IF you haven’t yet gone down the composting route, autumn is a great time to start as you gather up leaves, empty plant pots and generally tidy up the garden.

Many local authorities now provide compost bins to encourage householders to recycle, so it’s worth giving your own council a ring to check.

Alternatively, you can make a compost heap by building a wiremesh cage with four corner posts, lined with cardboard or straw.

Builders’ pallets also make instant compost bins, set on end and tied or screwed together.

You can fill the gaps between slats with straw or newspaper.

I have a cheap, lidded bin outside my back door for all my kitchen waste such as vegetable peelings, teabags and eggshells, which I add to the heap spasmodically.

Some people do get confused about exactly what and how much of a particular waste product they should put on their compost heap.

Too many grass clippings pack down and rot without air into a smelly, slimy mess so must be mixed with coarser material.

Weeds can be mixed with grass cuttings, but avoid vigorous perennial types with indestructible roots such as ground elder or couch grass.

Kitchen scraps can be used, but avoid cooked food – which attracts rats – and don’t put in meat or fish.

Often the problem gardeners have is that they don’t have enough material, but your local greengrocer may be able to supply you with some green waste, or the council may be happy to let you cart away leaves. If you have room, make two compost heaps so that you are filling one while the other is rotting down.

The best way to make compost is to add the materials in layers. Start with a layer of coarse material and pile on about the same about of grass cuttings, mixing them together with a fork.

If you have a lot of one type of material, stack it to one side and cover it with black plastic sheeting until there is enough other material to mix with it.

Quick-rotting green waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings, soft prunings and annual weeds should be mixed in equal amounts with tougher, fibrous materials such as shredded paper and card products, straw, vegetable stems, leaves, eggshells and soft hedge prunings.

Horse and poultry manure is a good addition, while wood ash from the fireplace can also be added, as can cardboard including egg boxes and toilet-roll middles.

Try to keep woody materials out of the compost heap as they will take ages to break down, and if you are clipping hedges, shred very tough prunings before adding them.

Small amounts of leaves can be thrown into the compost heap, but large quantities are better stacked separately. Once the heap is full, throw a piece of old carpet on top of it to keep in the heat. The compost will need turning from time to time while it is decomposing.

It should be kept moist (so it may need watering occasionally in hot weather) and should be ready in anything between three months to a year, when the mixture has turned into a crumbly dark-brown material, which can be used to enrich the soil in your beds and borders or as a nutritious mulch over a planting area.

Leaf mould is also invaluable as a soil conditioner, but it rots down in a slightly different way from other compost and takes slightly longer, so you’re better off making this separately.

All you do is gather your fallen leaves up and put them in either a wire-netting container or black dustbin bags with air holes punched into them, tie them up and stack them in the corner of the garden for a year while the leaves decay. If you let leaf-mould rot for several years, you can add it to potting composts and top-dressing for lawns.