Some people can't make a good cup of coffee. Some can't boil an egg properly. And some cannot make compost according to the normal rules. One friend falls very definitely into this category, and tells a long story. He puts his weakness down to the fact of having for years been spoiled by a regular supply of hen manure and then too a constant source of horse manure. The hen manure consisted of dropping son to the turf strewn barn floor in which hens roosted at night - or in very inclement weather. The best manure of all, he swears, especially for vegetables.
Anyway, as these two sources began, for complicated reasons, to give out, he set his mind to making compost according to the books. He used chemical accelerators or intensifiers or general hurry up elements. He put layer upon layer, as the books told him to do. And he waited and waited and waited. Mind you, it was a large heap, and in a very draughty corner of a biggish garden; and under conifer trees. Maybe that had some thing to do with it.
Also the fact that children used to play on it. Lots of room for them. And that is perhaps partly why, when, after a long wait, and after many probings, the spade would bring out sticks and bows and arrows and twigs, undiminished, and impacted handfuls of still whole beech or oak leaves long with golf balls and tins and plastic objects. But everything comes to those who wait. After many years, after all the treatments and then the long abandonment, excavation into the ground floor of the heap, now reduced to about eight or ten feet, reveals, believe it or not, compost.
A cut downwards reminds you of the face of a peat bog, with all its layers and its shades of dark and light material. Now that it has been opened, this particular peat face won't last long.
And, of course, there, is always the doubt. One voice, a dissident voice, on a BBC radio gardening programme said how much razzamatazz advertising was done, early in the season for this and that compost or enricher. The best additives of all, he thought, was sometimes disregarded or underestimated. It was spelled simply S-O-I-L.