Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Compost in Training

Oh boy, does winter ever hide messes. It's amazing how many surprises are uncovered by melting snow. Between garbage blown by the wind, the neighbor dog's poop, the remnants of my winter "experiments" and things that were dropped or lost into the snowbanks early in the winter, my yard looks like a minefield of things that the lawnmower would just love to chop up into even finer bits and scatter to the wind.

I guess this means it's time to clean up, before too many people see. I roused my teenage son from his perpetual slumber (and I didn't even need the cattle prod this time!), and set out with great intentions. After standing on the steps, unsure just where to start, I came up with a plan.

Step one in this process was building a new compost pile cage. Last year I just made a pile in an unused corner of the garden. This year, after seeing how nice last year's compost is, I decided I wanted to make a much larger compost pile. This has two advantages for our family. First, compost is an excellent soil conditioner for the garden, and we will have much more free compost to mix into the garden this fall. Second, nearly all of the kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and paper products from our house can go into the pile and not into the landfill. Most people know that food scraps and lawn clippings will compost, but did you know that most of your junk mail and old newspapers, after removing glossy paper and plastic, can go in the compost pile as well?

We started by driving four steel fence posts into the ground to make a square about 5 feet across both ways. Steel wire mesh left over from building the chicken coop was wrapped around the square, and fastened on one corner so that the mesh can be removed for easier access into the enclosure for stirring and removing compost. The mesh I used is four feet wide, making a four foot tall enclosure, so I left the posts sticking about four feet out of the ground.

After it was built, in went some pumpkins and squash that didn't get used and were starting to rot. Then we added whatever paper, cardboard, small sticks and branches we picked up in the yard, and a garbage can full of used chicken bedding. As the spring cleaning continues, we'll add last year's corn stalks that are still standing, more chicken bedding straw, leaves, kitchen scraps, paper and whatever other natural materials we would otherwise throw in the trash. Later on in the year, lawn clippings that aren't used for garden mulch, any weeds pulled from the garden, damaged garden produce, sawdust made cutting firewood, and many other things will find their way into the pile.

Composting is a simple concept, but there are some things that should be kept in mind. Sooner or later just about any pile will compost, but you can speed this process up significantly in a few ways.

-Aeration is important, the pile needs to get air to keep alive the aerobic (oxygen loving) bacteria that make composting work.

-Add material in layers. Alternate green and brown (wet and dry) material, using about twice as much brown as green material. This prevents too much water in the pile, which will lead to anaerobic bacteria growth and that telltale smell of slough mud/sewage that we want to avoid.

-Damp. A compost pile should never completely dry out, nor should it be so wet that you can squeeze water from the material. If you live in a wet climate, you may need to cover the pile with a tarp to keep excess rain off. If you live in a dry climate, you'll probably have to water it with a hose periodically.

-Turn the pile every few weeks when it's active and generating heat. Just stir it up with a pitchfork or potato fork to mix in that outer material that hasn't composted, and get some air into the middle to provide oxygen for the bacteria.

For more detailed information on composting, I'll post a few links at the bottom.

At the end of the day, this project didn't really clean our yard up much, but it's a necessary task so that we can return those nutrients to the garden soil without adding chemical fertilizers, and so that we can re-use a few things, rather than just dumping them in the landfill. I guess this post is proof that I'm easily distracted, because the yard is still mostly a mess. But hey, I have a nice compost pile started, and I can pick up the trash on a warmer day next weekend. Right?


Links, as promised
http://eartheasy.com/grow_compost.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Compost

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