“By the way, Diana has nothing to do with it!” warns Bridget Elworthy, while deciding whether or not to let me come and visit her compost-making operation. By Diana she means the Diana, Princess of Wales. The reason some might – erroneously – make a connection is that the compost is made on the Althorp Estate, childhood home to you-know-who, still home to you-know-who’s brother.
The Wall Street Journal made precisely that connection in a recent article about posh compost. Elworthy’s not too keen on that one either, the P-word, as well as the D-word.
Anyway, somehow I pass the test, and I’m in. Or I would be if I could find the place. I’m lost in rural Northamptonshire. Partridges scuttle across the lane in front of smiling children being led on plump ponies. In the fields, cock pheasants squawk loudly. All this land belongs to Earl Spencer, whose Grade I-listed stately home is somewhere through those trees. How anyone could think that any of this is posh is totally baffling.
I suppose it could also be that the compost costs £20 a bag. Not a big bag, like you get at the garden centre, but a small 1.5kg bag, like a bag of flour. We’ll get to that.
Now, though, I’m here at last, at an old dairy on the edge of the estate. “You’re going to have to tell me what posh is,” Elworthy says. “Because I’m a Kiwi and Tom’s an Aussie and we don’t have posh.” Tom is Tom Mitchell, compost manager. He’s here permanently, Elworthy is based in London.
Briefly: from a New Zealand farming family, she came to Britain and along with Henrietta Courtauld formed The Land Gardeners. They grow cut flowers and design gardens. They were here restoring the Spencers’ walled garden, and that’s how they got working in partnership with the estate. Courtauld is not here today; she’s in Cornwall, talking to a farmer about his soil.
“The soil is the basis of everything – plant health, animal health, your health,” says Elworthy. “So if you’re eating something that’s grown in microbially rich soil that is actually interacting with the plants, and not just getting a quick fix like with a synthetic fertiliser, that food will have higher nutrient density and you will be much healthier. Not only that, but so will the planet.”
She says I need to read Ben Mead’s Nuffield paper on improving pasture quality, then sets off at a breathless gallop through her and Courtauld’s soil odyssey and composting heroes: they did an (American microbiologist) Elaine Ingham course; studied Ehrenfriend Pfeiffer, the German soil scientist who was a protege of Rudolf Steiner. Most significantly, they learned from Austrian compost gurus Angelika Luebke and Urs Hildebrandt, who developed a method of producing high-quality humified compost in just six to eight weeks – that’s what they’re doing here.
Next, Elworthy shows me a big pile of poo, mixed up with bedding straw, from the estate’s horses and cows. “Cows are natural biochemists,” she says. “They self-medicate, they know what’s good for them, they will go along in a field and they will eat things they need, which is why you have to give them a diverse diet.”
Elworthy and co are working with the estate (which is in the process of going organic) on diversifying that diet by improving pasture quality. Camel dung is also good, apparently. She’s working on a local source, she says.
What? Really? Where? Who? She’s not saying. “That’s the one thing we’re going to keep quiet.” Bactrian camels are particularly interesting, and we’re off again, to the Gobi desert this time, then to a racehorse trainer in Australia, a woman doing some reforestation work in Zimbabwe, and someone else doing something interesting with goat poo on an island off Mozambique. “There’s so much I want to tell you about!” Sometimes I struggle to keep up with the details but the message is clear: whether we’re talking about farmers or gardeners, diversity and life and improving the health of the soil (which means not spraying it with synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and fungicides) are the keys to everything.
Camel dung is not essential, the manure from the estate’s horses and shorthorn cattle is just grand, and as if to prove it a cheerful woman turns up in a tractor with another trailer full of it. Farmyard manure makes up 40% of the compost they produce; 20% is green stuff, harvested from the surrounding meadows and including rye grass, clover and vetch, the fresher the better. Another 20% is hay, similar to the last, but dry. Then 10% is mature compost, from a previous batch. “Putting in the microbes to start it off, kind of like the sourdough theory,” says Mitchell the compost manager.
The final 10% is subsoil clay. “We’re fortunate here, they’ve dug ponds and they’ve had leftover clay,” says Mitchell. There’s a famous lake here isn’t there, with an island, I wonder if some of the clay comes from there … “No!” snaps Elworthy. Don’t mention the D-word, remember.
That’s the ingredients, now for the method. They make windrows – long piles that are wider at the base than at the top, almost triangular in cross-section – with the ingredients layered like lasagne. Then they turn it with a machine, to mix it up and get some air in there, then cover it with tarpaulins.
There are three windrows here in the old cowshed that they made about a week ago. Mitchell lifts the cover. It’s still manure and straw and grass and clay, but you can tell there’s something going on in there, feel the warmth coming off it. He sticks a thermometer in: 55C (131F) in the middle – that’s about right, he says, you don’t want it any higher. Next the CO2 meter; he’s happy with that, the microbes are doing their thing, respiring.
For six to eight weeks, Mitchell tends, and turns, and checks the temperature. And then it’s done. And here’s some they made earlier: a big sack of the finished product. I can put my hand in and feel it, says Elworthy. It’s cool now; dark, rich, sticky, maybe even chocolatey. If I was a seed I’d want to be germinating in there. I’d probably sprinkle it on my porridge as well.
Some of this lot will go back to where it came from, along with the seed in the drill when it’s time to plant crops here on the estate, to keep the cycle going. And some will end up for sale in little bags.
Twenty quid though! Really? “If you think of all the time and effort and integrity that has gone into it, in no way and on no level are we ripping people off,” says Elworthy. A labour of love, it doesn’t compare to compost you get at the garden centre (for – checks – £12.50 for 100 litres!), which is fibrous and light, has probably been overheated and won’t have nearly as much life in it, she says. “If you think of normal compost as yoghurt, this is a probiotic pill for the soil, putting life back into it.”
They actually call it Climate Compost Inoculum, and the bag has three red crosses on it. The message is, this is more than mere compost; it is going to make the soil better, as well as your health, and the health of the planet. And because it’s so concentrated, you only need a little bit. She picks up a pinch: this much to rub your sweet peas in before planting. Later they send me some pictures of their own trials: sweet peas grown using their climate compost next to ones grown without. With it is better: better germination; better leaf growth; longer roots; sticky aggregates on the rhizosphere (the soil around the roots), which is a sign of microbial activity in the root zone …
I’m still balking at the price, though. If you throw enough money at a problem it usually makes it better, doesn’t it? “Our whole point is that we can educate people so they can do it themselves and don’t have to spend twenty quid,” says Elworthy.
And it’s cheaper than a 4kg bag of manure from Flamingo Estate in the Los Angeles hills which costs $75 but sold out recently when Gwyneth Paltrow put it on her Goop Christmas gift guide. It’s called The Good Shit, of course.
This is better shit, because it’s not just shit, it’s got all the other stuff; love and integrity, and it’s part of a bigger plan. Elworthy and the Land Gardeners have a dream, where everyone from farmers with thousands of acres to gardeners, even the window-box tomato grower, is looking after their patch. “If you start thinking of that soil as being like a pet, or something you have got the responsibility to look after and really nurture, then you are doing something positive.”
And that involves making compost, which anyone can do. Hmmm, last time I attempted it, it just ended up a slimier version of what I put into it. Probably not enough air in there, says Elworthy. Or the right mix of green stuff and brown stuff for nitrogen and carbon. I have seen them do it now, got the magic recipe, but last time I looked out over my own estate (small London garden), there were no wild meadows to be harvested, no shorthorn cattle or ponies. Actually there is a riding school on the A406, with a mountain of free manure. We picked some up when we recently got an allotment; the car still smells.
There are dozens of ways of making compost. Whole books have been written about it – the Bokashi method, worms, biodynamics. There’s no room to go into it all here. Bridget Elworthy does have an aerobic method from fellow New Zealander Kay Baxter that approximates to what they do here. They call it a compost cake, and it involves alternating layers of nitrogen sources (fresh grass cuttings, weeds, garden clippings, manure if you have it), with sources of carbon (straw, old hay, wood chippings, brown leaves), plus a bit of clay and old compost (like sourdough remember?). And it requires a little more patience: six months for the cake to bake.
In the meantime, I scrounge a bit of the good stuff, from the sack. Not in one of the special breathable (and compostable of course) bags, with the three red crosses (they don’t have any here at the dairy), but in a disappointingly un-posh Sainsbury’s bag.
I’ll start road-testing it at the weekend, at the allotment. We’ll be sowing beans, mixing them with a little inoculum first, for the magic. I know princesses are out of bounds, but opening the book of fairy tales at a different page … It just so happens that one of my own progeny, the keenest allotmenteer, is called Jack. And if, the following morning, he isn’t climbing up a massive stalk into the sky, then returning with an actual golden-egg-laying goose under his arm, then I want my money back. (Even though – full disclosure – I didn’t actually part with any.)
