[donkeyrobber]

Kristen, thanks for the informative post! Some really useful information from everyone here. So thank you all for that.

Today was as good a day as we could ask for (weatherwise) in January, no sign of rain and bright blue sky all day. I picked up my 200L of manure from B&Q for just under £20. Drove it up to the allotment - hoping I was doing the right thing. When I arrived, what did I find? My neighbours, armed with barrows and forks, standing at the foot of a 3 ton mountain of (year old) cow poo!

I had mixed emotions. We had a laugh, his mountain cost him £50 (delivered)! Though the trailer had sunk in the plot and it took 2 tractors to pull it out. I think he was as envious of the neat little sacks piled up in the boot of my car as I was of his mountain.

Inspired by seeing someone more experienced than me having had the same idea, I decided to dig! Unfortunately I ran out of time before I managed  all of it in because I was faffing with other things. Hopefully I'll get one more day to do the last bed. I've dug out four rows of beds in the front half of my (half) plot. They are deliberately sized so that I can reach the entire bed without standing on any of the growing area specifically to avoid causing unnecessary compaction problems.

I have to say, the soil in actually pretty good on the plot. certainly not very much clay in the top 6-8 inches that I've seen, yet it holds together fairly well. Knock it with the back of  a spade and it'll crumble.

As for the compost, when I deposited a bag full of kitchen waste, I threw in  half a bag of shredded paper (thanks Dan) - I'd read it was important to mix green and browns but not actually started to do it. As for starting a new heap, the idea has crossed my mind. 

Maybe I will and just cover the exiting one up and leave it until next year. There's borage on the plot, it's looking a bit sorry for itself. Maybe I'll cut a bit down and throw that into the new heap.

As for using partially broken down compost in bean trenches, is there a risk that decomposing food waste underground could harm the beans or neighbouring carrots (I'm planning to companion plant beans and carrots). I thought that when food waste decomposed without oxygen, it caused harmful build ups of gas, hence the reason food waste in landfill is evil. Maybe the answer to that question is the difference in scale between bean trenches and landfill sites

[Kristen]

Not come across any references to gas buildup from decomposing compost, I suspect, as you surmise, that it might have something to do with "scale".

You probably know this, but in case not: Peas and Beans form a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria (they develop nodules on their roots which house the bacteria).  The normal problem with burying raw vegetable waste (or wood chip for that matter) is that the bugs that break it down consume Nitrogen.  Plants need Nitrogen to grow, so if decomposition is using up Nitrogen too then there is less in the soil for plants to grow, so generally putting uncomposted plant matter into beds is a bad idea, but because Peas and Beans, in effect, make their own Nitrogen then that's not an issue for them.  What beans need is good moisture retention, and chucking all sorts of organic rubbish (including newspaper and even uncomposted Brussels Sprout stalks) into the trench helps with water retention - which leads to Great Beans (and less watering )