• Over a year in a standard compost bin if you're turning it with a fork you fill it half a dozen times to get a bin of lovely dark, rich, crumbly compost. Everything goes in, loads of banana skins, vacuum bag, coffee, cut-up prunings and tons of grass clippings. When the brandlings turn up you know it's heated up and cooking nicely. Nobody knows where they come from. They're not earthworms but if you get the heap right they always rock up. Whenever you fill it scatter a spade full of earth soil on top as an activator and piss on it.

About