Compost is food for plants that looks a bit like soil. You can make it almost anywhere out of vegetable peelings and waste food. In my picture, I've just finished building a traditional compost heap held together by recycled timber. Every time I add more stuff, I cover the heap over with an old carpet. This helps it rot quickly. If it's big enough, your heap will get very hot inside. Can you think why?
Did you know...

• you can even make compost indoors using a 'wormery'? The worms eat all the decaying food and vegetable peelings and stuff and leave rich crumbly compost.
  
• compost heaps are a great place to look for different types of creepy-crawlies. They are full of life - mostly bacteria and fungus - but also many types of worms (no legs), spiders (8 legs), insects (6 legs) and centipedes (hundreds of legs). They're all part of the composting process and birds like to eat many of them. Take a jar, a pair of tweezers and a magnifier and see how many living creatures you can find. Don't forget to let them out again: the compost is their home!
  
• if you put stuff which you can compost in the garbage, it stinks. And it's wasted too. It all ends up in landfill mixed with all the other mountains of stuff people throw away.

So you see composting is a great way to recycle and you can use the results to grow more plants.