St Ives Community Orchard Compost - St Ives Community Orchard CIC

Composting your food waste is an incredibly valuable activity. It is like creating a gift for the Earth and it is so easy.

We are working hard to create lots of our own compost in St Ives Community Orchard.
Supporting our veggie growing initiative and fruit trees. Saving waste & giving rich soil back to the earth.

We have 6 compost bins in the orchard with various styles and encourage local people to bring their kitchen waste to the orchard.

Simply save your raw fruit and veg scraps, take a walk up to the orchard and put it into the rotating tumbler compost bin.

St Ives Community Composting

Jo Riley set up the project 'St Ives Community Composting' and collects kitchen food waste from various places in town on her electric bike and brings it up to the orchard. She collects weekly from Foundation Coffee, Yallah cafe, 27 The Terrace restaurant, St Eia cafe, kitchen waste brought in from the staff at Leach Pottery and one neighbourhood collection point. She has raised funds for an electric bike that volunteers will be able to use to increase these collections. She is currently recruiting volunteers willing to use this bike to collect kitchen waste. She successfully raised funds for another electric bike for the orchard which volunteers can use to collect more food waste. If you are interested in being a volunteer rider or are interested in being a collection point for kitchen waste, please get in touch.

Benefits of composting food waste:

Food waste breaks down, creating compost which we add to the soil, replenishing vital nutrients which have been used in the growing of fruit, vegetables, flowers, trees.
Saves valuable resources by reducing what is transported to an incinerator in mid-Cornwall, stops waste going to landfill.
Supports improving biodiversity within the soil and above ground too.
Used to support our local growing initiatives like St Ives Community Orchard veggie garden and fruit trees.

We have 4 different types of composters in the orchard.

A rotating tumbler in the veggie garden.
A large wooden framed compost bin
2 large wire-framed compost bins that we built ourselves. This is filled during the year with large amounts of waste then left to break down.
Worm baths - we have 2 worm baths which are baths with a lid and resting on concrete blocks. This is filled with composting material and the worms do the work. A tub is put below the bath hole and every day, the system can produce a few liters of fermented worm juice. This is liquid fertiliser which can be used watered down 10 parts water to 1 part worm juice. Additionally, the solid results inside the bucket are worm castings, something that, in many ways, is better than compost. It’s got loads of beneficial bacteria. In the summer time we can transform the worm baths into vegetable growing spaces where the snails and rabbits can't reach. More info
We also have a compost toilet.

Thank you to the following contributors to our compost

St Ives Community Foodshare who brings us large amounts of compost material every week.
The Mine Brewing Company who brings us a large amount of their spent grain from beer brewing.
Foundation Coffee, Yallah cafe, 27 The Terrace restaurant, St Eia cafe, Leach Pottery staff and one neighbourhood collection point created with Julia Denni who collect their waste to be collected by the electric bike.
Foundation Coffee who supply us with large amounts of chaff
Origin coffee who have supplied us with large amounts of chaff
Jo Riley who donated the rotating composter to us and fundraised for the electric composting bike.
Mark & Jenny von Senger who donated the materials and helped build our large wire composting bins.
Peter Whittal who donated the large wooden compost bin to su.