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Top tips for compost perfection

New to gardening and scratching your head over your first compost heap or compost bin? I’m no expert but I’m keen. Here’s a handful of home-grown tips to help you brew batch after batch of beautiful, rich, moist compost:

• you’re advised to turn your compost regularly to get the air through it and mix things up. But in practice it’s a silly idea to try and empty then re-fill a composter or compost bin. Instead, cut your garden waste up into six inch bits if you’ve got the patience. It seems to help. If you’ve got a proper heap, fork it over gently once a month.
• Water your compost bin or heap monthly, sprinkling a full watering can over it each time. For some reason, a bit of water seems to help the contents break down.
• Pee in it! No, really… pee in a bucket, top it up half way with water and sprinkle it on. Apparently urine is a catalyst - it helps break down organic material.
• Ants. If you have ants in your garden, keep your fingers crossed they’ll move into your compost heap or bin. They have an amazing ability to somehow chew up organic material then spit it out - transformed - as fine, regular particles. Wow.
• Shrink your grass cuttings before putting them in. If you’ve got a big lawn you’ll find yourself with endless heaps of grass cuttings all summer. Cram them into a bin bag, seal it and leave it for a week. Your cuttings will shrink down to a tiny fraction of their original bulk so you’ll be able to fit them into your heap or bin easily. 
• Make soup! Put the roots of nettles, dock, couch grass, bindweed and other vigourous nasties straight into your compost heap and they’ll sprout up again as soon as they escape into the air. Sometimes the seeds survive too. To kill them off, chuck ’em into a bucket then cover them with water. You’ll soon have a highly nutritious - if stinking - ’soup’ that you can pour onto your garden for dramatic growth. 
• Apparently evergreens don’t break down easily and they don’t make very good compost. So leave evergreen waste out.
• If you put bits of wood in your compost it’ll take ages to break down. Smash them up into bits and they’ll eventually break down just fine.
• Timing: if your compost is in the sun all or part of the day, it’ll rot down faster. If it’s in the shade it’ll still rot down, but it’ll take longer. Every heap is unique, but once you’ve ripened one batch you’ll have an idea of how long yours will take.
• Residents: fork the top off your compost heap or open your bin and you’ll be amazed by the heat it generates. For this reason, you’ll probably find small creatures have made it home. Expect anything from mice to shrews to woodlice, ants and worms, centipedes and slow worms, newts, toads and frogs. Perhaps even the odd hedgehog. I always give our heap a good poke then retire for a few minutes to give residents a fair chance of escape before I fork their homes over!  
• Put your kitchen waste into your compost, but don’t include anything cooked… raw organic materials only, and no protein!
• Eggshells are a useful addition to compost heaps in soft water areas. But in hard water areas, where the soil and water are already full of calcium, adding eggshells just adds more lime.