Photo credit:
cafemama, flickr
Yep, a pile of food scraps and leaves can help save the earth! Composting is a great way to create fabulous soil AND repurpose your heap of table scraps, leaves, and garden clippings. While saving the earth, of course. Spandex and cape, anyone?
The more compost you make, the better for your garden, but even if you live in an apartment and your horticultural efforts are limited to a window box and some potted plants you can make compost. You can make it in a garbage can on the balcony, or in plastic bags that you store in the closet next to your Uggs and Crocs Prada. It's really a matter of scale.
I have plenty of room so I use a three bin method. Composting is all about decomposition, returning organic stuff like leaves and lawn clippings, egg shells and vegetable peelings to the soil. Caveat: don't try to compost meat trimmings or animal fat. Flies will come and you'll soon have maggots. Also you won't like the smell—phew!
Put your raw material in bin one, wet it down, and turn it over every few weeks. If you have some horse manure or goat poop or other high nitrogen fertilizer to add, so much the better. When the stuff in the bottom of bin one doesn't much resemble the original cabbage leaves and grass clippings you started with, transfer it to bin two and turn it over every week or so. When it's humus, shovel it into bin three for storage until you're ready to top dress your flower bed. You'll know it's humus when it's turned uniformly dark, when it's fairly odor-free and smells like the forest floor, and when a handful feels spongy.
Photo credit: Anne Norman
How we can green our Summer
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composting has other benefits too. at our cottage, we find all sorts of things that grow from under the compost bin. we had some wonderful squash one year - that we actually had for our thanksgiving dinner (thanksgiving in canada is in mid-october).
in toronto, the city actually picks up our compost each week from the curbside. they then provide composted soil back to us in the spring at many local pick-up spots. the advantage of this method is that you can actually put in lots more stuff into the bins, including meat and animal waste.
In Madison we have a similar arrangement. The city picks up autumn leaves and composts them. They also pick up branches and run them through a chipper. The latter makes great mulch, and the former really enriches the garden soil!
If zoning allows in your area, consider getting yourself some chickens. Not only is it quite nice to have the egg cartons in the fridge on auto-fill every morning, but chicken litter from the roost house speeds compost heating enormously. (Raw chicken poo is very strong, don't put it directly on your plants.) I find a 1 foot litter of barn hay in the roost house cleaned it out about every 3-4 weeks.has just the right carbon/nitrogen ratio to heat the compost bins right up. Remember, don't put raw compost on veggies within 90 days of harvest. It's usually a bad idea to try to compost weed waste. Unless you can cook the compost at a pretty high heat, the weed seeds will just hang around and appear wherever you put the finished compost. We also do not compost tomato or potato vines. They both have a tendency to fungus. Should that occur, I don't want to take a chance on spreading it into other beds with the compost. Remember, manure is not all the same. Chicken manure is very high in nitrogen. Steer manure has very little. It adds good organic matter but doesn't contribute much nitrogen.
Once my daughter told me she screened her compost. She's a compost queen so I tried it. Good Grief. By the time I'd rubbed a handful of compost through, the screen was just covered with nasty little pieces of poor innocent earthworms. Reminded me of the frog in the blender joke.
I don't do that anymore. I don't mind if there are still clumps in the compost. I suppose if one were using it for container gardening, it would be a good thing to have it uniform, but since I'm dumping it in a field, I'd rather save the worms and the trouble.