Getting the Dirt on Compost

What is going on at Heart's Ease Cottage today? The dirty business of compost. Now that the garden centers are filling up with bedding plants and I have grown seedlings up to planting size, my thoughts turn to compost. Before we plant anything in our veg garden or landscaping we always give the soil a snack of compost. This helps to draw the earthworms to the soil surface to aerate the soil and drag down all the nutrients to give newly set plants some easy to reach nutrients.

We do compost three ways, passive, more passive and very passive. We do not turn or fuss with the compost pile, that job belongs to the microbes, mycelium and earthworms. There are way too many other things to do to spend much time pampering the compost pile! We have rich black compost, full of earthworms and friable dark soil in the gardens, so for us passive composting works just fine! The key is patience. With time the earth will works it's wonders and will provide beautiful, earthworm filled compost, so that you can give your garden all it needs to grown healthy, nutritious food. Our soil is so rich that it has been years since we have added and manure to our established beds. New beds of course, need a little help since the soil is not conditioned yet. My husband jokes that he is literally farming dirt. We introduce so much compost to our garden beds that they need to be carved down  periodically and the soil moved elsewhere.

For our passive vegetable garden compost pile we build a cinder block box on the ground, and start putting in kitchen scraps and grass clippings. I am vegan (really "plant based" not vegan, since I eat honey...) so we put all our kitchen scraps, including prepared foods that have gone south in the fridge in the passive compost pile since there are no animal products prepared in our home. If your prepared food contains animal products, don't put prepared foods in the compost. It will draw vermin. Once there is a nice thick layer of kitchen scraps, etc in the compost bin we toss a layer of soil from a dirt pile we keep close by on the scraps to keep down the smell.

This is our recently built veg garden compost pile. The layer of scraps was covered
with a little dirt after this photo to keep the odor down and discourage flying insects.

Since we produce so many veg and fruit scraps from what we consume daily, it pretty much gets covered every day or two. We don't put leaves in this compost because the majority of the tree we have in the yard are Shingle Oaks and their thin waxy leaves don't break down fast enough to suit me. We save or leaves for our  "very passive" compost. As the layers of kitchen scraps and soil grow we add rows of blocks to our compost pile. When it reaches about 4 feet high, we cover the top of the pile with a tarp to keep the rain from leaching out the nutrients. In a week or so the top layer of scraps will be consumed by the earthworms and the pile is ready for use to top dress our vegetable beds.

This is a finished compost bin. It is built into a slope so the front is short
 but the body of the bin is 4 ft. deep.

This is a spade full of finished compost right before it was tarped. The very top
layer still has some carrot pulp that has not been processed though the worms yet
 but give it a week and these little garden helpers will have broken it all down.
I sometimes feel like we are a worm farm... no matter where in the pile you
dig you will find more worms that dirt!

Then we start another pile. We move these piles around the garden since the soil underneath a compost pile becomes very fertile. This way we feed the ground while making compost to feed more ground.

The "more passive" composting is done in the pathways between the between our French Intensive Raised Beds. We double dig our raised beds to about 18" and remove the soil.We then use a pitchfork to break up the soil at the bottom to another foot. after which we amend the removed soil with manure, peat, sand and compost (for newly formed beds) and put the soil back in the beds.

We doubled the size of our garden this year, so this is soil has not been amended yet.
Still Waters is digging pathways adding the soil from the paths to the beds and then
he will amend the newly dug beds with copious quantities of compost
and some peat, sand and manure.

Here are some of the amended beds before the mulch is brought in. The mulch
will reach to just below the tops of the beds once it settles.

These beds are NEVER walked on so there is no soil compression and the roots of the plants can go deep and the plants can be set much closer together. We also do not till after the initial establishment of the beds so that the network of mycelium and other soil life is not disturbed, Then we dig the pathways down a 12 to 18" amend it and add it to the raised beds. At this point we start our More Passive compost by bringing in coarse wood mulch to fill the paths to a few inches below the tops of the raised beds. The wood mulch breaks down over time to become dark, loamy organic matter that we dig out more or less every three years and add to the raised beds. then we refill the beds with coarse wood mulch and the process begins again.

The mulch goes in and will take a few weeks to settle into place ending
up just slightly below the soil level. The mulch in the paths serves several purposes.
 It is a passive form of composting, but it also keeps the beds from swamping in the summer deluges
that we get here in the south. The organic matter in the compost retains just enough water to feed the
plants; the remainder seeps out of the soil into the mulch pathways and then into a network of
catch basins and plastic pipe that is laid in the pathways under the mulch to take excess moisture to the woods.

The new beds and the pathways between them are now ready for spring!

Over the years we have made friends with tree trimming companies that will text us when they are working nearby to see if we want a dump truck load of mulch. Which really helps cut the cost of our process, but sometimes we do have to buy mulch. When we do, we buy it by the 25 cubic yard dumper from a company that doesn't treat or dye the mulch. This year we actually had to buy two 25 cubic yards of mulch, but that was because we doubled the size of our veg garden. The expansion includes 12 new 3' x 25' beds plus an expanded growing area for perennial vegetables and medicinal herbs. This gives us a total of 24 3'x 25' beds and 3 foot wide paths between the beds with a 4' set of center paths that breaks the garden into four equal sections. This makes rotating the crops much easier.

Our last composting method has been dubbed Very Passive Composting. This compost pile has been in the works since 1989 when Hurricane Hugo played Pick Up Sticks with the trees on our land. We started dragging tree branches and rolling snapped off and splintered tree trunks into a depression in the woods. In subsequent years we hauled tarps full of fall leaves back there and dumped them on the pile of downed tree debris. Ice storms and tornadoes added to the mounting pile of wood back in the woods. We have continued to drag and dump all of our tree debris and leaves for 30 years. The pile is now a land mass.... about 30 feet long, 20 feet wide and in places 10 or more feet deep.

This is a view of the back of the Very Passive compost pile.
 It is at least 10 feet deep, probably more.

Here is a view of part of the top of the pile.

The pile has grown huge and then broken down over and over until it is mostly black soil all the way to the bottom of the pile.

This compost is like black gold. Soft, friable and full of life.

We use this compost for dressing around our landscaping and for filling in and leveling places in the yard. We don't usually use this in the veg garden simply because we don't need it there. We produce so much kitchen compost that we usually use that to feed the vegetable garden and leave the other for "terra-forming" projects and landscaping.

So in a nutshell, composting requires very little work and a provides a whole lot of benefit to both food gardens and ornamental gardens and landscaping. There are other kinds of composting but these have worked out best for us. What kind of composting do you use? Please feel free to share your experiences and techniques!