Bays a plenty - Bootle gardens thrives with innovative composting system

The Gateway Collective in Bootle, Merseyside was one of three organisations to each be awarded a grant of £1,300 to support composting activities in community gardens. The grants came from a partnership between Social Farms & Gardens and sustainable coffee brand GRIND.

Producing over 500kg of fresh food in a year, they wanted to develop an efficient and fast composting system whereby they could generate their own. We last caught up with them in October and are so pleased to hear their new approach to compost is proving plentiful. 

Over the winter months the garden’s staff and volunteers were able to maintain a new system for all the community to contribute to. Ali Horton, the garden’s Director informed told us ‘’Over Christmas people brought their veg waste from their Christmas dinner – we had great fun seeing what people had eaten by the content of their waste – sprouts were not popular at all!’’ 

Thanks to some guidance from composting experts, Composting Works, they have a full system set up to accommodate different types of waste. ‘’Our compost system is now going well. We have 10 bays in total!  3 for our community food waste, 1 for our toilet waste, 3 as a ‘staging area’ for compost to be put to be sorted and chopped smaller and 3 that are being used in rotation, cleverly called ‘take from me’, leave me alone and add to me!’’

Ali speaks with excitement about further plans for the future, ''We now have electricity connected to the site and are in the process of getting an electricity supplier.  As soon as that is sorted we can buy a shredder which Minna from Composting Works says will make our compost speedy and amazing!

 We have 3 community gardeners who are our ‘compost experts’ and 2 who are making our bays and fixing them when we need to.’’

Read more about our grant partnership with GRIND or download our composting guide.