Compost Heaven

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about composting, so when my most recent batch of compost was ready to use, I took some pictures. As I was spreading it out in the tomato bed this morning, a woman who was jogging by stopped and asked me how I keep my tomatoes looking so good in this heat. I was flummoxed. “Um, compost?”, I said, and pointed to the wheelbarrow with my shovel. She said their plants have tomatoes, but the plants look all dry and terrible. It’s hard to say, since the differences between gardens are many. But really, I am not very diligent in watering, which I do by hand. So it seems like it must be the black gold.

I got out this morning and finished harvesting the finished compost. We moved into this house last August, and immediately set up our three compost bins in the small east side yard. As I’m a lazy gardener, I use a slow method of composting, sometimes called “cold” composting. It’s made up of three wire bins, approximately 3×3 ft square, side by side. I bought it at gardeners.com:

Into the first bin go all new additions: kitchen waste, weeds without seeds, non-diseased prunings, and extra dry “browns” like leaves or hay. Once this bin fills to the top (which was slower before our garden got going, but can happen pretty quickly during harvest season), the entire contents of the first bin is forked into the 2nd bin. This aerates and mixes the ingredients, and gives you a chance to add more browns, if your pile is too wet and stinky (Which has never, ever, ever happened to me. Ever.). New additions continue to be fed into the first bin, and the 2nd bin is left to cook. I don’t water my compost piles, which is one reason they are slow and “cold”. If I kept the piles moist, and turned them every month, they would get hot in the center and cook, and break down faster. Too much work. Anyway, once the first bin is full again, the 2nd bin gets forked over into the third bin, and the first bin gets forked over into the 2nd bin. By this time, the compost getting turned into the third bin should be pretty much unrecognizable except for eggs shells, corn cobs, coffee filters, and other bits that take a long time to break down. You should also notice a big difference in the soil life. When I turn the first pile over, there are grubs and sometimes ants, earthworms, pill bugs and even maggots, occasionally (eek!). When I turn the 2nd pile over, there are many more earthworms, silverfish, snakes, rarely ants. By the time the last pile is done cooking, the earthworms rule the roost, never ants or grubs or rarely any other big insects.

This first pile in our house took almost a year to make it through this process, mostly because that’s how long it took us to fill the first bin twice. So finally, I’m harvesting my first batch of compost.

This picture is a little deceptive, because there is hay in the middle bin. But the first bin is at the top of the picture, and will be turned into the middle bin later.

Some people just spread the finished compost on the garden as is, with the big chunks still in it. But I screen mine, as ours includes little fruit stickers from our kitchen scraps, and we get leaves from neighbors, which sometimes contains candy wrappers and such. I use a 1/4″ screen to get really fine compost for our potted plants. I use 1/2″ screen to get regular garden bed compost. Since I’m lazy, as I mentioned, I bought both of my screens already made. But they’re really easy to make with materials from Home Depot. Anyway, my 1/2″ screen fits over my wheelbarrow:

I dump a shovel-full of compost onto the screen, then use the shovel to scrape and agitate the finer compost through the holes, all the while trying not to kill the earthworms that are flailing around like fish out of water. The big chunks that are left over are scraped into the bucket at the base of the barrow, and added back to the first bin to continue cooking.

And this is the good stuff; the glorious gold. From one bin, I got about 4 or 5 wheelbarrows-full.

From here on out, we’ll get more compost, faster. Not that the three of us are creating more kitchen scraps, but with the garden becoming more mature, I’ll be feeding the pile more vegetation. Just today, I turned a pile over into the middle bin.

There is now fresh hay in the last bin, and the first bin has a thin layer of hay at the bottom, waiting for new additions to the pile.

Notes for success with composting:

• You need “greens” (nitrogen) and “browns” (carbon) to make the average pile work as generally expected. In my experience, THE most common mistake made in backyard compost piles is too few browns in relation to greens. The result is a wet, slimy, smelly, infested mess. Basically everything that comes out of your kitchen is a green. So you’ll need to feed the pile with dried leaves, hay, or some other dry, brown substance. Shredded paper, shredded cardboard, something. The best input is the one that you have handy, especially if you’re diverting it from the landfill. We usually harass our neighbors into giving us their leaves (they think we’re nutty). But we plowed through a tremendous amount of leaves this year, and had to break down and buy some hay from the feed and seed store downtown.
• The more you turn the pile, the hotter it will cook, the faster it will finish, and the more buff you will become.
• If you’re going for hot, you’ll also need to keep the pile moist, like a squeezed-out sponge. Dry piles can take years to finish (like a dry leaf pile, which takes about three years to turn into leaf mold).
• Bury your kitchen waste in the pile, preferably under a handful of browns. That’s why I like to keep a bag of leaves or something right next to the first bin. If you dump your kitchen scraps, then throw in a handful of leaves, you’re virtually guaranteed to end up with the right combination of greens and browns, as well as discouraging flies and cats. Both of which I consider the most disgusting of visitors to my little homestead.
• Bugs are generally your friends. It’s true that you can get an imbalance of one bug in relation to all of the others. But if you balance your greens and browns, you should be able to step back and let the battle of the bugs play out. They’re the ones doing the magic, so leave them be.