When I was 7 years old, my family moved from a tiny bungalow to a house 15 miles from anywhere. A house where two cars going past in the morning was a rush hour, and a house with a garden which would help form me as a person.
That garden, on the edge of a salt marsh, had everything. We had wild strawberries, apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, gooseberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, ponds and, of course, two large compost heaps.
To encourage us in gardening, my sister and I were each given a square foot of garden to plant what we wanted. I remember not being very impressed with the size. Still, I always found growing my own things more interesting than the gardening jobs we were assigned.
A year or two later, I noticed a shop bought garlic sprouting, and asked for permission to plant it. It was the first time I experienced the huge joy in harvesting – and eating – my own vegetables.
Then followed potatoes, when I dug up a patch of garden 20 foot long by 10 foot wide to grow enough potatoes for weeks of eating.
It wasn’t the only garden in my life. My grandfather’s garden was huge – and immaculate. Besides the perfect rose garden and the lunches under the weeping willow, it had a ginormous vegetable garden with everything in neat rows. Exploring the back I found wooden compost bins hidden in a small square of manicured hedges. The smell of cut grass and pine from that garden lives in my memory still.
Back home, our own two huge compost piles were an early source of learning under the tutelage of my father. We turned and harvested and added horse manure (I also mucked out the stables for my mum – early proof that good compost usually starts with unglamorous work). One year, the heat from a fire spread underground to the heaps and set them on fire. Everyone in the village turned up and we formed a chain from the tap to compost heaps, passing buckets along. The local fire engine turned up but the fire had gone out – they still hosed it down, just in case. Then we all went to the pub.
Times changed. My parents separated, I went to university and then abroad to teach in Asia, where I met my wife. After a sojourn first studying and then teaching at Cardiff University, I moved to Qatar for work. In my spare time, I set up a travel website there, wrote a column for Qatar Today and co-founded an e-commerce company – the beginnings of the digital and business skills I would later lean on to build Compost Magazine.
In 2010 I moved back to the UK to focus full time on e-commerce. I also bought my first house – and after years of apartment living, had the chance to garden and compost again. The garden I moved to had poor soil, full of breeze blocks and waste, and it took a concerted effort – and lots of composting and horse manure – to restore the soil to health. That was the year composting stopped being something I did and became something I studied.
In 2017 I moved to my current house, with a quarter of an acre garden, and composting went from a habit to something close to an obsession. There followed vegetable patches, chickens, a polytunnel, flower beds – and system after system. I started with a simple compost pile, moved to a three-bin system, added an insulated bin to keep things cooking through the winter, and then began testing everything I could get my hands on: Bokashi bins (not impressed), worm bins (very impressed), tumblers, home-made bins, trench composting and more. All told, I’ve built or used more than 35 composting systems over the years, and I’ve learned as much from the ones that disappointed me as the ones that worked.
These days I test compost bins and electric composters the slow way – in my own garden, over full seasons – which is why my verdicts don’t always match the marketing.
When I’m not gardening, composting or writing, I love foraging for wild foods, fishing and surfing.
And it was here – initially as an escape from work on winter nights when I couldn’t garden – that I started Compost Magazine in 2018, with the help of Jean, John and later my wife, Siska.
Compost Magazine has given me something I didn’t expect: the chance to test my own experience against people who know far more than me. I’ve interviewed soil scientists and researchers, dug into the studies behind better composting, and passed what I learn on to readers who care about it as much as I do.