It’s always nice when a plan comes together, and for that reason alone this Monday was a good day. I’m not really sure why I’m prejudiced against the day – we tend to work through the weekend anyway so it isn’t as if it’s actually the start of our week. It’s probably a hangover from my school days, when Sunday evening was such a poignant time. It seems like I spent all my Sunday evenings thinking back to our Sunday seaside trip and dreading a return to the village school where the spirit of Wackford Squeers lived on well into the 1960s.

In truth I actually liked some of the schools I went to and didn’t go to the coast too often so I’m really only thinking of an eighteen month period when I was eight-years old, but it seems to have ruined Mondays for me for life. Fortunately it’s just a mild dislike – if I had an irrational fear of Mondays I would have to learn to spell lunaediesophobia just to describe how I felt.

Anyway, back to the real subject. Having access to a large amount of greenery and several cardboard boxes it seemed a good time to dig the bean trench we’d been threatening for two years. There are various sorts of bean trench, ranging from ones filled with good compost to those filled with cardboard and newspaper. The benefit of the first sort are obvious, the benefit of the second sort is that it keeps moisture under the beans. We’ve gone for the third type, also known as a composting trench, where you fill it with waste and let it rot down over winter. The idea is that it will not only rot down to produce compost, but will heat the soil (according to one blog I read). I’m not convinced about the soil heating bit – I think you will need a lot more in the trench to produce heat, but let’s see.

That’s cardboard, cape gooseberry and various garden clippings in the trench. We ended up with a lot more by the time we’d finished and had to stamp it down. Now we just wait and see.

As for the rest of the compost – the three bay pallet bin is nearly full (as you can see from the picture above), the plastic and wooden bins and rotating drums are full and the pigs are producing plenty of raw materials. Despite this I just know that when we come to spreading time we will be disappointed when we see how little it actually covers. There are several rules of composting:

(1) It always contains plastic, no matter how careful you are

(2) It never looks as good as it does on Gardeners’ World

(3) It never goes far enough