Compost: Secret to Food Growing Success!

Mother Earth News confirms what I’ve suspected since I started composting around 10 years ago: When it comes to fertilizer, compost is at the top of the list!  In “Best Organic Fertilizers” (April/May 2017 issue), the magazine discusses all kinds of fertilizers and soil amendments, and the pros and cons...but Mother Nature does it best. For a fertile, productive garden, you don’t need to buy anything; you can make compost at home, for free, with material right from your own kitchen and backyard.

Now that spring is officially here, and your ground is either starting to thaw or already workable, it’s a great time to start a compost pile. There are lots of different ways to go about it. Some gardeners go at the process scientifically; in the book, Gardening When it Counts, author Steve Solomon outlines the precise ratio of carbon to nitrogen-containing materials for optimal compost. Upon reading Solomon’s discussion, I got kinda intimidated—you know that feeling of You’re Doing it Wrong. (A sidebar: I did learn from him that sawdust isn’t the best component—too much carbon. Once I stopped putting sawdust in my pile, my garden’s fertility improved.)

Anyway, you can create your compost in a bin, a hole, a trench, or buy a fancy compost container at your local gardening supply store. I keep my process super basic and not terribly scientific. I dig a wide, shallow hole, about 3-4 feet by 3-4 feet and about 18 inches deep—it’s sort of more like a wide trench. Into the trench goes a bucket of soil, as weed-free and rock-free as you can make it, a bucket of kitchen scraps like raw veggie peelings, apple cores, eggshells and coffee grounds, which provides the nitrogen, and a bucket of dead leaves or other dry leafy material, which provides the carbon. Mix/turn well, keep moist, and let nature do its magic. Every time I add food scraps to the pile, I also add dead leaves or other dry foliage from around the yard.

The secret is in a couple of things: keep your scraps and peelings fairly small, and turn your pile often and well! If you don’t turn it, you won’t get enough oxygen into the pile, and it will soon get a very sour smell, and the scraps take longer to decompose. Turning frequently to speed the breakdown of the scraps also deters rodents and neighbor dogs!

In terms of kitchen scraps and other high-nitrogen materials beyond fruit and veggie material, some gardeners might add grass clippings (as long as you don’t use Weed n’ Feed on your lawn). Others hold the everything and the kitchen sink and beyond philosophy, tossing in stuff like hair clippings, weeds, and newspaper. 

Not me. For one thing, hair’s just gross. And human hair might contain sulfate residues from shampoo. Newspaper? Well, there’s all the ink. I don’t know what’s in it and what I don’t know might hurt my pile. Weeds? Weeds are survivors that can grow through the cruelest winter, through drought,  and basically through thick and thin. I don’t trust the deadest of weeds not to germinate their seeds in my compost. Watch the leftovers you put in too. Maybe some dry toast or something, but material with fat/oil/meat or dairy in your pile messes up the decomposition process. And bits of cooked food will be an open invitation to rats, raccoons, and other critters!  

When we had chickens, I kept a separate chicken manure compost pile, because manure takes longer to break down to safely use on a garden bed. I mixed the manure with sawdust—it’s so high in nitrogen that sawdust is more than equal to the carbon-supplying job. After letting the manure/sawdust sit for 6 months, I would spread it on our asparagus beds in late fall…plenty of time for the manure to decompose before the spring harvest.

Next month, on Earth Day, I'll be teaching "Grow a Homestead-Style Food Garden" at Whatcom Community College. In the class, we'll be discussing compost, sustainable gardening, and much more! 

And if you have any secrets to great compost, please share them here!