon leaves it crackly and dry. Either way no good compost comes from a heap that has lost its balance. I never lay the cardboard in flat, which tends to suppress the movement of air into the heap. I scrunch it up into fist sized balls and chuck it in willy nilly. Compost creatures need air and these scrunchies help to keep the air in the heap.

There are plenty of weeds coming up at this time of year and it’s tempting to see them as a problem rather than a resource. But nutrients stored up in the tissue of many weeds can be recycled through the compost heap quite safely so don’t blat everything in site with a weed killer. So long as you keep out those weeds laden with seeds, tough perennial roots and anything that might reproduce in the heap from the stems or leaves there isn’t a problem. A Colour Atlas of Weed Seedlings by J.B. Williams will help identify those weeds that are safe to compost.

Wild comfrey growing in the wrong place could also be called a weed but the cultivated non invasive variety Bocking 14 is grown specifically to add umph to your compost heap or to make an organic liquid fertilizer. It always bounces back from a hard cut and carries on producing broad strong shoots and leaves throughout the summer months: each packed full of nutrients brought up from deep soils by their impressive root system. This means you can cut it to the base every six weeks without fear of losing the plant and add the stems and leaves to your heap. They are one of the easiest plants to propagate from root cuttings and come up fine without any attention if planted correctly: horizontally between one and six inches long and about two to four inches deep. Alternatively order plants direct from the Organic Gardening Catalogue.

Resources
The Organic Gardening Catalogue (www.organiccatalog.com 0845 130 1304).
A Colour Atlas of Weed Seedlings, J.B. Williams.

If you’re in London this weekend with a few hours to spare get yourself down to Woodland Wonders at Kew Gardens. It’s one of the loveliest events I’ve ever been to and a great opportunity to learn about coppice crafts, do some woodturning and carving. Of course you can also walk round Kew Gardens, always a treat at any time of year but especially now with the Bluebells in full bloom. The Centre for Alternative Technology will be there too. For more info go to www.kew.org.uk.

The eight annual Compost Awareness Week runs from 4th-10th May so if you haven’t started your compost heap yet now’s a good time to get started. There’s plenty of information on this site to help you get started including the simple DIY bin described on the post below, and I’ll be posting more helpful hints everyday next week, an article about composting and some useful links to other sites. If you’re visiting the Centre for Alternative Technology this week look out for the talks on composting by CAT displays gardener and co-author of The Organic Garden Chloe Ward and get discount copies of The Little Book of Compost. Go to www.compostawarenessweek.org.ukk to find out what’s happening in your area. Check out my simple video guide to organic techniques on the link above and many of the composting videos on www.youtube.com. Here’s a composter for anyone, no matter how small their house or garden is.

At last the news we’ve all been waiting to hear. Push mowers are just as good, and in some cases better than machine mowers, both electric and petrol. The new machines are much lighter and easier to use than the old ones almost everyone gave up using back in the sixties and seventies. So says a new Gardening Which report released today. And the other good news is it only burns 30 more calories an hour more than motor mowing, proving that actually it doesn’t take that much more effort to use one. With additional benefits including less vibration through the hands, less danger and no noisy engine to contend with its all good news. Wouldn’t it be great to return to the days when our saturdays were not dominated by the sound of engines in our gardens! Gardening Which asked two experienced testers to cut 30m squared areas of standard length, long, short and damp grass. The best mower choice was the Husqvarna Novocut, priced at £80 and the worst, not surprisingly priced at £30 was the Argos Challenge - perhaps not a very good choice of name! The best buy for a small lawn was the Brill Razorcut Premium 33, closely followed by the Gardena Hand Cylinder Mower 300. Visit www.mower-magic.co.uk/acatalog/Husqvarna_Lawnmowers.html to get more details of the Novocut.

It’s Compost Awareness Week next week so what better time than now to get your compost bin made. Here’s one I made earlier.

It’s dead easy to make. You need these tools and materials.

Bang four wooden posts in the ground to make a square shape the size of the bin you require. These are from an old hedge I cut down.

Wrap some old chicken wire around three sides of the bin fixing it to the posts using staples.

Next fix some black plastic inside the three sides of chicken wire. This keeps the compost in place.

After that make a removable fourth side to the bin. This enables you to remove the compost easily when it is ready, or turn it over if you like turning your compost heap. I actually had this old gate lying around from the previous owners chicken house and just fixed some black plastic to the bottom of the frame. I’m sure a frame would be quite easy to make.

If you want to be fancy and make a hinge no problem but as the gate is only going to be removed once or twice a year I just tied mine on with some plastic cord. And thats it!

Small organic flower grower Sweet Loving Flowers have launched a new wedding service and the take up is already proving there’s a big demand for eco weddings this year. With the wedding season approaching fast if you haven’t already ordered your bridal bouquets now is the time. Sweet Loving Flowers is run by Sue Harper and Pete Condron from a two acre field in Mid-Wales. You can guarantee that your flowers will be green, ethical, organic and beautiful - each one lovingly chosen and grown by hand. The last thing an organic bride wants at her special day are flowers sprayed with chemicals and flown in from half way across the world. Visit their website at www.sweetlovingflowers.co.uk.

There’s nothing I like better than a freshly picked French or runner bean, picked small before the stringiness develops, and the idea of them dripping from an archway has proved too good to resist. Never mind your standard bean pole row or conical frame, nor your traditional rose archway. How about a bean archway? Well it’s an experiment so we’ll see if it works.

The idea came out of the restrictions of my garden space. Being short of it in the kitchen garden I’ve had to be a bit creative about growing my beans and peas. I want to pack as much variety into the space as possible and at less than 5m x 3m there’s no room for standard rows of plants. In my planting I’m going for the Ornamental Kitchen Garden approach developed and popularised by Geoff Hamilton all those years ago and seemingly more prescient than ever.

Geoff’s theory was simple but backed up by years of his own research and testing. Pests and disease problems are kept to a minimum by mixing a wide variety of flowers, fruits and vegetables together in the same space. Pests find it harder to find their target and get established because biodiverse gardens hide plants and are generally filled with a greater number and variety of predators. Geoff never used pesticides because he found they upset the careful balance he created, killing both pest and predator, making gardening harder than it otherwise might have been. The bean pole arch way will add a vertical layer of diversity and the beans of course will fix nitrogen into the soil for the benefit of the garden as a whole.

The bean pole archway
To make the bean archway you’ll need four straight freshly cut bean poles (between 84 and 96 inches (2134-2438mm) long and 1 and 1.5 inches (25-38mm) thick at the butt), ten one foot stakes cut from branches or slats of old two by one, a pruning saw, a tape measure, secateurs or billhook, a mallet and some garden wire.

First measure the width of the archway.

To bend the bean poles into shape you’ll need a flat surface (lawn, rough ground or unplanted vegetable plot) to make a bending frame (see picture). Bang one of the cut stakes into the ground and measure the width of the arch across from it.

At this point bang a second stake in. Measure 6 ft up from both these stakes and bang two more stakes in, ensuring the distance between the stakes remains the same as the width of the arch.

Lay your first two bean poles opposite each other on the outside of the staked area resting against the stakes. Then bang a third stake in on each side, half way up, on the outside of the pole and two more stakes in opposite the top and bottom stakes to keep the poles in place when you bend them. Laying the bean pole in position there should be plenty of top end to bend over and join together to make the arch. Bend each bean pole top together so they form a nice curved arch and can rest against each other for at least two – three feet. There’s lots of pressure when you bend so you have to have the wire ready to tie the two poles together, in several places.

Place the joined bean pole arch in position in to two prepared snug fit round holes (I used a piece of old metal pipe to make them). Make the holes deep enough so the arch feels secure left standing on its own. Go back and make a second bean pole arch and then ‘plant’ this about 1-2ft away from the first. Secure the two archways using four of the cut stakes from your frame. Push the stakes into the ground next to the arch so they rub up against each other. Either screw the stake and the pole together or just attach using several pieces of wire garden twine. I found it helpful to remove wobbles by wedging some small pieces of slate next to the poles.

Cross brace the wooden poles using smaller pieces of cut hazel and join the top of the frame with a further piece. This sort of structure wont last forever but as you’re only growing annuals up, it doesn’t really matter. Finally I added two pea sticks to the sides of the bean pole. Pea sticks should always be a fan shape, between 48 and 72 inches (1219-1829mm) high and three quarters of an inch in diameter (20mm) at the butt end.