A Post on Compost

Oct
26
2008

A Post on Compost

As Dan and I were trying to come up with ideas for this blog he said, “we can always post about compost.” Surprisingly enough compost is a tricky thing and one that is continual work on our small urban farm. All the books about gardening make it sound so simply – pile your organic matter and wait until next year and you’ll have great compost for your garden. Despite this relatively easy concept we’ve had to learn some things the hard way. For example weeds can’t go in compost or else you’ll just spread your weed problem in your garden beds. Also the bins need to be in direct sunlight at some point in the day (at least in Seattle) in order to break down stuff in a reasonable amount of time. For some reason it also took us awhile to realize we need two compost bins/piles so one can rest while you add new matter to the other. When we bought our bins from the city of Oakland them came with an instructional video (called Do The Rot Thing – seriously) which gave us some good basics, but we had to learn the hard way thateucalyptus leaves and palm fronds are too woody to break down. The hard part has been how to get our compost to break down and be ready in a year. I am sure some of our failed compost piles would have worked eventually, but its not much good if it takes more than a year. The addition of the chickens has helps since they sort of pre-process our food scraps. Now we’re in the season of brown matter (i.e. fallen leaves) which will help balance out our very wet matter we have in there now (thanks to our apple pressing remains from a week ago). Plus we have a completed pile resting (or cooking) for the winter which looks like its going to be ready to add come early spring. Hopefully we’ve gotten a good enough system down by now. There is always more to learn, but yesterday Dan stirred the compost and got a beautiful sight – steam rising, which I think means we’re on the right track.