I have a Hotbin. It smells. It’s full of stinky liquid and slimy slightly rotted vegetables and completely intact twigs. It’s cold. I can’t get it right. I know it’s me not the Hotbin – and they have sent lots of help about how to get it right but it still isn’t. And I’ve looked into Andrew’s and his is lovely and crumbly and wonderful.

I bought it just as lockdown started (so nearly a year?) (and then persuaded Andrew to buy his). I still haven’t got good compost out of it. I got some nearly good stuff a couple of months ago and put the best on the garden as a mulch and the worst back in the bin. This month, I couldn’t bear it any more so I took the smelly disgusting stuff out of the bottom. HB told me to aerate it – the smell is because it is anaerobically composting and I dried it as best I could and this is what it looks like….

I think I was too mean about putting in dry matter/ bulking agent at the start and then it all got squished together – and you keep squashing more in to try and make it work and that makes it worse.

The problem is, once you’ve seen the error of your ways, you’ve got 3 foot of smelly cold crap compost and my garden isn’t big enough to put it anywhere (plus with the smell not fair on the neighbours).

I’m posting this in the hope it’s just one in the first in a series that ends up with lovely compost.