POSH poo from Princess Diana’s childhood home for £20 a bag? Manure from Mozambique sold for more than connoisseurs’ coffee?
The craze for classy compost is causing quite a stink among gardening sceptics. But despite the doubts, it’s flying off the shelves like something smelly off a shovel. Especially after Gwyneth Paltrow extolled the virtues of mixing eucalyptus-eating goat waste in your mud.
One seller of this premium poop is London-based Land Gardeners, who have begun making manure at the 500-year-old Spencer family property, Althorp Estate, where Diana grew up.
Their Climate Compost Inoculum blend, which costs £20 for 2kg, (but you only need a tiny bit apparently) uses a mix of waste from the family’s cows and horses, alongside ingredients such as weeds, buckwheat and young wood chips.
It seems that the humble pile of poo really has come up smelling of roses. Boosted by the pandemic-fuelled boom in gardeners, it seems that shoppers are prepared to pay a premium for craft crap.
“It’s a craft, making compost like we do” said one of founders of Land Gardeners, Bridget Elworthy, in the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s like making wine, although making wine seems very glamorous, and making compost is very unglamorous. So maybe it’s like making yogurt.”
“The soil is the basis of everything – plant health, animal health, your health,” added Elworthy in the Guardian.
“So if you’re eating something that’s grown in microbially rich soil that is actually interacting with the plants, and not just getting a quick fix like with a synthetic fertiliser, that food will have higher nutrient density and you will be much healthier. Not only that, but so will the planet.”
Oxfordshire flower farmer Miranda Michaelis swears by the blend and is convinced it is the secret behind her multi award-winning blooms.
“[The] secret is simple, compost harvested from Princess Diana’s childhood home,” she said.
Not all Guardian readers were convinced though.
“As someone with two degrees in Soil Science I can say without hesitation that this is utter bunk. There’s no such thing as ‘artisanal compost’ and you can’t inoculate topsoil with a small bag of anything,” said one.
“What a load of pretentious rubbish. This is a way to sell manure to mugs very much like the bottled water scam. ‘Must have that because it is more expensive’. For stupid rich people to boast they have the best ****,” added another.
Whatever the case, the old saying ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’ has never rung so true.
