Make Compost for the Garden

Compost is an often heard buzzword right now, but if you’re into organic gardening the way I am, it’s probably been in your vocabulary a long time!

Simple compost bins made from stucco wire

Composting can be as simple as a pile of leaves, grass clippings, prunings from your perennials, weeds, kitchen waste and maybe some animal manure hidden behind a shrub in the corner of your garden. If you want to get more complicated, build yourself a wooden bin, and get the same results in a more aesthetically pleasing manner.

Another low cost option is to bury your compost right in the garden bed you want to improve.

I make temporary moveable bins with stucco wire (see picture). I fill them with anything I can beg, borrow or grow, add a little garden soil to inoculate it with micro-organisms and, if I’m in a hurry, turn the mixture a couple of times a year until it’s pretty well homogenously rotted down. Sometimes you can still tell what some of the material was, such as leaves, corn cobs or sticks; if you want you can sift the larger pieces out. Use the finer stuff for potting soil or to build up the soil in a bed of perennials or annuals, or use as mulch around individual plants for a concentrated hit of special nutrients.

I try and mix whatever I can find: leaves that I rake with friends, grass clippings that I (gladly!) take away to reduce a neighbour's fire hazard, horse or rabbit manure free for the hauling. I also collect potato peelings, coffee grounds, rotten carrots or salad bits and any other organic matter from the kitchen and add those. Using as many different materials as possible adds to the complex combination of minerals and micronutrients available to plants once the compost is added to the soil. Trees bring up nutrients from far below the soil surface, making the compost you get from their leaves rich in nutrients usually not available at the surface.

I take some worms from one pile and move them into a new bin to start a new colony. Don't worry, they won't hurt you when you pick them up, but you might hurt them - our skin secretions have an acid base. The best worms are red wigglers, dark red in colour, and prolific in a hot compost pile. Handle them with care, and apologize for disturbing them! The grey ones that you find in a garden bed are only happy in a colder soil, and will die off in a rapidly heating bin.

At the moment I have 8 bins on the go! In the fall I always procrastinate about raking leaves until it’s too late and the snow comes and covers them up. So this year I made sure that I arranged to collect lots of them. You can never have too much compost; in fact, in my book, (and garden!) you can never have enough!