Researcher: Sebastian Chaloner
Collaboration with Cambo Garden in May 2025
I spent 2024 volunteering at Cambo Estate’s garden. Over this time, the Head Gardener (Callum Halstead) and I bonded over our shared passion for nurturing a habitat for vast numbers of organisms, from bacteria to mites to earthworms, responsible for converting organic kitchen & garden waste into a nutritious growing medium – this habitat being the compost heap.
Witnessing visitors arriving in their droves to Cambo Garden’s Snowdrop Festival, inspired us to pitch to Cambo’s board of trustees a similar festival-approach, but with the focus being composting. My collaboration with the Head Gardener was intentionally blurred with Cal sometimes assuming the role of a graphic designer come art director and conversely, me the job of the gardener. The first task involved the design and build of a compost trail with nine exhibition points, demonstrating different forms of composting. From passive examples such as habitat piles and standing dead wood to more hands-on methods such as leaf mould heaps or wooden-pallet-bay-systems. To guide visitors around this exhibition, we designed a compostable poster-map made from recycled agricultural waste (which included an instruction manual on how to build a compost cake, plus compostable interpretation for each exhibition point providing information on each approach.
Throughout the six-week festival we ran different practical workshops that covered how to construct a Compost Cake, learn about no-dig growing and understanding how to balance green to brown ratios to make your compost heap (or bin) as efficient as possible. I personally orchestrated creative workshops for families in which participants could make compostable anthrotypes (see image) using beetroot juice, sunlight and compostable materials. As well as facilitating an ideation session where community action groups (Greener Kirkaldy, Climate Action Fife, Eats Rosyth) were invited to work together to think up new innovative ways to get people composting in their own spaces. Part of reaching out to communities, was supplying V&A Dundee compost made during the festival for their planted borders to coincide with the recently opened Garden Futures exhibition.
The festival culminated with a conference day, where we had informative and emotive talks from both Compost Club’s Michael Kennard and industrial turned organic farmers Steading & Co, about their own life changing experiences with composting. Finishing the day with a tour of the composting trail, a facilitated discussion circle about the future of composting and an evening of drinks around a campfire right next to the heaps.
We’re going to run it again in 2026 – if you’re compost curious or a fully-fledged fanatic get involved!