When I told my husband I was going to start a compost pile, he said, “But we don’t have a bin.” I told him I was going “old school” with my compost and making a true pile. (Hey – it worked for dad for DECADES and he was famous for the size and deliciousness of the tomatoes he grew with that compost…Who am I to mess with a proven method???).
So after doing a little
reading from such things as A Simple Guide to Composting in your
Backyard (and peeking at a few websites), I fearlessly set out to
build my pile of gardening goodness.
Down went a layer of dried
leaves (this is the brown material with lots of carbon). Now we are surrounded
by oaks and their leaves can be a little harder to break down, so I went at
them with hedge clippers (it is all
about making do with what you have on hand) to break them up and aid in their
decomposition.
Next a layer of scrumptious
veggie and fruit waste (those old carrots and grapes hiding in the back of the
refrigerator and…well, you know where that is going…). It is a good idea to have a kitchen container
to keep your veggie/fruit scraps in but on days you are cleaning out the
refrigerator (as I was today) you can just take the stuff right out to the
compost pile and bury it. Rotten fruit and veggies may not be appetizing to you,
but your compost pile LOVES them since they provide the green (nitrogen-laden)
layer.
Bury it? Yes, after the
veggie layer came a nice layer of dirt. It helps to keep the garden critters
(bunnies and raccoons) from foraging in your compost for some tasty tidbits. Plus
there are fun microorganisms in the dirt which help the composting
process. And this was topped with yet
another layer of hedge-clipped oak leaves. A little sprinkle of water (the pile
is supposed to be as damp as wrung-out sponge, so I just used a little water to
hold down the top layer of leaves).
Voila! A Compost Pile!
