Free range wood makes great bin

It may have been the excesses of Christmas that encouraged us to start a compost bin. Heaving out quantities of uneaten food left me feeling wasteful and environmentally challenged, so I was determined to do something useful with it.
I was also influenced by the fact that while I was paying to have the refuse company dispose of my kitchen waste, I was also shelling out $20 at the garden centre for six bags of compost to keep the vegetable garden, the orchard and the new plantings looking chipper.
The need for a composting system was further illustrated by the amount of rotting vegetable matter in our garden produced after a week of rain, humidity inconsistent with breathing, and temperatures in the 30s.
We were also tired of either hiding the lawn clippings, tree trimmings and dead leaves from our 0.8ha garden behind the henhouse, or burning them in the early morning before the neighbours put their washing out. All those factors sent me to Google to find out how it was done.
A series of images of compost bins of all shapes and sizes yielded some ideas that seemed possible with severely limited post-Christmas finances, and we settled on something that looked organic but smart, made from timber not plastic, and which should have been achievable within the half day that our short attention span allowed.
Deciding to build a compost bin - or in fact anything - on a statutory holiday would normally be an exercise in frustration, but we were saved from that when a chance drive past a timber yard carpark revealed a pile of pallets with a "free" sign on them.
"Ha," we said. "Look at that. Half the job's already done for us."
It wasn't, of course, but nonetheless the timber was free and, meanly, I even recycled the nails that held the wretched things together. We dismantled about half a dozen of them, and reassembled them into a perfectly functional compost bin that sits neatly behind the vegetable garden, sheltered by a circle of monkey apple trees. We admired it for a few minutes, he started cleaning up the mess, and I went back to Google to find out what to put in it.
Most of the subjects I research on the internet leave me aware that there are dozens of different ways of doing things and most of them work.
Compost, thankfully, was very straightforward. The 10 top sites all gave pretty much the same information.
* Site the bin a good distance from the house, out of direct sunlight.
* Put a layer of twigs in the bottom for good drainage - important if your bin is sitting on the dirt.
* Put in organic material - kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, weeds, leaves, animal manure (but not the dog's or cat's poo), fish scraps and crushed shellfish shells, seaweed, non-treated sawdust and ash in small amounts, all in layers no more than 15cm deep.
* Keep the heap covered to prevent smells.
* Throw over a handful of garden lime every few layers.
* Keep the heap moist in summer but don't drench it or you'll end up with a gluggy mess.
* Turn your compost in the heap as often as you can be bothered (weekly is good) to speed up the composting process. The compost will take three or four months to mature.
* While it's doing that, build another compost bin beside it and get that one underway lest you again become overwhelmed by your kitchen scraps.
Other handy hints included using compost accelerators from the garden centre, and adding a layer or two of ready-made compost to the mix.
You may wonder why the miracle of composting hadn't struck us earlier. Well it had, but until recently we were the loving owners of a retriever whose mission in life was to find anything at any stage of decomposition and eat it. Had he seen the compost bin he'd have thought all his Christmases had come at once. We were going to bury his ashes under an Australian frangipani. But somehow, right beside the compost bin seemed more appropriate.
From murky to azure blue
We have lots of water containers in our garden - an elegant, semi-circular trough in the courtyard, two eggshell-shaped urns on the terrace, and a rustic concrete pond on the lawn.
I cleaned them all before Christmas but when I refilled them, the water looked murky. I was in a hurry and didn't have time to wait for the pond plants to work their magic, so intervention was called for.
A chemical water cleaner from the hardware store was about $70 and didn't appear user-friendly for all the living things which drink out of our ponds, so I paid a princely $4 or thereabouts for a bottle of blue food colouring from the supermarket.
About 10 drops in each pond turned them into tropical-looking azure oases, and so far nobody has died from drinking the water.