One of the novelties of the house is that it has a back yard, with some garden beds, some lawn and an outdoor space - not just a concrete balcony space.

I am already spending more time in the back yard than I ever did on the balcony and we haven’t even started thinking about improvements. There are some tomato plants to tend, a couple of trees to water, cobwebs to sweep, a lawn to weed and mow - plus a family of European wasps I keep trying to evict.

One thing that is becoming clear is that there’s a lot more work to be done to make the back yard into a pleasant space with a garden.

It makes sense for us to try to do something with our food waste, to reduce how much of it goes to landfill. We also want to plant a garden around the new house, so we have started to think about how we can build up and improve the soil.

Those are a couple of the reasons why we have recently re-started our composting efforts.