Personally, I don’t bother. Once the compost is spread, any weeds which grow are easy to remove and go into the next batch. It’s not such a bad job. Heat sterilising such a large amount would be tedious and smelly.

And 'cooking' or heat sterilizing the compost now will kill off all the microbial activity, which to me is one of the major benefits of compost in the first place. I would gladly deal with a few weeds in favor of a biologically active compost!!

When you say the compost is full of seeds.... what type of seeds are you talking about?

Hi there, full of weed seeds. You name it it will be in there. Oxalis is one example, very difficult to pull out when young but if you leave it you can literally hear the seed heads popping and spreading further.

The sterile soil from the council was really good. I was just hoping to replicate that so that I'm not continually weeding the bed. We have tried using the compost before, before we realised what weeds are in it and it is an enormous job to clear the weeds.

well... similar to others.. i would be apt to just use it and then pull weeds as you see them. Being in compost, they would be easy to pull up.... and the of course don't add any weeds that have seed heads to the compost moving forward.

If you really wanted to, you could do a temporary cook by getting a bunch of browns (leaves, straw (not full of herbicides)... or even some cheep wood mulch... mix them into your compost well with some added urea fertilizer. Keep it damp and turn it every so often.

Excellent - thank you. We'll have to empty one of the bins so can do that when we mix the newer one and get it working again.

Try not to put Oxalis on the compost heap in the first place. It spreads by bulbils as well as, in fact in some species more than, seeds.

If you keep pulling weeds as soon as possible when you see them you’ll gradually deplete the seed bank.