Compost cheat sheet: how to make the most of waste
From Hügelkultur to habitat piles — and a bin called Johanna
As one of life’s great hoarders, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid a bin. Take tea. I recently switched from bags to loose leaf, not for the taste but so I could add them to my home compost (tea bags are only compostable in industrial composters). Why would I give those valuable nutrients to the council? Then there’s broken crockery — useful substrate for the gravel garden. Cuttings and twigs? Insect homes and fodder. As autumn begins to unfold, attention often turns to the nitty-gritty of a garden in preparation for winter; soil health, mulching — and what to do with piles of plant detritus that have gathered over the summer.
Now, we are more mindful of hedgehogs and our neighbours, and more of us understand the benefits waste adds to a microhabitat. Garden waste in particular is integral to good soil and therefore flourishing plants. My front garden at home barely noticed the summer droughts, its loamy soil having been nurtured with mulch and compost. We’re reaping the benefits of good waste management and soil improvement. . .
Meet the modern-day Woodlanders A trip to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex – and the crafts he loved
About a decade ago, I traded in a shiny life as a magazine editor to make baskets in a one-woman supply chain, from plant to product. My previous work reached millions of people; now it reaches just one at a time – and I find that more satisfying. To try to understand why, I began studying regional craft cultures around the world. I came to see that one can find an entire world of knowledge, intelligence and history hidden in a single object, especially an object that is grounded in the landscape. “Beauty lay not so much in the thing,” writes Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “but in what the thing symbolised.”
Hardy’s novels, particularly those he later classified as “Novels of Character and Environment”, are rooted in the largely forgotten rural patterns of life in England’s West Country. He was, as he wrote in the poem “Afterwards”, “someone who used to notice such things”. Born in the tiny hamlet of Higher Bockhampton before the arrival of the locomotive in nearby Dorchester, Hardy was still writing at the interwar peak of 20th-century modernism. He was intimate with both the rhythm-bound woodland communities he grew up in and the urbane world of literary London that overlooked them. Novels such as The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd are each set in a distinct landscape within Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, loosely draped over the actual map of the South West, where the natural world exerts a powerful, even deterministic, force in human lives. Each mourns a culture of craft he saw disappearing amid encroaching change.
But it is The Woodlanders to which I return most often. Set at the edge of a forest in a fictionalised version of Dorset in the 1850s it is, at its core, about the intimacy between people and trees. The village’s livelihood and survival are bound to its sylvan neighbours. The novel is also a literary lodestar on old woodland crafts, such as coppicing, spar-splitting, hurdle-making and cider-pressing. The characters’ relationships to these trades form the narrative backdrop for a tragic triangular love story. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
It tells the story of Grace Melbury who, after being sent away to be educated, returns feeling superior to her promised lover Giles Winterborne – a supremely decent copse-worker and cider-maker – and Marty South, a plain, impoverished girl as keenly attuned to the ways of the woods as Winterborne, and hopelessly in love with him.
Hardy’s heroes, like Winterborne and South, are those most in sympathy with the natural world, able to “read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing”. Indeed, they seem hardly separable from it; Winterborne is described during cider-pressing season as “autumn’s very brother”. But while Hardy’s moral heroes are society’s losers, left behind as a blinkered world steam-powers into the future, their ways of life are, even now, not entirely extinct. There are some holdouts in Wessex’s woods, orchards and fields refusing to let traditional practices, and the knowledge that informs them, die.
Orchard
For centuries, cider-making has been an integral part of West Country life. Malcolm Seal, a legendary basket-maker and gardener, is also a keen “ciderist”. In Hardy’s day, every large farm had its own cider shed, and each village had a communal shed and orchard. But when Seal moved to Nettlecombe in west Dorset 26 years ago, its village press was gathering dust. He and a few friends got it running again, and they now press in various sheds each autumn. They make cider the way Giles Winterborne does in The Woodlanders: using a scratter to crush the apples into a pomace that is then set into straw and built up in layers called a “cheese”. The main difference today is that these “anarchist ciderists” have a WhatsApp group to let people know where to gather. “Whoever feels like it turns up, maybe helps press a barrel, catches up with mates and drinks,” says Seal. Evenings often end up as a multigenerational party, with music and singing around a fire.
Celebrating the cyclical nature of agrarian life has bound rural communities together for millennia. At Seal’s farm on the eastern edge of the Powerstock Hills, the days follow the rhythm of the seasons. There is the willow harvest in the early months of the year, followed by sheep shearing and lambing in the spring, hay cutting in summer, the autumn apple harvest followed by cider-making, and basket-making in the short dark days of winter. “I made a deliberate choice to live a small life,” he tells me. “Sometimes it can be a pain in the arse being tied down by the sheep” – he laughs – “but to get to see the sun rise over Eggardon Hill every morning…” This echoes something Hardy wrote in Tess: “The magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.” Seal’s is a life of hard, satisfying work attuned to beauty and the agricultural traditions he loves.
Woodland
Neil Parsons is the lone and final practitioner of a five-generation family of local hurdle-makers in Alderbury, near Salisbury. In a workshop behind his house, he splits hazel rods with a billhook and weaves them into panels traditionally used to pen sheep. When I visited, he – like Hardy’s Giles Winterborne – “was in the act of making a hurdle, the stakes being driven firmly into the ground in a row, over which he bent and wove the twigs”. Beside him lay “a square, compact pile” of finished hurdles.
This craft, practised for at least 7,000 years in Britain, began to die out in the 1950s and ’60s with the arrival of metal and plastic fencing. When Parsons, now 63, was learning the trade at the age of 11, he was one of a dozen struggling to carry on. But the death knell for the local industry was the arrival of cheap eastern European versions in the 1990s. He kept at it, his business eventually saved by the internet, which allowed new customers, mostly garden designers, to find him.
The demise of the wattle hurdle is not merely the loss of an old craft. It signals the demise of Britain’s woodlands themselves. Coppice products such as hurdles, spars, charcoal and many others sustain an ancient – and elegantly circular – system of forest management. In a coppiced wood, hardwoods such as oak, ash and hazel are selectively cut back close to the ground on a rotation of between five and 20 years, depending on the species. The remaining “stool” resprouts, replenishing the wood supply, while simultaneously extending the trees’ lives, often by centuries.
We drive to an estate where, on one side of a dirt road, is an abandoned copse. Its dense oak canopy starves the understory, leaving the forest floor dark and bereft of life. Across the road, where Parsons has been culling, birds flit in the filigreed light. “This gentle, cyclical thinning allows all kinds of wildlife, birds, insects and flowers such as wood anemones, primroses and bluebells to return at different stages in the cycle,” he explains. The ancient practice is almost too good to be true: a symbiotic relationship of craftsman and woodland that enhances both.
Forest
Jim Bettle likes to quote a study that claims one in three people don’t know that charcoal is wood. The material for making it is the last refuse left on the ground in a coppiced wood, after every other more desirable stick has gone to be used elsewhere. Nothing is wasted. Bettle has been making charcoal for 30 years in the same manner as in Hardy’s day: in a steel kiln, filled and fitted carefully, which he takes to woodland across the county of Dorset. While most modern charcoal production does enormous damage to the environment, Bettle is driven to do the very opposite.
Charcoal is that rare product whose means of production can actually benefit the environment. It sequesters carbon, and can be used for biochar, which improves soil health (while keeping the carbon locked in the ground for centuries); in pet food and animal feed, where it helps digestion and filters toxins; in cosmetics and soaps as an exfoliant; and many other uses that Bettle continues to learn about. It is only by burning charcoal, as we do on barbecues, that it releases carbon. Bettle points out that this is offset, because otherwise you would be using your gas or electric stove. But to reap the benefits of British charcoal, which includes not just carbon sequestration but all the biodiversity that thrives in a managed woodland, there has to be a market for it. Alas, almost no one in Britain uses British charcoal. Most is imported, and the commercial production of that charcoal is one of the most damaging practices in the world, ranked fourth after palm oil. The raw material comes from large-scale deforestation, rife with corruption and harmful labour practices, which is killing rainforests in the Amazon, and desertifying southern Africa. But it is cheaper. Humans have been making and using charcoal for more than 4,000 years, Bettle tells me. “But we’re having to relearn what we once knew.”
Farmland
Dave Symonds comes from a centuries-long line of local farmers in Dorset that ended when he was 12. He lived part of the time with his grandfather on an estate that, in a Hardyesque turn, had no tenancy succession. When his grandfather died, he had to find a job outside farming and, at 15, found himself apprenticed to a thatcher.
Today there are 700 or so British thatchers; Symonds is one of around 24 who still grow their own material. When he started out on his own, 50 years ago, he wanted to return to the old methods. He knew how to make thatching spars – the cleaved sticks of coppiced hazel twisted into a hairpin shape to secure thatch – from watching his great-grandfather and “the old cider boys” cut them as they drank and talked in the estate’s cider