Compost, Part 3

If you've been reading the other posts on composting, and maybe you've even made some compost over the last few months in your own backyard, but now you are wondering, "What do I do with the compost I make?" Glad you asked!

Obviously you use it in the garden, but how? I use my compost in several different ways.

As I said earlier, when I empty out my composter towers that I have in some of my garden beds, I just spread it around and dig it into my beds in the spring. That is simple and straight forward enough. I do this early in the spring, when things have just thawed, and the compost towers look nice and black and crumbly. If I haven't thrown anything in them since the early fall, and they have been sitting there since about October, everything is probably broken down pretty good. Keep in mind, my towers are made of metal fencing, and are about 18 inches in diameter, and about 4 feet tall. The air can circulate through it, helping the composting process, and the finished compost filters out through the bottom throughout the year.

I use raised beds, and not rows, for my garden, and I have those lined with some old bricks. So, I don't use a rototiller but rather a pitch fork. It's good exercise. :-)

I usually dig up the bed, and just fold the compost under, as if you were folding in well beaten egg whites into a fine cake batter, so that it all mixes in. This, like the egg whiles, also adds air to the soil, and loosens it in preparation for gardening. You don't want your soil all compacted down.

Another thing I do with compost is use it as a mulch around my plants. I mostly use my household compost for this, which I process in the spinning composter usually. I find that after I put some plants in the ground, a nice heap of composted materials around the plant help give it an added boost.

Then there's the compost tea. Compost tea is what forms when the water runs through your compost. It smells just what you are imagining it smelling like. (pee--yew!) My spinning composter has a base which is designed to catch rainwater that runs off of the composter. I use this to water around my plants after every good rain storm we have. This may smell bad, but it is full of good things for our plants.

I also have leaves, as I said, which I compost anaerobically in black plastic bags by raking them into the bags, lightly watering them, and letting them set for the winter. By spring it is mostly decomposed, especially if you had them sitting in the sun all winter, and I can then use the leaves as a mulch around my plants, which will then compost right on the spot.

Today, a friend gave us about a yard and a half of mulch he was going to throw out because it was starting to biodegrade (awesome! just the way I like my woodchips!), and the good thing about any sort of biodegradable mulch is precisely that--it will eventually biodegrade, and feed your soil. So, if someone has an ancient pile of woodchips that they are not going to use, ask for some...it will cut down on weeds, and feed your garden.

For perennial beds, that is, garden beds with plants that come back every year, I find the best way to feed them is to use some sort of mulch, because we risk damaging the roots when we dig too much. Strawberries we need to take extra care with, as they don't root very deeply, and it is easy to pull them out (it's also easy to put them back in again, too, thankfully). I usually have some fine woodchips around my strawberries, or some partly composted leaves. I also put some fresh compost around my strawberries after we've picked the last berry, to feed them.

For raspberries, I also use lots of wood chips, if I can, or else a thick layer of straw. You want to buy straw bales, not hay, as hay usually has seeds in it (though straw may too). A good trick is to buy your hay/straw bales in the fall, lightly water them, let them start to "Grow" and sprout, and then when it freezes, the little plants will die, and your hay/straw no longer threatens to fill your garden with wheat plants. Rasperries do great with lots of hay thrown down around them, at least a foot thick, to try to keep the weeds at bay. I also throw down some compost from the composters before I apply the hay, too.

I also lay a good layer of compost and other mulch around my fruit trees, and vines, to feed them.

With my herbs, I lightly mulch around them with compost, digging it in gently around the plant but being careful of the roots, or just leaving it as a mulch. I also add whatever other mulch I have to my perennials.

For more information on growing your own groceries in your backyard garden, check out my ebook, Growing Your Groceries.