Composting for a better garden

Compost. It's literally fuel for your garden. It's nature's way of fertilizing the soil and the plants grown in it. We do buy compost here, but we also try to make some of it ourselves. We take our kitchen scraps from the week, usually about half a five gallon bucket worth, and distribute that over our heap. These are just vegetables. There are no egg shells, no bones, no meat scraps. Just veggie scraps and spent garden waste. We do try to keep weed seeds out of it, but there's not much we can do about that. We also keep any diseased plants we might have out of the mix as well. This year we had a terrible time with powdery mildew on our strawberries. So we just bagged all the foliage up and tossed it in the trash.

This is our bucket from just Saturday. We keep a lid on the bucket during the week. after we dump it on Friday, we rinse it out and let it dry overnight. This keeps the bucket from getting too gross and smelly.

I went ahead and tossed these scraps onto the pile which looks like this.

The left pile is our working compost where we add new material. The right pile is our finishing compost that has been sitting there for a few months and is breaking down slowly over time. We will be using that for a top dressing of our beds and then supplementing the rest with store bought compost.

As we add all the fresh scraps, coffee grounds, and garden waste, we also mix in old leaves and some cardboard. These are browns where the fresh stuff are greens. You need the mix so that your compost can work, heat up, and break down. We also try to turn the piles every two weeks. If its been dry, we water it.

Although we have been doing this, our compost here doesn't seem to get hot enough. So we do have some more learning to do! I will say the compost we have added to the garden last year has made our soil nice and lofty, very easy to dig and plant into. So, if you haven't yet, give composting a try! It will reduce your need to buy it at the store and will keep all those useful scraps from going to the landfill. Happy gardening!

~Everbearing Farm