Compost, part 2

Yesterday, I posted a little bit about compost and how to gather it...today is about how to actually do it.

Pretty much anything biodegradable will eventually biodegrade, no matter what you do to it....it's a fact. Composting methods described in most gardening books are designed to hasten that process to allow you, the gardener in need of compost, to use your organic fertilizer sooner than later. For example, the leaves in the bags will probably revert to compost within 1 year if I left them in bags tied up and did nothing else to them, but if, during the process, I ripped open one of those bags, it would smell nasty because there would be anaerobic composting going on...it's slower to compost something without good air circulation, and definitely smellier, but it will eventually happen if you did nothing at all. If I put them into some sort of composter, turned the compost daily, and made sure it was exactly wet enough, and had good air circulation, it would probably be ready in 6 weeks (Aerobic composting).

I use a combination of methods. Some of my compost is in a small, spinning black composter...but the problem with that method is (1) that composter is expensive (2) it doesn't hold nearly enough (3) it's hard to get stuff out of it when you are done. For all of the biodegradable stuff we have to use, we'd need several of them. Still, compost is done in 6 weeks or so with it. In the spring, it provides me with the first batch of compost I need to feed the bed where my 200 onion sets go, so it serves it's purpose.

Most of my compost is in several wire mesh towers that I built by cutting wire mesh into a 4 foot length, and forming a cylinder with it, and standing it up at the end of one of my garden beds. I have 3 of these actually. Into those, I throw garden scraps, lawn clippings, and sometimes leaves. I don't turn it at all; I just let it rot in place. Eventually it will. Because it is tall and skinny, and air circulates in it well, you don't get much smell (depending on what you throw in there of course--I don't use those for kitchen scraps as that can be smelly), and as the compost is formed on the bottom of the pile, it just filters out into the bed. In the spring, the fall's garden scraps are usually completely or at least mostly composted, and I just unhooked the composter, and spread it around really good to all of the beds. There was a good half yard of compost in each of them. If there is any big hunks of uncomposted materials in there as I spread it around, I pitch fork them out, and add them to the other composter.

I've also used wooden frames, about 2 ft across, and a foot tall each, with holes drilled in them for air circulation, for compost. What i would do is fill them with biodegradable matter, and then, every few days, I would turn it by stacking the top frame next to the other frames, and carefully shovelling the compost into the frame, stacking the other frames as I went. By shovelling the compost back and forth, it moved around enough to have good air circulation and usually decomposed in a few months. It's not really the easiest job in the world, and most of the time I didn't remember it. :-))

As I said in the last post, I also have black bags of leaves each fall which I moisten and allow to partly decompose over the winter before using it as mulch in the spring. The leaves are another part of my compost puzzle, providing both a thick mulch and quickly decomposing into the garden beds, providing rich, black humus when they're done.

Other things I've used include chicken litter (Which you must completely compost before you use it...it's very "hot"--meaning, so high in nitrogen, it could burn young plants), composted cow manure, and peat moss. Digging some of any of those into your garden beds in the spring will give your soil a little more life.

Monday's post: how to use the compost you make