From the archive
9 Sep 2026
The idea came out of a meeting of allotment holders in 2004, the way these things usually do - somebody had more prunings than their own heap could swallow, and the parish had weeds going to waste. The following year, with a start-up grant from Gloucestershire County Council, the Bisley Community Composting Scheme opened on the Chestergate Allotments site, next to the community orchard. It was the first community composting scheme in the Stroud district. This August it turned twenty-one, which makes it the longest-running in the county.
The arrangement is simple. Members from the Bisley-with-Lypiatt parish bring their prunings, cuttings and weeds to the site, where the material is hot-composted, and in return they take away as much unsieved compost as they can use. It runs as a community interest company under a volunteer committee, with some paid labour alongside - an honest admission, after two decades, that goodwill alone does not turn heaps. The compost goes back onto members' gardens, returning nutrients to the same soil the material grew out of.
The birthday itself was run like an open day with the gate left open. Two of the scheme's directors, Lesley Greene and Liz Howlett, led tours of the composting and demonstration beds; both have been involved since the original allotment meeting. A new blacksmith-forged gate was formally opened in memory of Alan Evans, a founding director who was, unusually, both a composting expert and a world-renowned blacksmith - so the gate is his in two senses. Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust ran a bioblitz, setting seven moth traps around the site.
The traps came back with more than 170 species of moth identified in a single day, seven of them never previously recorded in Bisley. That is not a bad return for a site whose official business is rotting down cabbage stalks. The day finished with a bat walk, which is about where a composting scheme's twenty-first birthday ought to finish.
A community compost scheme needs three things before it needs money: a willing site (an allotment corner will do), a committee that will outlast the founding enthusiasm, and a no-sieving rule - members take the compost rough, which halves the labour that kills volunteer schemes. Budget for some paid turning help by year five. The start-up grant is the easy part; Bisley's lasted one season, the scheme twenty-one years.
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