When was it that ‘passionate about’ become such a marketing cliché? A few years back, I groaned when the umpteenth candidate for a lecturing job told the board they were ‘passionate about teaching’. Yet here it is: I can’t help it, I am passionate about compost. It makes me happy, reconciles me to the grander scheme of things, reassures me that beyond the human world, nature is quietly getting on with restoring and recycling …

Our LRSP compost is doing well. Reports from the plot confirm the lovely mixture of garden clearings, horse manure and kitchen waste is rotting down well, with no evidence of vermin. We’ve filled our first wooden bin to at least two-thirds now. This will of course rot down, but once it’s full, we’ll start using the second bin, while waiting for the first to ‘mature’. The compost in the wooden bin should then be ready to spread on the soil for the spring.

Already four neighbours – who’ve stopped to chat or have contacted us through Harvest – want to register for composting their kitchen waste at our site. So it seems others too are passionate about composting – it’s just that composting in a first floor flat is tricky, and taking a smelly caddy on the bus up to an allotment or to the Council tip is definitely not good bus-user etiquette.

So we’re looking at how we could manage access to our compost bins more easily, and we’ve also put in a bid to Brighton & Hove City Council to purchase a green waste shredder which we could use for ‘community shredding’ events. The idea is that you would bring along your bulky woody prunings and put them through the communal shredder so that they could be composted more easily, either on the LRSP compost heap or on your own. And of course we would have tea and cakes to make it an ‘event’.

Meanwhile, other Ditchling Rise compost heaps are in good heart this year: mine are rich and laden with worms, thanks to a neighbour donating grass cuttings throughout the summer, and Diane reckons it’s her best composting year yet. Talk about passionate … she’s just seived her mature compost for use on flower beds, transferred the unrotted stuff from her ‘current’ heap to the now empty ‘old’ heap, leaving the semi-rotted stuff from the ‘current’ heap to rot down under a cosy carpet for the spring.

OK, so maybe we’ve got just a bit obsessive about compost … but it’s worth it! Rhiannon’s wonderful 4-year-old compost heap which we demolished in June has helped create a rich growing environment for our shady triangle at London Road Station. Every time I dig there, fat earthworms wiggle to the surface. Which makes me think: Rhiannon, how are you managing composting in Manhattan?