It's all filth

Over at Life is full of surprises, TL has been musing on the various ways of creating a good compost. My experience has been that perfectly good compost can be made without any smell or sludge simply by piling the garden debris up and leaving it open to the air. The majority of professional advice is to cover the heap over so that the heat from the decaying matter hastens the whole process. In my experience, that is what produces the stink. An open pile takes longer, but it's odour-free, and provides somewhere warm for the neighbourhood cats to sit in winter, keeping their little bottoms warm!

As the photos show, I have two main piles - one a large open-cast heap and the other a contained box mainly for grass cuttings. We are currently digging into the big one, and you can see the quality of compost that is at the base.