When Barbie gave me a very attractive little book called Compost: the natural way to make food for your garden I know she meant it very kindly. But I read here: “The only rules are to make sure that you have approximately equal volumes of paper and green waste, and not to add pure green waste in a layer more than 15cm (6in) deep” Rules? Why do we have to have rules for an entirely natural process? I find these handy little books on how to do things the simple way very stressful. It comes from having muddled along for years on the assumption that Nature knows what it’s doing.

If one does (Heaven forfend!) happen to just tip a layer of grass clippings, weeds or leaves on the compost heap in a mass and leave it, it just takes longer for the microbes to chomp through it.

And if, when you are forking it over, there is still a soggy lump of old grass, or a few lumps of woody stuff, well, you just disperse it all a bit and carry on forking.

We’re a team, the microbes and I and we all just get on with doing our own thing. (Although I will admit that, as you will know by now, I’m not a very ambitious gardener.) At a meeting last night I was gently chided for sending too much information to the working group of which I am a part.

Dealing with information, and deciding where to draw the boundaries of which bit goes to whom is a major undertaking for me, and it has always seemed easier just to send out the info and trust those for whom it is not relevant to discard it.

And if it means they end up with too many emails coming in, then what could be simpler than pressing a delete button?

I just took a moment off to nip down to the compost heap to check that I hadn’t got it all wrong, ignoring the information in the book and that the microbes were doing their stuff.

I scratched under a layer of oak leaves, through an unacceptably thick layer of grass clippings to the two-foot deep heap of tree chippings and felt the temperature rising at every stage. It would be very comfortable spending the winter in my compost heap. No wonder the little critters are happy there. They just don’t read their emails.