Tis the season for composting

Composting is great. Right? Yeah! Really. We know this, so I'm not going to go into why. What I am going to talk about is how, usually, composting is a great thing that you can't (or don't) get enough of.

So you pile up your garden and kitchen scraps all spring and summer. You pull weeds and add those to the pile. Maybe you even dump some lawn clippings in there. All spring and summer you have this beautiful pile of material just composting away, home to millions if not billions of perfectly happy thermophilic bacteria doing their happy little thing.

Come spring, you go to add that beautiful compost to your garden and realize that you should really have about 5 times as much as you have. At least that's how it always works for me. No matter how hard I tried last year, I don't have enough compost this year. Personally, I choose to use no commercial external inputs (stuff I bought to improve something) to my garden. In fact, the only purchased external input to any of my food production is the occasional bag of chicken feed, especially during winter. This means no fertilizers, organic or otherwise. My only sources of fertilizer for my gardens are compost and chicken poop. I acknowledge that the chicken poop is at least partly external, but that's a work in progress as well. It takes a LOT of finished compost to properly amend 1500 sq feet of garden, and that's if I ignore the sweet corn patch, potato patch, and pumpkin patch. The way I calculate it, a pile of finished compost 4 feet high and 4 feet square is enough to put 1 inch of finished compost on about 800 sq feet of garden. That's only about half of what I'm going to need at a minimum, come spring. Maybe less. So my goal is two finished compost piles 4 feet cubed by spring, and this is how I'm trying to help get there.

My beautiful daughter picking clover flowers. We mow and rake this stuff up for the compost bin.

Compost everything but the kitchen sink. Almost. Newspapers, junk mail (no plastic or glossy papers though), eggshells and all food scraps that don't have meat or oil in them. Tissues and paper towels used for wiping hands, etc. Leaves, grass, weeds, sawdust, and straw. Think about how much of this stuff you might throw away in a year and put it in your compost pile. Cardboard should be torn up or shredded first. I rip up paper too.

Don't waste lawn clippings. If you have a lawn, especially this time of year, it's tempting to just blow the clippings back down and let them mulch. They're usually short as the summers dry out the ground and the grass doesn't grow as much. If you can, let the grass grow a little longer and then bag or rake it up for the compost pile.

Do you have some space that you didn't plant this year? Seed it with yellow or white clover and grow compost. Really tall clover plants get a woody stem and don't compost as easily, so if you plant clover you should compost just before it flowers. The stems are still not too tough and it's at its nitrogen fixing peak. Pulling the roots up with the plant will move those nitrogen fixing nodules into your compost bin.

If you live in the country you probably have an area that you just let grow into tall grass. I mow this down, rake it up and put that in the compost bin too. This works great if you find yourself adding a lot of greens and not enough browns to the pile. Mow it down and let it dry in the sun for a few days before adding it to the pile.

Do you have chickens in a tractor or on pasture? They scratch grass all to heck, and always leave a layer of dead grass laying where they've been, especially if that grass was a bit long. I rake this up and put it in the pile. This stuff is great, it's dried and coated in chicken poop. That's about as good as compost gets.

Do you have bedding that you use for pets or livestock? I switched from using pine shavings to straw and grass bales for chicken bedding in the winter, because it composts faster than wood shavings.

If you plant cover crops, you can choose to work those into the ground where they are, or they can be chopped and added to the compost pile so you can choose where you need their nutrients later on.

If you burn natural charcoal or wood in your grill, some ashes mixed in are beneficial as well. The drawback to this is that wood ash will make your compost and your soil quite alkaline. Use wood ash only in small amounts, or offset with ingredients that will acidify the pile such as oak leaves, pine needles, or other material that is very high in tannins or acids. Of course, if you have exceedingly acid soil this is an easy way to solve that problem.

At a certain point, everything starts to look like potential compost. Some more extreme ideas:

Occasionally I walk down the ditches on the old dirt road with a machete and cut clover, pigweed, mare's tail, wild sunflowers, and other large plants. Stuff that's big enough that you can bind the stems with a string and carry them over your shoulder. I can add 10 pounds of high nutrient compost to my pile on an evening walk this way. Plus it's great exercise. You'll want to make sure that anything you cut from a road ditch hasn't been sprayed, but if you're familiar with the area, you'll probably know that already.

This time of year, my shore fishing trips end up with me dragging a lot of coontail and other aquatic weeds back to shore. Throw it in a bucket and put it in the pile too. If I had more time, I'd actually gather the stuff just for this purpose. Pay attention to where you're collecting this stuff from, though. Chemical contamination is always a concern.

With doing these things, I currently have a compost pile 4 feet high and 4 feet wide both directions, in a chicken fence bin. It's still not enough.

The next key is making sure your compost finishes as fast as possible. A full bin makes it hard to add more. Plus, if your compost bin is breaking down fast and the pile is shrinking down into finished compost, you'll be more likely to add more to it. Add a little soil from a healthy garden bed to introduce beneficial bacteria to the pile. Large compost piles are a miserable chore to turn. That usually means they don't get turned often enough. A second bin that you can move the compost back and forth between makes this much easier. Pay close attention to the moisture in the pile. large piles will hold moisture in the bottom for weeks after the top half dries out. Turning solves this problem usually, but watering the top of the pile lightly, so that only the top half gets damp, will help between turnings.

Another thing to keep in mind here is quality of compost. A compost pile composed of nothing more than grass clippings isn't going to create the quality of compost that a more varied pile will. You may end up with plenty of nitrogen, but you're risking micronutrient deficiency. The more different things you put in there, the better the compost you'll make. Also consider taking a lesson from the permaculture crowd and supplementing your compost with urine. Gross? Maybe, but urine from a healthy person who doesn't take any pharmaceutical drugs (or illegal drugs, obviously) is a fantastic fertilizer. There are studies showing that fertilizing tomato plants with diluted human urine can increase yields significantly, somewhere in the area of 50% or more. Guys, peeing on your compost pile not only adds nutrients that that the beneficial bacteria in the pile use, it also adds nutrients to the finished compost. Ladies have found various solutions to help with this process as well.

I think, oftentimes, composting is looked at as a method to dispose of scraps, and that's all. However, by investing a little more time and attention in composting, you will also create the perfect soil conditioner for your garden, fertilizing and improving soil tilth at once. And it doesn't have to cost you a dime.