How to Start Composting This Spring: Turn Lawn Clippings and Veg Waste into Next Year’s Bed Dressing

Every weekend through spring and summer, the same little pile of black bin bags appears at the side of the lawn — grass clippings, the woody ends off lettuce, peelings, tea bags, the cucumber that got missed at the back of the fridge. Off it all goes to the green bin, ready to be carted away. It feels tidy. It is also, quietly, one of the biggest wasted resources a small garden produces.

If you start a compost heap or bin this spring, that same pile of waste will be returned to you next year as a barrowful of dark, crumbly compost — perfect for dressing flower beds, mulching around the runner beans, top-dressing pots, or quietly rejuvenating the lawn. The work is small. The pay-off is twelve months away, but it arrives on its own.

This is a UK family-garden guide — no specialist kit, no jargon, and an honest look at which sort of composter actually suits a normal back garden. There is a small list of compost bins we like at the end with two voucher codes that are live until early July, but the post works just as well if you already have a bin sitting in the shed.

Why spring is the right time to start

You can start a compost heap in any month — but May is unusually generous. Three things line up:

• Lawn-clipping season has just begun. Grass clippings are the single biggest source of fresh “green” material a small garden produces. Most of it is wasted from May to September.
• Kitchen veg waste ramps up. Salads, courgettes, the inevitable glut of beans and tomatoes from late July — a heap started now is hungry and ready for all of it.
• It will be ready in time. A heap started in May, fed honestly through summer and left alone over winter, is usually crumbly and usable by the following March or April — exactly when you want to be dressing beds for the new season.

Start in November and you will be waiting until 2028 for anything useful. Start now, and you have a full season ahead of you.

What you can put in a compost bin (and what to leave out)

It helps to think of a compost heap as a living thing that wants a balanced diet. It needs roughly half “greens” and half “browns” by volume. Greens are wet and full of nitrogen — they feed the heap. Browns are dry and full of carbon — they keep it airy and stop it turning into a soggy mat. Get the ratio roughly right and the heap looks after itself; let it skew too far either way and you’ll know about it within a fortnight.

Greens (wet, fast-rotting)

• Grass clippings (the big one)
• Vegetable and fruit peelings
• Tea bags (check the brand — some still have plastic in them)
• Coffee grounds
• Cut flowers past their best
• Soft prunings and weeds (no seedheads — see the “leave out” list)
• Comfrey leaves — worth growing on purpose, see the note further down

Browns (dry, structural)

• Cardboard — pizza boxes (no greasy bits), cereal boxes, the inside of loo rolls, plain brown delivery boxes torn into hand-sized pieces. The amount that comes through a normal family’s door each week is more than enough to balance the grass — we tear up almost every food and delivery box we get. If you’ve cut a big bag of grass in one go, layer it with cardboard rather than tipping it in all at once: grass, cardboard, grass, cardboard, like building a small lasagna
• Shredded paper (no glossy magazine pages)
• Egg boxes
• Dry leaves saved from the autumn before
• Straw or hay if you have it
• Small woody prunings, chopped short

Leave out of a cold heap or dalek bin

These belong in a hot composter or a bokashi bin (see further down) — or in your council’s food-waste collection. Never in a cold heap or a dalek bin:

• Cooked food, meat, fish, dairy, bones — in a cold heap they go rancid before they break down; in a hot composter or bokashi bin they’re perfectly fine
• Citrus peel in large amounts (a few satsuma skins are fine; never a whole bag from a juicing morning)
• Dog or cat waste
• Coal or barbecue ash (wood ash from a clean fire is fine in small amounts)
• Diseased plant material, anything with bindweed root or seedheads of cleavers, dock and the worst lawn weeds
• Glossy printed paper

If you find yourself with a sudden mountain of fresh grass and nothing dry to balance it, save up some cardboard for a fortnight and tear it in. A grass-only heap turns into a sour, sloppy mat — easy to fix, easier still to avoid.

A note on comfrey — green manure worth growing on purpose

If you have a corner of the garden you don’t mind giving over to a slightly unruly plant, grow comfrey near the compost bins. The leaves are exceptionally nutrient-rich — comfrey’s long taproots pull potassium, calcium and phosphorus up from deep in the soil — and a handful or two cut into the heap through summer and autumn is a genuine boost to the finished compost.

It looks a little weedy if you’re not used to it — large hairy leaves, pinkish-purple bell-flowers in May and June, the bees love it. A single plant gives you three or four cuts a year. The Bocking 14 variety is the one most gardeners settle on because it doesn’t self-seed and so won’t take over the bed. Once it’s in, it’s in — comfrey is the kind of plant you plant once and reach for every summer afterwards.

Choosing a composter — match the system to your life

Worried about smell, mess, or what your neighbours will think? Don’t be. We’ve had four daleks at the bottom of our garden for years and no neighbour has ever mentioned them — there’s no smell to speak of if you keep the green-and-brown balance roughly right. The bigger question is which sort of composter actually suits the way you live. Here are six options, in rough order from “absolute beginner” to “specialist”.

The open heap

Three pallets nailed into a U-shape against a back fence, or two bays for turning between. Costs nothing, takes any volume, easy to fork over. Looks rustic and a bit untidy — fine at the bottom of a long garden, less ideal next to a back door. Slower to heat up than an enclosed bin because heat escapes upwards. Open heaps are also the one type that can attract rats if you put kitchen scraps in them, so keep an open heap to garden waste only.

The plastic “dalek” bin

The black conical bins you see in everyone’s side return. Around 220–330 litres, lifts off as one piece, a small hatch at the bottom for finished compost. Cheap (often council-subsidised — see below), sturdy, looks neat, holds heat well, and properly sealed against rats provided you don’t put cooked food in. We have four going at the bottom of the garden at any one time — one filling, one resting, two in finishing stages — and they’ve never given us a problem. Downside: hard to turn the contents, so the bottom layer matures while the top is still fresh. Most family gardens get on perfectly well with a pair of them.

The tumbler

A barrel on a frame that you turn with a handle. Faster than any other method when fed right — finished compost in eight to twelve weeks rather than a year. Costs more (£90–£180), smaller capacity (usually 100–180 litres), and you must keep up the turning. Brilliant if you are impatient or want to compost during a kitchen renovation where you generate a sudden spike of veg waste. Less suited to absorbing the whole season’s grass clippings.

The wormery

A tiered bin with tiger worms doing the work. Produces a very rich compost and a useful liquid feed, sized for kitchen waste rather than garden waste. The wrong tool for a season of grass clippings, but a lovely complement if you also want to compost daily peelings without ever going down the garden. Children find them genuinely interesting — lifting a tray to see the worms hard at work is a small science lesson in itself.

The bokashi bin

This is the kitchen-first option, and it works on a different principle: bokashi doesn’t compost food waste so much as ferment it. You add waste to a sealed bin in layers with a sprinkling of bokashi bran (an inoculated grain that costs around £6 a kilo), press it down, close the lid, and within two weeks you have pickled, pre-digested food waste that’s ready to bury in the garden or finish off in a regular compost bin. Two big advantages: it accepts everything — meat, fish, dairy, cooked food, citrus, bones — and it lives indoors on the kitchen floor, so there’s no trip down the garden in the rain. Best used as a companion to a dalek rather than a replacement: the dalek handles the garden side, the bokashi handles everything the dalek won’t.

The hot composter (Green Johanna, HotBin and similar)

A heavily insulated bin that reaches 40–60°C inside — hot enough to break down cooked food, meat, dairy, fish and bones without going rancid, and to finish compost in six to twelve weeks rather than a year. The downside is the price: £150–£250 retail. The upside, beyond the speed, is that hot composters are sealed and rat-proof by design, and they’ll quietly handle the kitchen waste that nothing else outdoors will. Worth knowing: many UK councils subsidise these (more on that lower down) — Green Johannas in particular often appear at half the retail price through council schemes, which changes the maths a lot.

For most families starting fresh in May, the sensible default is still a pair of dalek bins — one to fill this year, one to finish last year’s. They’re cheap, sturdy, and in our experience genuinely don’t attract rats as long as the cooked food stays out. Add a wormery if you have curious children, a bokashi for the kitchen waste a dalek won’t take, or a Green Johanna later if you find you’ve become enthusiastic and want to compost meat and dairy too. There’s no single right answer — just the one that matches your life.

Setting it up in May: the first hour

Where to put it

• Directly on bare soil if at all possible — that lets worms and soil organisms move up into the heap and do the work. A patio slab works at a pinch but you will need to start the heap with a forkful of garden soil to introduce life.
• Light shade. Full sun dries the heap out; full shade keeps it cold. A spot that gets sun for half the day is ideal.
• Not too far from the back door. A bin at the bottom of a hundred-foot garden is a bin that gets skipped on rainy evenings. Put it where you will actually walk past it.

The first feed

• A 5cm base layer of twiggy material — broken-up garden prunings, the woody centre of last year’s tomato plants if you have them — to keep the bottom airy.
• A bucket of finished compost or garden soil on top to introduce the right microbes. This step matters more than it sounds — a brand-new heap is essentially sterile, and the bacteria and fungi that do the actual decomposition need to be seeded from somewhere. If you have an older heap or a neighbour with one, a shovel of their finished compost is the ideal start; if not, garden soil from an established bed works almost as well.
• Then the first proper layer: roughly half grass clippings, half torn cardboard. Soak the cardboard from the watering can if it’s dry.

That’s it. The heap will get warm within a fortnight — sometimes within a few days — and from there you simply keep feeding it. One tip we use through the summer: every few weeks, toss in another shovel of finished compost from an older bin (or another bucket of garden soil if you don’t have one yet). The microbe community needs topping up the same way a sourdough starter does, and you can noticeably feel the difference in how fast the heap breaks down.

Setting up the first heap is a good half-term project for children to help with — there’s something genuinely satisfying about siting the bin, building the base layer, and then tipping the first armful of clippings on top. For everything else worth doing in the garden right now, see our May gardening jobs guide.

A month-by-month feed calendar

You don’t need to obsess over this — but a rough mental rhythm helps in the first year:

• May: First lawn cuts. Pair every bucket of clippings with the same volume of torn cardboard — if you’ve cut a lot of grass in one go, layer them: grass, cardboard, grass, cardboard, like building a small lasagna. Add kitchen peelings as they come.
• June: Grass coming thick and fast. Keep balancing with cardboard. If the heap smells sour or feels slimy, you are running too green — add more browns.
• July: First glut of veg waste from the kitchen — bean ends, courgette trimmings, tomato vine tops. Add as a layer rather than a pile.
• August: Heap should be roughly two-thirds full and warm to the touch in the middle. Turn it with a fork if you can — moves the outside in. Toss in a shovel of soil or finished compost from another bin to keep the microbes lively.
• September: Soft prunings as the borders come down for the year. Tomato vines (not diseased), courgette plants, the lot. Chop them up first.
• October: Autumn leaves. Either add a handful in with each grass cut, or save them in a separate sack of leafmould — they are slow to rot and steal nitrogen if added in bulk.
• November onwards: Stop adding. Cover with a lid or a square of old carpet. Leave it alone over winter.
• February/March: Lift the lid. The bottom layer should be dark, crumbly and smell like a forest floor. Fork it out from the hatch (or from underneath, with a dalek bin lifted off).

What you’ll have by next spring — and what to do with it

A heap fed honestly through summer 2026 should give you between two and four wheelbarrows of finished compost by March 2027. That is enough to:

• Top-dress every flower bed with a 2cm mulch — locks in moisture, suppresses weeds, feeds the soil for the year ahead
• Mix into pots — about one part compost to three parts peat-free potting compost gives a richer, longer-lasting blend
• Top-dress the lawn after spring scarifying — a thin sieved layer works wonders on tired patches
• Plant the runner beans into it — beans love a deep compost-rich trench, and there is a real pleasure in feeding the next year’s crop with this year’s kitchen waste. (We’ve written separately about growing runner beans with the children — composted ground makes the whole job easier.)

You will also have a vastly reduced green bin. We were astonished, the first full year, how rarely we had to put it out.

What lives in a compost heap besides the worms

A working compost heap is one of the busiest pieces of habitat in a small garden. The visible workers are worms and woodlice, but underneath that, fungi and bacteria do most of the actual breakdown — and the heap itself attracts a wider cast.

Hedgehogs sometimes nest in cool, dry corners of an open heap or under the base of a dalek through autumn and winter, which is one of several reasons not to turn a heap aggressively from October onwards. Slow-worms and grass snakes hunt for slugs in the warmer bottom layers — we’ve found grass snake skin sloughs under our daleks more than once. Ground beetles and centipedes patrol the surface, controlling slug and aphid populations that would otherwise spread to the borders. Solitary bees and queen bumblebees occasionally overwinter in cool dry pockets too.

If you’re composting with children, lifting the bin lid carefully on a warm afternoon is a small wildlife project on its own. Keep a hand still over the heap for thirty seconds and let the woodlice come back out — most kids will watch them for longer than you’d expect, and it’s a useful conversation about what “rotting down” actually means.

Things that commonly go wrong (and how to fix them)

• Smelly, slimy, sour: too wet, too green. Fork in two big armfuls of torn cardboard or dry leaves and leave the lid ajar for a few days.
• Dry and not breaking down: too dry, too brown. Tip a watering can over it and add a layer of grass clippings.
• Cold, going nowhere: heap is too small. A heap needs a critical mass to heat up — at least 1m × 1m × 1m for an open heap. Dalek bins solve this by trapping the heat.
• Flies: bury kitchen waste under a layer of browns rather than leaving it on top.

What about rats?

This is the worry that stops most people starting in the first place — and in honest practice, with a sealed dalek bin and the cooked-food rule kept, it isn’t a problem. We’ve had four daleks going at the bottom of our garden for years and never seen a rat in any of them. The bins seal at the top, the contents are mostly fibrous greens and torn cardboard, and there’s nothing inside that a rat finds worth chewing through plastic for.

If you’re using an open heap rather than a dalek, the calculation changes — open heaps with cooked food or bones in them genuinely do attract rats. Keep an open heap to garden waste only, or move to a dalek if you want kitchen peelings to go in too. Bokashi bins and Green Johanna hot composters are sealed and rat-proof by design, which is part of why people invest in them.

Where to get a composter — check your council first

Before you click “buy”, check your local council’s recycling page. Many UK councils still subsidise compost bins through partnerships with GetComposting and similar schemes — a 220-litre dalek often comes in around £10–15, and Green Johanna hot composters are frequently offered at roughly half the retail price. If your council runs a scheme, that’s the cheapest route to a dalek by some margin.

Where the council schemes don’t reach — tumblers, wormeries, bokashi bins, and the kit (bran, replacement worms, extra hatches) — the Gardening Direct range is the easiest one-stop, and they happen to have two voucher codes live at the moment that take a useful chunk off the price:

One more thought

Composting is not a chore — once it’s set up, it is mostly a matter of carrying a bowl of peelings down the garden once a day and forgetting about it. The first year is the slow one, because you are building the supply rather than spending it. From the second year onwards, you simply have free compost.

For more month-by-month gardening jobs, see our May gardening jobs guide — the composter sits alongside everything else that wants doing this month. For the wider archive, our gardening hub has the rest. And if you’ve got more compost than you can use on beds, our older guide on container-grown figs is exactly the kind of pot-and-soil project that swallows a good barrowful.

Homemade compost goes furthest in a small garden, where every pot and raised bed counts. If you are working a tiny plot, our guide to small garden ideas shows 30 ways to make the most of the space, from vertical planting to renter-friendly containers.

— Linda

That peat-free, home-made compost is exactly what your indoor plants want too. If you are filling the windowsills, see our guide to the best house plants for every room.

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