Composting: The Joy of Good Dirt

The lengthy cold snap through which much of the country has been struggling appears to have lifted. Although it's only January, the slightly warmer temperatures and sunshine are making a lot of people think about their spring gardens. Along with laying out your beds and day dreaming about fresh garden peas, give some thought to composting. If you aren't composting, you should be. Composting diverts a lot of waste out of the landfill and improves your soil. Good soil is the foundation upon which successful gardens are built. If you are composting, are you doing it as fully and with as much variety as you could be?

Several months ago I attended the 2009 Heritage Harvest Festival, which was held at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had the pleasure of listening to Barbara Pleasant, staff writer for Mother Earth News, give a talk on composting. Ms. Pleasant is clearly very passionate about composting and I was impressed with the wide range of methods she used to create healthy soil.

Ms. Pleasant pointed out that when you use purchased compost you run the risk of introducing herbicides into your garden. There are numerous easy ways of composting that you may not have considered. Sheet composting, for example, requires no great effort. Using cardboard and sheets of newspaper, leaves, grass, and other organic material, you create layers of material, which are left to decompose. Sheet composting takes time but very little effort. If you have designs on a particular area of your lawn, you can layer your sheet compost right on top of the sod, piling it several inches deep. After several months, your compost materials will be decomposed, as will the sod below. Dig it all under and you're ready to go. While you are planning what to put into this year's beds, figure out where you would like to expand and start sheet composting in those areas. By this time next year, the new beds will be covered with lovely organic material and ready to dig.

Here are some other tips from Ms. Pleasant for easy composting:

When you weed your beds, throw the material into the pathways. All spring, summer and fall, continue to walk on and throw your weeds into the paths. When you clean your beds in the winter, rake the layers of material in the walkway back into the beds as winter mulch. No need to haul the weeds to another area to compost them and then haul the compost back again. That's pretty smart!

If you have piles of leaves to deal with, run your lawn mower back and forth over them to break them down. Leaves treated in this manner decompose faster than leaves left to decompose whole. Rake the pile of broken down leaves into a heap and put a soaker hose on it. Again, damp leaves decompose faster than dry ones.

Make use of your compost pile by planting directly into it. Growing legumes in your compost pile will help to fix nitrogen. Squash also grows readily in a compost pile. In this way, your compost pile is working for you and does not represent lost garden space. Stick your plants in the sides of your heap and you can continue to pile new material on top.

Pressed for space in which to compost? Ms. Pleasant suggests composting around the edges of your lawn. You’ll kill the grass, produce good compost and create border in which to garden without having to dig them.

In a very clever compost/garden idea, Ms. Pleasant completely covered a section of unbroken lawn with bales of hay, cut side down, creating a solid rectangle of hay bales. She watered the hay bales with as much water as they would hold, cut some holes in the hay, filled them with compost and planted crops right in the holes. This created a raised bed. As the bales broke down, she surrounded them with cardboard to hold them together. She replanted in her hay bed and the hay and cardboard continued to break down and the lawn underneath died and decomposed. Ultimately she was left with a new, very well-mulched garden bed without have had to break any sod.

Ms Pleasant was all about easy composting. She pointed out that most people compost using a commercial model, which is not appropriate at home. She stressed that we shouldn't be worrying so much about carbon/nitrogen ratios and that, unless you have a known problem, you don't have to heat your heap in order to kill pathogens. If you know you have problems, she suggests using a solar cooker to heat the compost. Remember that "cooking" compost will also kill good things and she suggests adding your cooked compost in stages to your worm bin before using it in your garden.

Encouraging us to use what we have, Ms. Pleasant composts her junk mail and uses brambles and sticks to form frames for her compost heaps.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and find something to compost!

Ms. Pleasant is a gardener, a writer and a composter who makes her home just up the road in Floyd, Virginia. Get to know her at http://www.barbarapleasant.com . Make plans to attend the 2010 Heritage Harvest Festival on September 11. They hold it up on top of beautiful Mont Alto and it is well worth your time!