Country diary: The compost bins are heating up and teeming with life | Phil Gates

Crook, County Durham: Underneath the weeds and vegetable peelings, there will be woodlice and slugs, springtails and centipedes, working away in the heatFour conical plastic bins, like baleful Daleks, each produce about a cubic metre of compost every year. In go weeds and kitchen vegetable waste; 12 months of organic alchemy later, out comes some high-quality crumbly soil improver. These bins are the hottest biodiversity hotspots in our garden.Inside, in air foetid with fungal decay, an ever-changing invertebrate workforce gathers: woodlice and slugs, writhing brandling worms, fruit fly larvae, minute springtails, large-fanged, predatory orange centipedes. During last summer's drought, a toad took up temporary residence, growing fat on slugs. Sometimes, when I lift the lid, woodmice peer up at me, so I tend to pause for a moment before hurling in another bucket of vegetable peelings, giving them time to dash for safety. There must be several PhD theses to be written about food webs and cycles of life and death in that clammy Stygian darkness. Continue reading...