A Whole Heap of Trouble...

Composting is a mug's game.

There - I said it.

I'm aware that there are those of a gardening persuasion who would vehemently disagree with me. But I tried and tried, and failed and failed,  and eventually came to the conclusion that it was either me or the compost heap - one of us had to leave. And obviously it wasn't going to be me.

At that time, our council were encouraging everyone to invest in subsidised compost bins. We did our duty, took delivery of our very own black plastic dalek and began the process of filling it up. 

We weed in it (in a verbish rather than nounish sense). This is not weird at all. Apparently human wee is a good accelerant. We dutifully cut up all our woody waste, developing Iron-Man style muscles in our hands in the process.  Only to find we were breeding a monster crew of slugs and nothing much else. By the time it was ready to turn out it was so heavy we couldn't actually get it open to distribute whatever lay inside around our postage stamp garden. And so it remained there, our very own installation, minding its own business and about as useful as a fish on a bicycle. It was still there when we moved house.

Then there was the compost heap in my current garden: made of wood, with a nice home-made lid to keep it neat and tidy. We inherited it 3 years ago. Being, at the time, still enthusiastic and committed, I set to. I wasn't going to make the same mistakes as last time - I'd come on in the composting world. This time I stirred it regularly with a specially purchased compost aerator-stick thingy, because my friend Liz said I should.

One afternoon there I was in an aerating reverie when I became aware that I was not alone. 

There, running in a rather panic stricken circle, inside my heap, not two feet from my face, was a mouse. I like mice. How sweet! I thought.

'Come and have a look at the mouse, kids!' I yelled at my two sons.  

'Where? Let's see!' They ran over eager to see the wildlife I had unearthed. 

Cue mouse number 2.

'Oh look - another one! Poor things - they must be frightened of us - don't shout!' I said. 

Privately I was thinking that these mice were entirely too glossy, and - well - large, for my liking. What were they eating in there? I didn't remember composting several pounds of cheese.

It was just then that mummy mouse appeared. Not a mouse. Not at all. Two feet FROM MY FACE.

I'm not generally squeamish, with the exception of very large house spiders  apparating in the centre of the living room in the middle of Newsnight, but a full grown rat at close quarters was not something I'd encountered before and it turned out NOT to be one of those 'feel the fear but do it anyway' moments.

Shooing the children back inside I did the obvious thing, and Googled the problem. 

'Hey, live and let live - they are wildlife - they're not going to harm anyone' said one post.
'KILL KILL KILL OR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY WILL DIE OF DISGUSTING DISEASES!' said another.
'They'll be off as soon as it's summer time,' said still another. 
It was summer time.
'Face the facts, if you have a compost heap, you're going to get rats', said still another.

This is confusing, I thought. 
I'll get my husband to deal with it, I thought.

My husband, it turns out, is really scared of rats. 
Bummer.

When I'd finished laughing at him, we decided to call in the rat people. 
Turns out it was a bumper year for rats. Turns out we had pretty much done the equivalent of putting together a pretty good viral ad campaign called 'Calling All Rats' by a. feeding the birds (rats love bird food, even more than birds do) and b. providing them with the rodent equivalent of the Ritz to live in. 

'We've not stopped all summer,' said the rat man, rubbing his hands together.
But how does your stuff...you know... kill them? I whispered.
'They bleed to death,' he said cheerfully. 'Internally.'
'Okay,' we said, ashamed.
'Seventy quid please,' he said.
The rat people were laughing all the way to the bank. 

Weeks later, armed with rolls of chicken wire we re-constructed the compost heap, rodent proofed it, and started over. No more rats! Hurrah! we thought.

And then, a few months later, I was sitting in the garden when a rat RAN OVER MY HUSBAND'S FOOT and scarpered down the garden. Very much in the direction of the compost heap. Which would have been loads funnier had he not been standing right by our open back door at the time.

A week later we spread out a tarpaulin, and, encouraged - from a distance - by my man, I dug out the compost (which was, actually, full of pretty good compost, all dark, crumbly and not smelly) and dismantled the heap for good. 

Rats aside, making good compost isn't easy. It's a bit like taking part a Great British Bake Off Technical Challenge. You can't just chuck in your old banana skins and potato peelings. Oh no, you have to get the composition just right. It turns out not everything can go in it. And the ingredients, like a particularly complicated Baked Alaska, have to be precisely mixed and layered, with not too much of this and not too much of that. It can't be too wet, or too dry. It can't be cold, or in the shade. It's higher maintenance that Madonna. 

So I've given up. The garden waste can go to the Council tip where they know what they're doing, with their heated compost piles to 100 degrees and all that malarky. And where the rats can gambol, haemorrhage free, to their little hearts' content.

I'm all about the wormery now. And that's another story.