COMPOST PILES

To the right of this garden spot is my composte pile. Volunteers from seeds in some of the discarded vegetables I threw on bear witness to the richness of the soil underneath.

There were several things wrong with the way I started this compost heap. First thing is that it is too close to a wooden fence and the side of my house. Compost piles add nutrition to your soil building good, nutrient rich, black, loamy soil year by year. However, they can start fires by self igniting. After this picture I moved it away from the wall by several feet. I had never considered a fire but my daughter-in-law advised me that she had started her compost heap using grass obtained from mowing their yard. Grass in small quantities will not burn. However, in larger quatities the Nitrogen rich grass will heat up. Oddly enough the more you water it to keep it damp the greater the danger. The microbes causing the grass to decay will generate heat. She had walked outside one day and her compost pile was smoking. So...if you use grass, use it sparingly.

The compost pile in the picture was full of old plants from last year's garden. It's best on vines or vegetable plants with thick stalks to cut them into 12 inch or less lengths. That will speed up the process. Natural microbes in the soil will attack the plant refuse and multiply. Over the winter a compost pile the size of the one pictured will decay by about half. I turn mine over using a rake or a pitchfork once per month. I try to water it once a week or so. The water insures that the microbes do not go dormant for the winter.

Sometimes I will add a large bag of leaves to the pile and mix them in. However, I don't use soley leaves since I want the nutrients I added to the plants the year before to be used again. You can buy a box of Compost Starter and mix it in according to the directions on the box. That will speed up the process a little. Mine worked fine for three years before I tried that.

Some cities have ordinances which require that your compost pile be contained either in a barrel or inside of a wooden frame. To me that just shows that some government workers and regulators had too much time on their hands and listened to someone's neighbor who was jealous that they didn't have a garden. I got the idea for a compost pile when one of my neighbors complained to me. He had used as a dumping ground for leaves and branches an area just inside my side of the fence separating our yards. When I cleaned up the spot he quickly threw more branches over onto it. I threw them back over the fence. He then complained that he and his wife didn't much like the leaves there. It didn't matter that they had thrown the leaves over the fence in the first place and had been doing so for years. He wanted them moved! Reminded me of a small town I went through on a trip to Louisiana. The sign at the edge of town said "Welcome to Jennings! Home of 6,987 friendly people and a Few Old Grouches." My neighbors must have been related to the grouches.

As it turned out, however, they did me a favor. As I started bagging the leaves I encountered some of the richest top soil I have ever seen. Quickly I took a shovel and spread it over the site of my soon to be garden. Compost heaps are a good recycling measure for last year's garden plants. However, I got in the habit of recycling lots of things in my compost pile. When I prepared fresh vegetables I took the parts not used and tossed them on the pile. Much better than being burned in the town dump. The nutrients recaptured have already been proven to be usefull in vegetable growth. My daughter-in-law even throws her eggshells on the pile adding calcium to the soil.

She uses a metal 55 gallon drum for hers, kept far from anything it could burn. She also puts a metal top on it since deer and bears love to eat compost.

Each Spring I roll the undecayed matter off my pile and use a shovel to throw the rich dirt at the bottom onto my garden site before I dig it up for the planting.