Spaghetti and Rat-atouille anyone!

With the combination of rats, worms and rotting compost it may not have been the most grim task we'd ever done but it definitely came close. By the end Paul was the only one who could stomach one of the cookies we were offered! The main task was to tip the compost bins up, dig out the compost that was ready and resurrect the bins with the still rotting compost left in them. There were also additional tasks of raking and tidying up the border of the long bed which Tom started tackling when it got too crowded around the bins and Louise eagerly volunteered for when she arrived. Lindsay, Kate, Paul and Laura continued to dig out the compost and David transferred the compost to the beds and dug it in. Members of the Holgate Community garden group were tackling other tasks around the garden. The task started with 2 rats running out of the bins as we tipped them up. It didn't take long for us to discover that much of the matter in the bins hadn't composted fully, partly due to the number of "compostable" plastic bags that hadn't decomposed. There were a number of potatoes growing in them that seemed to be thriving however! After digging out all the usable compost for the beds we soon discovered that resurrecting one or two of the bins wasn't going to be as straightforward as it looked. Luckily when Laura and Paul had to climb behind the bins to push them up the remaining rats who had been watching us scarpered. After a bit of a struggle with one bin which wouldn't go back on it's base we consulted Julie who decided that the only solution was to lift it off altogether, transfer the rotting material and then replace the bin. There were definitely a healthy number of worms in the material leading Kate and Lindsay to joke "spaghetti and ratatouille anyone!" Eventually we cleared enough to get the bin back on it's base or certainly as close as it was going to be and refilled with any remaining rotting matter.