Composting

Turn Your Kitchen Scraps
into Black Gold

My Dad was the main gardener in our family. He came from a long line of country folk, having been born and raised in Yorkshire, England where composting is a fact of life when raising award winning cabbages and parsnips.

His family grew a beautiful lush garden, and whenever we would visit, even as a young child, I was fascinated.

It was so neat and tidy, with beds of rhubarb, vegetable marrow and potatoes and other plants as yet unknown.

I grew up to have this picture in my mind of how a garden should look, based on this.

It was only much later that I learned the magic alchemy of composting which transforms kitchen scraps and garden waste into precious black gold.

When I first started to get interested in how to make compost my first efforts were fairly unsophisticated.

At one point, I simply placed several concrete blocks to make a square right in the middle of the lawn.

This worked, until we had a rainy spell and the decomposing and rotting stuff became riddled with large black slugs. I got ducks.

I raised chickens that were free range for most of the day.

I sent my two young daughters out with the salt shaker and rubber boots whenever it rained.

I carried a sharp stick with me wherever I went.

Eventually, the slugs were under control, and I needed a much bigger compost pile.

Experimenting with different vermin proof containers, boards and small compost piles went by the wayside when I moved to a farm in the Chilcotin, got horses and ran a small restaurant.

You won’t believe how much manure one horse will produce, and when you have eleven of them...well, I leave it to your imagination.

The café provided vegetable peelings and coffee grounds galore. Shoveling and raking became an everyday affair, and mixing the compost to get it to rot down required a skid steer loader.

I had tons of the finished compost – it was magnificent!

I’ve since moved to several different places, each time getting more experience in compost making and composting with worms.

Find Some of These Composting Materials

• well rotted sawdust, as that’s a valuable addition, especially after it’s been used in a chicken house or to cover paths. Fresh sawdust will take a long time to rot down and also rob the pile of nitrogen, so use it in small amounts only.
  

• Old straw or hay is good too, although sometimes it carries weed seeds. Add this to your chicken pen so the birds can have access to the sprouting weeds, and they begin the process of breaking down the fibres by scratching in it to search for edible bits.

• I add plenty of horse manure from a neighbors loafing shed…

• and lots of fall leaves raked from the gardens of friends.

• I occasionally buy a bag or two of chicken manure or steer manure that is pasteurized, and either add it to the compost, spread it on the vegetable garden or make compost tea out of it.

• I also add a couple of shovels of sandy soil from my garden or vermicompost to inoculate the soil with soil-organisms native to the area.

• I may add wood ashes from the fireplace occasionally, and sometimes dolomite lime, depending on what's available and if the pile is slower to heat up than I like. Both of these ingredients will change the pH of the compost making acidic materials such as pine needles more neutral.

• Glacial rock dust is a good additive for boosting the growth of the micro herd, as well as adding micro nutrients that may not be present in your soil.

Be prepared for quite an odor at times. The compost tea option is best if this is a concern; keep the lid on your garbage can while it steeps.

If the smell is like rotten eggs, this indicates that the pile is too wet. Mix it with a pitchfork to add air to the pile, or add some more dry ingredients and off it will go again.

If the pile is just sitting there, with no activity, it may be too dry. Either water it, or save your tea or coffee to add to it, or sprinkle with compost tea to get it started again.

The heat produced by a working healthy compost pile is quite impressive. This is the heat given off from the billions of tiny animals, fungi, bacteria, and other microfauna in their biological processes.

I once gardened in a very cold climate, and mixed horse manure, aged sawdust and raked leaves together, and since I had a bag of flour and a bag of chicken feed that had got wet and gone moldy, I layered those to the pile too. Even in -35 degree Celsius temperatures, the steam would come off that pile in clouds.

You could heat a greenhouse with this, if you had the set up. I've used this technique to build a hot bed with hay bales, covered with a couple of old windows, with a sheet of plastic over all. It's worked quite well, producing some Chinese greens and salads for a number of weeks before the ground outside was even thawed.

The finished compost you’ll produce is usually odourless, and most of the components will have broken down a lot, although you may still have some identifiable parts such as twigs or corncobs. Simply throw these back in to rot down some more with the next batch.

I guarantee you won’t be able to stop at one batch; compost making is very addictive. Make sure you hold back a little of each batch to inoculate the next one with those beneficial little critters that dwell in the millions in well made compost.

Use the friable dark coloured compost

• as mulch,

• sieve it for a seed starting mix,

• for mixing with a commercial potting soil to make your own special transplanting soil, or

• to mix into your garden beds.

However you use it, your garden will thrive with the added nutrients, micorrhizae and microflora you introduce along with it, not to mention how much fun the gardener will have. It’s an endlessly fascinating science experiment to find the most efficient and nutritious compost magically transformed from what is essentially garbage. How great is that?

go to Drought Smart Plants home page

Sustainable Gardening

Compost Activators

Compost Tea

Chicken House Compost

Chicken Pen Compost

Vermicomposting

Worm Farming