Master Composter Training 2011

We have just recruited another 20 volunteers to the Shropshire Master Composters network.

This is fantastic news which will allow us to really expand the reach of our community engagement programme and hopefully get more people in Shropshire into home composting as a cost effective and green way to manage your own household waste as well as helping to make your garden beautiful.

Our training involved a day in Shropshire hosted by the Shropshire Wildlife Trust and the second day was hosted by Garden Organic at their HQ near Coventry. 

We got alot of technical instruction and interesting talks about waste management, bacteria, fungi and minibeasts in your compost heap, what to compost and what not to compost and how to engage with the public about these issues.  We also did a site visit to the Councils farm near Shrewsbury where they compost garden waste on an industrial scale. 

We also played the Compost Game - see below...

We also had a tour of the Garden Organic composting area to learn about various different systems for home composting... 

Gary from Garden Organic showed us how to build your own New Zealand Box style composter from old wooden pallets.

We learned all about how to make leaf mould...

We learned about "food waste digestors" like the Green cone system.

We also got shown about sealed units which can rotate like the "compost tumbler" below.  These can be used to accelerate the composting process.

And of course the bog standard "darlek" type compost bins like the Council sell which are simple but effective.

We even learned about using food waste in a bean trench.

We got very excited about wormeries! These are great for dealing with cooked food waste which you wouldnt normally want to put into a home compost bin.

We also learned about how to use Comfrey, that wonderful plant, to make an accelerator for your compost bin.  You can also stew up this kind of comfrey soup to use as a direct fertiliser.

All the volunteers found it very inspirational, even the dog!

A big thanks to all the staff from Shropshire Council, Veolia, Shropshire Wildlife Trust and Garden Organic who gave up their weekend to get us all enthused and confident to go forth into our communities and talk to people about composting.