The Compost Project

Compost is the mother’s milk of gardening.

Good compost just has that “smell of the earth”; that great aroma that makes plants want to grow just because of the smell. You know how the aroma just lifts you up when you walk into a bakery and smell all those fresh baked goodies? I think the compost pile is the bakery of the plant world. Open up the pile and you can hear the plants saying, “Ummm, that smell good.”

Compost has many benefits.

Compost has several advantages in your garden.

• It is one of the best fertilizers for your vegetable garden
• It improves the soil – adding organic matter – giving the soil better water holding capacity and structure
• The rich dark color just looks good against the fresh green plants. It’s pretty.

Compost gardening has problems too.

I’ve been using the Ruth Stout “no dig” approach to gardening for several years now. With this method of gardening you bury the ground under huge loads of mulch, and plant into the mulch. This works great for transplants – you can just pull back the mulch and make a hole in the ground for the plant, then put the mulch back around the plant. Works pretty nice.

But you don’t always transplant plants into your garden. You often plant seeds. Tossing a bunch of seed out on top of a pile of grass clippings and covering them with more grass clippings just doesn’t work so great. You need a more suitable growing medium to plant seeds into. Compost is ideal for this.

But that requires a lot of compost.

If you’ve ever built a compost pile for your garden waste, you know a good sized pile “cooks” down into a fairly small amount of finished compost. It won’t yield enough to plant a large garden.

You can buy compost by the bag at your local garden center. This can get expensive fast.

The solution – build a huge compost heap.

Last winter we had several trees removed from our yard. Most of the limbs went into a monster grinding machine. I had the two truck loads of wood chips dumped beside my garden plot. I intended to just spread them out for mulch. I’ve decided to use them in a super compost pile instead.

I use a Cyclone Rake vacuum attachment on my riding mower. I get a lot of grass clippings with this thing.

So I’m building a huge grass clipping/wood chip compost heap. I alternate several inches of wood chips then several inches of grass clippings.

I have enough chips and a seemingly endless supply of grass clippings, so I’ll probably build a couple of piles. I may even turn the piles a couple of times this summer.

Hopefully by fall I’ll have a nice supply of compost.

Tagged as: agriculture, compost, compost garden, compost heap, compost pile, composting, garden, home composting, leaf mold, mulch, no-dig gardening, organic gardening, plant seeds, sustainability, vegetable garden