 At the top of the site here, we've got some water storage, but we're also making fertilizer for plants. Now, you probably come across the method where you shovel a lot of leaves, maybe nettles or comfrey in a bin like this, and fill it up with water and leave it for a few weeks. It makes a very rich, tasty, perhaps it's a good word, feed for plants, but it really stinks because the process of digestion, the decomposition, occurs anaerobically, and that means without oxygen. So it's a really simple way of doing things, but it's also another very nice way. It's, you know, once you've used it on your plants, it gets into your skin, you can't sort of wash it off, you don't want to see it in your friends for a few days. So my preferred method for making a liquid feed from plants is an aerobic method, and that's what we're doing here. There's no water involved, and there are certain benefits to this, including that it doesn't smell in the same way. So this is one that we started literally about two and a half weeks ago. We filled it with nettles. It's early in the spring, so nettles is what we have at the moment. Comfrey is not quite getting going, but it will be in a few weeks time. We'll have some of that. And nettles makes a nitrogen-rich feed, which is particularly good for things like cucumbers, but at this time of year, potatoes, anything that's making greens, it's good to give a good dose of nitrogen feed occasionally. And it's a very tasty-looking stuff, whoops, as you can see. So here, how well you can see that from there, but essentially that's what we collected from about two and a half weeks ago. Just putting fresh nettles in, putting your weight on it, letting it drip through and collecting the liquid at the bottom. And I'm going to show you how we make one of these from stuff that most people would just throw away. So this is a bunch of stuff that people might have thrown away that I've scapaged around and about the place that I'm going to use to make this fertility bin. And the first thing you might notice is there's a hole at the bottom. And not only is there a hole, a normal hole, there's a split. Obviously it's got bashed, and this has been thrown away because it leaks from the bottom. Now, from our perspective for making this project, if you were trying to make a bin that you wanted to fill with water and do an anaerobic mix, the smelly one, this would be useless. But to make an aerobic bin, which is going to have no water in it, apart from the little bit of rain that comes in the top and maybe adding a bit of watering the top just during dry periods. But apart from that, it's not going to be full of liquid, so it doesn't matter that there's a hole at the bottom there. So we've got a water butt that someone's thrown away. We've got three old bricks, which will go in the bottom. So we're going to drill some holes in the bottom. We'll put the bricks in there. We're going to make a little filter out of some old chicken wire, just an old bit of chicken wire that, again, could have been thrown away. We just found it in the corner. We've got a couple of wooden offcuts here, but this could easily be a couple of breeze blocks, just something to hold the tank off the ground, so that you can slide your collector underneath, like the one we see over here. Okay, let's get started. So the first thing I'm going to do is drill some holes in the bottom, some drainage holes, so the liquid that's being made inside the butt can drain out and to drip out where we want it. So I'm looking for what are the highest points on the outside, because that will be the lowest points on the inside, and from my experience with these butts, it seems to be either side of the seam. Maybe it's just a way that when water's been in them a while, it makes them sag a little bit about here, so along this line and this line. And also, because my container's quite narrow, and this is just a trough for window boxes, I want to make sure that I'm drilling the holes not beyond that. I don't want the liquid to drip out by the side of that, so I'm going to drill my holes so that, generally in a line, so that the liquid drips through into the container I have. So let's do that. Okay, so I've done that job, it makes lots of pretty plastic spirals, I'm not sure what to do with those, anyway they're going in the pocket for now. So now I'm going to turn it over, and yes, hopefully it's fairly obvious that what's going to happen is that it will sit a couple of these, like that. What I've done over here is to put them fairly close to the sides of my collecting trough, obviously yours could be wider, or washing out the bowl or something like that would be just as good. What I don't want to do is to line the holes up with what's underneath, and then take this out one day, so if these are further apart, I took this out and I took it back and it's not directly underneath the holes. So I'm putting these close enough together that I know exactly where the holes are, and where that needs to go. So this will sit on top of there, and obviously I'll make sure that they're lined up. And then the next thing that's going to happen is I'm going to put these three bricks in, easier to show you outside, really, than to do it inside while I show you a photo. So they'll look a bit like this inside, or they could be on edge like that, doesn't really matter as long as they're stable. And then what I'm going to do is to take this, and make a nice little sort of filter, disc filter with it. So the purpose of this is simply to keep the bulk of the leaves from clogging up the holes in the bottom of the tank. So when we get that off there, so the leaves will sit on top of this filter, and as they decay the liquids will drop through and into the collecting bowl here, into the collecting bowl. And the leaves, the bulk of the rest of the leaves will stay on top, and from time to time we'll just take them out and put them on the compost to dry matter. So what I need to do now is just get a sense of the size of the inside of that, and I'm going to fold this up to make a little bit of a filter mesh out of this old chicken wire. Okay, I've made my filter. What I've done is folded it enough that it will go slightly up the sides as well, because that's flexible, that will go in the top hole here. So the next bit is easier to do, not up on the blocks, because you have to lean right in. And so what we're going to do is just pop the bricks down in, that's a bit of really good in there. This goes in the top, like that, and you can put this back on our base, making sure the holes are lined up, lovely. Now all we've got to do is to fill it with whatever leaves we have. So for me, this time of year, obviously nettles are abundant, there's a field we have access to where we can go and cut, because the animals don't eat them, so we go and cut nettles. And this bin was completely stuffed full of nettles, it was about seven or eight trugs full, compressed down two and a half weeks ago, and you've seen how much liquid has come out the bottom. And the nettles themselves now are only filling half of the tub. So one of the advantages of this method, which you can't do when you fill a bin with leaves and water, is you can keep adding to it. This is a continuous process as it goes down, you can just add more on top, whereas the other version you have to wait until it's ready and empty and then do another batch. And you don't have to fill this all in one go, you put in whatever you have in the way of leaves, and what we do is to give them a good squeezing. So we just need some kind of board or plate on the top, as it turns out these old plastic tray sources fit perfectly in the hole, so I've just been using these for the moment. Always bear in mind that if you're using a tapering bin, that's this shape, that the plate you use will go most of the way down, otherwise it'll get so far and then it will just get wedged, which might be difficult to get out, but it certainly won't be squeezing the material anymore. So this goes in, it just needs something on top to give it a bit of a squeeze. So a stone, something like that, works perfectly. Now it's worth bearing in mind that when you next add some things to your bin, this will be quite a long way down, perhaps it might be all the way down here and the stone might be down here. So don't put anything that's so heavy that it would be really difficult to lift out again. If you want to put a lot of weight on, then I would recommend putting several stones or bricks rather than just one, because then it's easier to get those out afterwards. And it's as simple as that really, it's just leave it alone. We've had some hot weather, which is good because that basically helps the decomposition as long as you add a bit of moisture because bacteria need some moisture to break down, but they don't need to be underwater. And with two, well two and a half weeks of really quite hot weather and a little bit of watering, we've got all that liquid feed. So it's a quite fast turnaround in the summer months and of course the hotter it is, the more likely you are to need to feed your plants. So it all works very well and as long as you get started early on, then you've got feed ready for your plants when they need it. So it's turned a bit wet and windy. We've had a day of rain and it's washed through the tub quite nicely, so we've collected a lot more in the container at the bottom. In fact, it's the ideal recipe really, having a couple of weeks of sun to really give some heat and get the decomposition going as long as you're adding a little bit of water and then a good rinse through. So we've got a full five litres in there and another, well pretty much two and a half in there just selected this morning. And what I'm going to do is do some feeding. So the potatoes, our first early potatoes in particular, have a little tinges of yellow around. They're obviously wanting a feed. We've got some rhubarb which we've been harvesting and that probably wants to be fed as well. So what I'm going to do is dilute this down. And obviously you don't use this neat. I'm going to start with one of the liquid to about 20 of water. And the size of the watering can makes this quite a simple sum. This is nine litres, this holds. So if I add about half a litre, just under half a litre, that's about one of these to 20 of water. And I think that's a good starting place. You could up it to about one to 10 of water at some point. But I'm going to start at one to 20, see how that gets on. So just going to fill this up, that's about half a litre, very rich. Just going to pull that in there and just give it a little bit more water just to stir it up a bit. And I'm ready to go. So to recap, nettles are good for things that need a lot of nitrogen like cucumbers, potatoes and such. Plants like tomatoes and peppers and aubergines prefer a liquid feed made more with comfrey, for instance, and that's something that we'll be using this bin for fairly soon. But our comfrey plants are not quite ready yet to be harvested. And of course you can just put anything. So essentially if you're just wanting to make a general liquid feed and you're weeding around the garden, if you've got healthy plants that you were considered to be weeds, you don't want to eat them or use them in the garden. But they're growing well. That means that they've got the nutrients they need, which also means they'll make a great liquid feed. So as long as they're not full of seeds, just you can pull them out, put them in the bin, liquefy them over a period of weeks and use those nutrients to then feed the plants that you're growing.