Garden Gab

Lots of people get weirded out or scared off when someone mentions composting, but in all honesty, it isn’t terribly technical, you won’t burn your house down and unless you are adding the wrong things, it won’t produce a cloud of stinky, rancid gas. 

There are lots of good reasons for creating a compost heap, but my personal favorites are:

            a. it creates rich, well draining soil for my garden and

            b. it VASTLY reduces the waste I have to send off to a landfill. 

Even if you don’t have a garden or flower bed, I hope you will take a week and just look at what you throw out that can’t be recycled.  Think about all the food that goes bad, gets stuck in the kitchen drain, fruit peels, and is just not eaten.  Also think about flower clippings from arrangements, lawn clippings, dead leaves and twigs.  If your family is like mine, close to sixty percent of your garbage consists of compostable material.  Sixty percent!

If saving the earth is your goal, composting is also one of the easiest ways you can reduce your impact on the environment.  That’s not to say you can’t get extremely fancy with your compost pile.  In fact, the faster you need fresh compost, the fancier you’ll want to get when it comes to compost bins.  But you can also have a perfectly good bin made out of chicken wire or my choice, a box made with movable fence rails.  You can even forgo a bin and just maintain a compost heap in a corner of your yard.  The key is, the smaller the bin space, the more the internal temperature will rise, provided you keep turning it (more on that later) and the faster you will develop garden ready compost.

Selecting a compost spot

Now, there’s two kinds of lazy when it comes to composting.  There’s winter lazy and there’s spring lazy.  Myself, I happen to be spring lazy.  I’d rather trudge all the way out to the corner of the garden in winter to add to my compost heap and not have to lug fresh compost in the spring to spread over the garden.  If you happen to be winter lazy, you’re going to want to keep the compost pile closer to your house so you don’t have to suit up and walk a half mile in the freezing snow to empty your compost bucket into the pile.  It’s completely up to you.  However, you will want to make sure that wherever your pile is, it will be in direct sun as much as possible.  So try not to put it directly under your eaves or it will lose a lot of its potential heat and decompose slower.

Now we’re cooking!

So, near or far, space age bin or pile, what should go into your pile?  Any form of plant life will work in your compost pile.  You will want to keep any animal remains (that is bones, meat, dairy, egg shells, pet waste) out of the pile, not because they will not decompose, but because they attract scavengers of both insect and animal kind, and once you’ve got them it’s hard to get rid of them.  Fruit and bread should be turned into the pile quickly to prevent other pests like raccoons from dragging them out and making a mess on your lawn.

The key to starting your pile is mixing brown items (such as twigs, old leaves, wood chips) with green items or nitrogen rich items (such as grass clippings, cow or horse manure or fertilizer).  The combination of carbon and nitrogen as these items mix will begin the raise the decomposition rate.  Adding soil or old compost (find a composting buddy!) will kickstart the process by introducing the bacteria that starts composting your waste.

You will want to keep your compost heap damp to help the decomposition process, so water it when you water your flowers or vegetable garden in the summer and check it every so often in the fall and winter.  it should be moist but not soggy.  To make sure you get the whole pile, you’ll want to poke holes or turn the pile as you water it.  You can buy all kinds of aerating tools and special shovels to turn your pile, but I prefer one sturdy pitchfork to do the whole job.

If you are starting your pile now, you will want to conserve your pile’s internal heat.  You can do this by making a ring of medium to large rocks around the pile to reflect the heat.  Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a compost pile!

Next time we’ll debunk a few composting myths like spontaneous combustion, solve a few common problems like stinky heaps and show you how to turn and use your compost.