Anyone with an interest in gardening sooner or later begins weighing the pros and cons of maintaining a compost pile.\
Compost is an imprecise mix of nitrogen-rich green material (such as vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, tea, flowers, leaves, and freshly mown grass) and carbon-rich organic material (including straw, dry grass clippings, shredded newspaper, cardboard, brown wrapping paper, and dry fall leaves).
Left more or less to its own devices, a pile of these waste materials will eventually turn into rich soil – or possibly into a big pile of unappealing goop. With modest effort, a gardener can ensure that he or she produces the good stuff, not the goop.
Compost is great for improving the soil quality of one's yard and gardens so that plants of all kinds will thrive. Leftover organic material from around the property gets recycled to contribute to another season of growth. The compost pile helps keep costs down because there's little-to-nothing one has to buy in the way of soil nutrients. And the end product, particularly in the form of healthy vegetables, saves money for a good part of the year.
All in all, composting produces such an irresistible package of good outcomes for the backyard gardener that it's no wonder a lot of gardeners eventually get around to creating a composting setup.
Breaking down steps
The rough composting process is this: starting with a base of leaves or branches or brush or straw, layer in organic materials like food scrap. Mix the contents every couple of weeks or so using a pitchfork (absolutely the tool of choice for composting). Worms, fungi, and bacteria do their part in breaking up and converting the material, and the pile gets smaller as it decomposes, so add more material over time. After six months, give or take, the compost is
ready.
Compost piles have a rep for being a bit stinky as nature goes about its business reducing organic materials to their component chemicals, but actually it's pretty much a non-issue. Using manure in the compost is typically one of the culprits. Other causes are an imbalance in the materials used in the compost heap, or not turning the pile periodically so air can do its thing.
Composting is something of a tinkerer's delight. One can carry out the process with the precision of a laboratory scientist, or be positively slapdash in one's approach.
Cindy Haines is on her third compost bin since she and her husband Sig bought their house in Fairhaven twenty-five years ago.
Cindy is a passionate and thoughtful gardener, and her garden is well-known throughout the town. Her composting bin gets the attention it needs, and she has plastic garbage cans full of "brown gold" to attest to the effectiveness of her method, but she doesn't obsess over the details. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist at all. Nature just does it," she says. "You can get very technical and scientific. I don't."
She enthuses, "It's absolutely the best thing you can do for a garden."
Cindy has what she describes as a normal, mid-sized back yard, about forty feet by fifty feet, pretty much equally divided between vegetable and flower beds. "I don't like grass," she notes.
In the middle of the yard stands a small greenhouse where, along with tools and early season potted plants, sits a well-used copy of the 1970s classic, Crockett's Victory Garden, which serves as her gardening bible (although she says "Crockett gets into very scientific stuff"), and note cards detailing soil formulations for British gardener Christopher Lloyd's basic potting mix and Great Dixter Soil.
Her compost bin is made of lumber and chicken wire, about ten feet long, and divided into three-by-three-foot bins. Starting out in the first bin, along with yard waste she throws in kitchen waste including banana peels, lint from the dryer, potato peels, and eggshells. "No meat," she warns. "Meat attracts animals. We don’t had any problems with animals if we don't put any meat in there."
The material in the first bin will over-winter there, but in March Sig will pitchfork it into the second bin. When Cindy looks it over after another couple of months, it gets pitchforked into the last bin for its final decomposition into soil. "You know it's done when it's rich, rich brown and friable," Cindy explains, meaning nicely crumbly. I sniff a handful of the finished product; it's neutral, almost sweet-smelling. "It will never burn your plants," she notes.
Rain and heat help the piles decompose. In summer, the process can take as little as six weeks, so there's a regular supply of new soil.
Once the compost is deemed finished, Sig sifts out the twigs and chunks over a wheelbarrow, after which it is stored in the trash cans.
She tops off her eight four-by-eight-foot raised vegetable beds with compost and works it into the top four inches of the soil.
In spring she starts with peas, radishes, bibb lettuce, Swiss Chard, and spinach. About mid-May, she plants the warm weather vegetables: squash, cantaloupe, tomatoes, zucchini, onions, leeks potatoes and beans – wax beans, pole beans, green bush beans. "The nice thing about growing your own beans is that so many other kinds that are much better tasting. And you can pick them when they're small, when they're more tender."
Her herb garden, which separates the vegetables from the flowers, includes thyme, oregano, parsley, chives, rosemary, and sage. "I do not have to go into the produce section of a grocery store from May through October," Cindy says.
Gaining Experience
"If you have something growing outside your house, compost is only going to help it," says Laurie Hellstrom, a member of the Fairhaven Sustainability Committee and the Fairhaven Community Garden (www.FairhavenCommunityGarden.org).
The Fairhaven Community Garden has arranged for garden space to be set aside at three town schools, where participants of all ages can learn about agriculture and grow their own vegetables.
Her own compost pile works along the same lines as Cindy Haines'. She keeps a covered container in her kitchen for fruit and vegetable scraps, which she dumps onto the compost every couple of days.
She also stockpiles leaves to put on top of the kitchen scraps. Her husband turns the whole pile once or twice a year, "which exposes it to air and water so it doesn't dry out or not get oxygen," she says.
Laurie has a thousand square feet of vegetables, among them garlic, beets, over-wintered leeks and perennial onions, eggplant, and kale in summer. "Anything I grow for a two-dollar pack of seeds saves a lot of money," she says.
Rough-and-Ready Composting
The Dartmouth YMCA operates the Harvest Community Farm, which relies on volunteers to work the fields. For the volunteers, it's an education in agriculture and nutrition, and anyone interested in composting can pick up tips in their program.
Farm director Dan King maintains two composting setups, a rough-and-ready composting operation, and a lumber and chicken wire bin similar to Cindy Haines'.
"Our compost is a byproduct of our operation," Dan says. It is used primarily as rich backfill when one of the nearly infinite number of rocks typically found on New England farmland is removed from the field.
The bulk composting heap consists of two six-foot piles of materials that make use of the field waste from the 4.5 acres of fields. Weeds, soft and squishy rotten vegetables, and plants that didn't make it get thrown onto the piles, though care is taken to avoid diseased tomatoes and such that might breed pathogens.
Periodically, Dan's volunteers take the temperature of the big piles to be sure they're heating up internally, and the piles are turned occasionally to prevent weeds from getting a grip, but otherwise they don't get a lot of attention. "It's a low-cost, no-cost solution. It has no downside," Dan notes.
The upside of the program that composting supports is tremendous. The food produced (92,000 pounds in the most recent year) supports the Hunger Commission of Southeastern Massachusetts, a United Way program.
Choosing a Composter
Low-cost, utilitarian composters have been featured in this article, but there are units that may be better suited to small urban and suburban composting setups.
A composter is simply some sort of bin to keep the compost tidy and operating efficiently. There are many styles you can buy at garden stores or nurseries.
There are kitchen-appropriate units, models made from recycled plastic or stainless steel, bins intended for hosting worms, rotating bins that make it easy and convenient to remove the finished compost.
Popular recycled plastic models that can be turned by hand cost about $250-300 depending on size, says Rachael Gibson at Agway of Cape Cod in Orleans.
Doing one's own composting sparks an inordinate level of satisfaction in gardeners who have integrated it into their gardening agendas. It's a link that ties one growing cycle to future growing cycles, all generated in one's own back yard. As Laurie Hellstrom says, "When you use your own compost, it's kind of cool. It's win-win."