Agnes Stevenson: Crisis… what compost crisis? I am more worried about the frogs!

Coronavirus may be all that’s in the news just now, but there’s another crisis in town – a compost crisis. Since lockdown demand has soared and suppliers just can’t keep up.

“I can’t believe how much compost our customers are buying,” Kathleen McIndoe of The Mill Garden Centre in Armadale told me while she took a break from delivering sacks of the stuff all over town.

She and her team have been working long hours to keep up with orders and at one point last week they had to put new orders on hold while they struggled to catch up.

Kathleen’s customers are lucky even if they have to wait a few days for a delivery, because in my corner of Ayrshire I’m fast running out of options.

The compost I had delivered just as lockdown was announced has all been used. A subsequent order from a different supplier has gone AWOL and now the original supplier is charging four times what I paid at the start of all this.

There is a glimmer of hope. The local supermarket now has some, although I don’t think making a separate trip to buy it while my fridge and freezer are fully stocked counts as essential travel but, better still, the garden centre just a couple of miles away has launched an on-line shop, with a limit of three bags per customer.

Meanwhile I’ve been hunting compost sacks around the garden and emptying out every last grain of soil. I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I found one with a couple of inches of material in it so I stuck my hand in to pull out a fistful – and that’s when I squashed the frog.

It was only a small frog, so it’s not my fault I mistook it for a clump of compost, but we both got a bit of a shock.I placed it gently on the grass while I had a cup of tea to steady my nerves and by the time I was down to the leaves in my Darjeeling it had hopped off,

In this time of shortages, old compost that would normally be used as a mulch on my heavy clay is being checked for millipedes and leather jackets then getting a sprinkling of fertiliser before being pressed into service as a growing medium for potting on.

My next plan is to collect the soil from the molehills along the roadside verge and use that as well. Thanks to the mole’s hard work, this soil is fine, crumbly stuff and would give plants a much better start than anything I’ve got in the garden.

And I’ve been lifting clumps of saxifrages and spreading them out to brighten up bare patches of wall.

Sometimes I’ve heard voles rustling about behind the stones, but I’ve not been tempted to investigate further as I reckon that one close encounter with nature in a week is more than enough.