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Message: [QUOTE="Colin, post: 123383, member: 5507"] Hi, An update. I've now filled all four compost bins. The big pile of garden debris was over 7' tall but settled down a bit. I was amazed to find the pile bone dry inside in spite of the amount of rain we suffer here on the valley side. Mostly it was made up of snowberry stumps; ivy; leaves and sticks etc with well rotted horse manure thrown in. I had also built a smaller pile. Yesterday looking at the new bins I wondered if I had gone over the top in buying four; this morning though I find I still have half the pile remaining? I've added 8 bags of shredded material into the bins and have just added about 6L of water to each bin before putting the lids on. As the material in the bins settles down I can top up using the remaining pile but am resigned to this taking quite a while. In order to move the material down to the bins I used my well tried method using a small tarpaulin as a sled as seen in the pictures below; this is about the only time I can use gravity in the garden to my favour and it works a treat; just four trips with the tarpaulin which I loaded with a fork. Shredding the lot would have greatly reduced the bulk but I'm fed up of working on the steep slope whilst Blackie soaks me and Gale blows me around; I must be getting soft; I'll never join a gym. Loading the bins was easy enough but the springy nature of the material tended to lift the bin from the ground as I rammed the material in; no doubt the bins will settle. For the last 30 years I've been running this kind of garden material to our local tip but I've now started doing lots of shredding and am trying to compost; the pile of stones is just one of the piles I dug up whilst removing the snowberry stumps; I'm sure in a previous life I must have been a labourer building the pyramids? :( The last picture shows what remains and what the material is like; I've never dug as many stumps up previously and never want to do it again. Kind regards, Colin. [ATTACH=full]29218[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]29219[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]29220[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]29221[/ATTACH] [/QUOTE]

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