Build it, and the worms will come: what I've learned from my year of home composting and container gardening

Our ground floor flat in the most south-easterly corner of England boasts a tiny, triangular back garden with an area of about 25 square metres. Most of it is paved over, although there are a couple of raised beds - more of which later. Not, you might think, a very promising place to grow your own vegetables but in my first year of trying, I don't seem to have done too badly. (I didn’t originally think you could ever eat too many tomatoes but in a month or so I might well have changed my mind on that score…) In addition to tomatoes, I've also managed to grow rhubarb, Jerusalem artichoke, garlic, chives, carrots, spring onions, pak choi, spinach beet and courgettes, although the latter seem to be a bit problematic - you'll get the occasional beauty, but most of them shrivel up before they have a chance to get going. Oh well.

Some gardening purists will tell you that growing vegetables in containers is never as good as growing them in the soil. Perhaps the average yields you get from conventional soil cultivation are better overall, but if you choose the right things to grow and the right conditions to grow them in, container gardening can be very rewarding indeed. Below are some of the recommendations I can pass on to any other aspiring container gardener. Hope you find them useful.

Choose your container well

The selection of container is important. I've noticed that whatever I'm growing - be it vegetables or flowers/pot plants - I always get better results from plastic containers than clay ones. Presumably this is due to the fact that clay pots lose moisture through their pores and plastic pots don't.

And if you don't have any pots to grow things in, put off the trip to the garden centre and get creative. Old washing up bowls are the right depth for growing things like garlic and spring onions (drill some holes in the bottom first though and put a thin layer of broken shards of pottery or small pebbles down before adding compost; both these steps will help with drainage). You can also use old buckets. If you're transplanting something (e.g. herbs) from a smaller pot into a bucket with sloping sides, here's a tip: put the plant low down, so that there's a three inch gap between the top of the compost and the rim of the bucket. When it's time to repot, all you have to do is take the plant plus compost out of the bucket, add a couple of inches of compost to the bottom of the bucket, replace the plant, and fill around the gaps with compost. Bingo - you've repotted without having to buy a new pot.

A word of warning though: all types of plastic are not created equal. Most plastic items will have a number inside a recycling symbol stamped on the bottom. You should definitely avoid anything labelled with a 3 (PVC, which has certain additives and stabilisers that you don't want accumulating in your compost) or a 7 ("other". This often means polycarbonate, a plastic containing bisphenol A, which has been implicated in certain cancers).

One other thing you might like to try is self-watering containers. You can buy these in the shops and online, but they're not cheap. However, it's not too difficult to make your own, as this demo shows:

Grow from seed

It's cheaper - much, much cheaper - than buying plugs of seedlings from the garden centre. If you don't have a greenhouse or shed, then it does mean that your dining table and/or windowsills will be covered with seed trays for a good part of the spring. But it will be worth it.

If you're starting your seeds off indoors, here's a handy tip I picked up from Alys Fowler on BBC TV's Gardener's World: build your own propagator, by cutting the top and one of the sides away from a cardboard box and covering the inside of the three remaining sides with foil. This will reflect light back onto your seedlings and stop them from becoming leggy and bendy. You could also stick a few old CD-ROMs onto the foil for good measure.

Get a water butt

If there's space and a downpipe, a water butt is invaluable - it will save on mains water and the rainwater you collect will be soft and free of chlorine. The water butt should be raised off the ground to allow room for a bucket to collect water from the tap at the bottom.

Boot fairs are the thrifty gardener's paradise. And so are skips

Boot fairs are great for buying used containers, seedlings/plants and second hand tools. Once you start gardening, you will also start to view skips and their contents with a great deal more interest. One neighbour of mine used a skip to throw out old junk while he redecorated his house. Some of the "junk" turned out to be extremely useful, including several 6 foot lengths of 1 inch diameter plastic tubing, which I now use in my self-watering containers.

Start a comfrey patch

In our raised bed out the back, and in our front garden as well, I've planted some comfrey. It's a zero maintenance perennial with nice purply-mauve flowers, and the leaves make a very good liquid feed. (Tomatoes love it.) Just cut some leaves off during summer and place them in a bucket/old washing up bowl. Cover with water, then weigh down with a few large stones. Leave for a few weeks, during which the comfrey leaves will rot down into a sludge and the water will turn into a brown, slightly faecal-smelling tea. Dilute 1:10 with water and use as a feed every week or so. The rotted down comfrey leaves can be chucked on the compost heap, which brings me nicely to my final recommendation, namely…

Start a compost heap

Growing vegetables in home-made compost is very rewarding, as this picture of container-grown chard (plus publicity-hungry cat) demonstrates. Not only do you get better yields than with shop-bought compost, but it also saves you money! If you're in the UK, some local authorities offer composters at lower prices than you would pay in a garden centre, so it's worth checking with your local council.

I'm no expert. But here's what's worked for me when it comes to composting. I bought a "Dalek" type composter a couple of years ago, and placed it on the larger of our two raised beds. Into it go vegetable and fruit peelings, egg shells, torn up bog roll cores, bits of torn up newspaper/cardboard (don't go overboard with these though), used tea bags/leaves and old coffee grounds. Plus occasional dead-head flowers, weeds and fallen leaves. (Warning: do not put meat or dairy products on your compost heap - they attract vermin.)

To keep things reasonably moist in your compost heap, you need to add a few cupfuls of water every time you put a load in. The occasional bit of comfrey feed will also help accelerate the composting process.

Most "how to" guides to composting recommend that you turn your compost heap over every week or so. Do any of these people realise how hard that is to do if you have a Dalek? Fortunately, I hit on a solution. Since my Dalek is a couple of feet off the ground, I find it relatively easy to open the hatch, and use a spade to transfer the more well-rotted matter from the bottom of the Dalek to a bucket or container. Next to the Dalek I've dug a hole, into which I put this partially rotted compost before covering it with old carpet/containers/chicken wire. (If you have any cats in the vicinity it's important to do this, otherwise they will use your lovely compost as a litter tray. I can't emphasise this enough: something which has been used as cat litter is NOT suitable for growing veg.) During the warm summer months, all you need to do is wait a couple of weeks and the worms will turn the stuff you've put in the hole into gorgeous, crumbly compost. All you have to do before using it to grow stuff is fish out most of the dead twigs and worms - a makeshift chicken wire sieve can be pressed into service here, or for quicker results, just use your fingers to get the biggest ones out!

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