Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of loam!
four and twenty earthworms
finding a new home...............
Who but me could write a four page dissertation about compost! And who but a true garden nut would be interested in reading it! Heres my tome! Come share YOUR compost stories with everyone!
Within the last week I dismantled my compost pile, screened the black gold on the bottom, and put everything else back where it belongs! I started my brand new "no work" style compost pile about three years ago in spring after the year I moved in! I always had hope, but for the first couple years it seemed impossible that I would ever have a really "useable" quantity of finished compost. As I said above, itÂs a "no work," throw it on a pile and let it rot, type compost pile. About the only thing I do to help it is to wet it down fairly often in summer. Over the last couple years I have dug down into it in various places near the front of the pile to removeÂfairly smallÂquantities of finished compost. This year I wanted to get as much as I could to work into my veggie garden before planting, so it was now or never!
When I started, the pile was 6' wide by almost 4' deep by a little over 4' front to back. This isnÂt the best picture since it was actually taken to show my winter sown flats right after I put them out there, but you can at least get an idea of the size. By the time I started this project I had added a bunch more stuff on top that I had been cutting down in the backyard, and you couldnÂt see the pumpkins at all anymoreÂthere was a lot of totally undigested stuff on top of the pile. While it had a gotten squshed down a lot over winter, most of the fall-added stuff hadnÂt even started decomposing yet, which I sort of expected, but since I had wet the pile down really well a couple times over winter, I thought at least some of it might have started decomposing. (Click any picture to enlarge)
The first thing I found that surprised me was the cottonwood leaves! Since I just put whatever I have at the moment on top of the pile, everything is in layersÂat least all the things I have any quantity of! When I got the really recent things off of the topÂincluding the pumpkins, which really surprised me when I stuck the fork into the first one, Âcause I had completely forgotten they were thereÂI ran into the fairly thick layer of cottonwood leaves. What surprised me was that there were places where the leaves looked exactly as they had when I put them on the pile. If I had spread them back around on the grass, you wouldnÂt have even been able to tell they had been on the pile all winter. They were COMPLETELY dry, and didnÂt even look like they had been smashed together all winter. And other patches of them were TOTALLY dripping saturated and had been compressed together into inch thick, tough layers of cottonwood leaf leather. What surprised me even more was that when I started to pull these leather layers apart, they were absolutely packed with wormsÂred wrigglers I think is what theyÂre called. I never would have expected worms to be thriving in such a wet (and cold) environment! The wet patches of leaves were so wet that they smelled SO BAD I could hardly believe it! It was the only part of the pile that smelled at all (except for some onions that had been recently thrown out!) In the future IÂll probably try to find enough stuff to mix in with the cottonwood leaves that theyÂre not just all on a separate layer by themselves so theyÂll, hopefully, start to decompose more quickly. I think it would be a really good idea to create a separate little "soggy cottonwood leaf worm farm," but since I donÂt know what made the difference between the leaves that stayed totally dry and the ones that got saturated, IÂm not sure how to do that. With my luck, the leaves IÂd intend for the worm farm would stay dry!
After forking all the unrotted and half rotted stuff off of the topÂmore than half of the pile, and a major job all by itself, I thought IÂd be able to just shovel some of it up as useable compost. Disappointment! Since I throw anything organic on the pile it includes things like all the small cottonwood branches that fall off of my neighborÂs trees, and, while I do break them up into pretty small pieces, they still decompose much more slowly than the leaves and kitchen waste, so virtually all of the pile on the bottom had undigested stuff mixed in with the good stuff. To solve this problem I found one of my pea trellises from last yearÂone made with 1" chicken wire that I wasnÂt gonna use for a trellis again this year anyway, laid it over the top of a BIGÂnursery sizeÂpot, and started screening the stuff. What a job! A couple shovelfuls on the wire, and then shake and rub till all the fine stuff falls thru. I wonÂt be doing this again till next spring sometime, but by then IÂm gonna build some sort of a "real" screen with a 1 X 2 frame or something sturdier than the bamboo stakes that framed the chicken wire this time. ItÂll be a lot easier. And IÂll probably use a somewhat smaller screen too, since a lot of the small, broken up pieces of sticks and perennial stems fell thru the chicken wire and had to be "raked up" and taken out of the pot after every couple shovelfuls. A smaller screen will make it harder in some ways, and easier in some other ways. IÂm tempted to quit throwing the bigger stuff on the pile, but IÂm not gonna do that! It seems to me that the more variety you have in the pile, the better the ultimate product will be.
Some of the other "problem" type things I put on the pile are the hibiscus stems which get up to an inch in diameter and take, easily, a couple years to decompose. I still need to cut the hibiscus from last summer down, and IÂm thinking of breaking them up into pieces and throwing them into a BIG bucket of water to soak for a couple days before adding them to the compost pile this year to see if it helps (but I think theyÂll float, so I donÂt know if thatÂll work or not!) And another problem is the stuff like Agastache, Russian sage, and lavender plants when I cut them down and throw it all on the pile in bunches of whole pieces like IÂve been doing. That kind of stuff seems to hang together WAY longer than IÂd expect it to, and I guess IÂm gonna have to start cutting it up into smaller pieces before putting it on the pile from now on. More work!
Another thing that surprised me as I was screening the compost is that every single tiny, tiny little piece of plastic or cellophane that had ever gotten into the pile was still there! That stuff is TOTALLY indestructible! There was very little of it since I try to be really careful, but apparently sometimes little pieces of plastic bags and candy wrappers and stuff blow in unnoticed. I also found that the little clumps of dog hair that had blown into my yard, which I had thrown on the pile, were still in completely unchanged form. Whoda thunk hair wouldnÂt decompose! And I also found a few carpet fibers that I had thrown in, assuming, since they were so small, that theyÂd eventually decompose. No way. They were completely unchangedÂand are now in the dumpster!
And I found something else, that I had also found on previous digs, that was like a small (about 2" x 2") semi-solid, white or light green kinda slimy mass! Last year when I was digging in the pile I had found a couple places with similar "globs," and had tried and tried to think of something I might have put on the pile that could have created what I found, and I couldnÂt come up with anything! This stuff sort of reminded me of slightly dried globs of latex paint. Well this year, when I ran into a "glob" I got up the courage to sniff it! Anybody want to take a guess? Every now and then IÂll throw a tiny little scrap of bar soap into the compost pile bag by my kitchen sinkÂand bar soap doesnÂt compost! Luckily I didnÂt do it very often, because you wouldnÂt believe what a slimy, disgusting mess it makes! I always figured it would just dissolve and act as a surfactant to help the water saturate stuff better in that area. Not! No more bar soap in the pile!
Another observation! The most worms were in the wetter and more undecomposed parts of the pile. The compost at the very bottom of the pile, which was completely decomposed, had no worms at all in it. That surprised me a little bit since IÂand probably we allÂthink of earthworms as eating earth, but I think I really knew better even before I noticed that. My compost pile is directly on the ground, which, tho I didnÂt realize it when I started it, is a really, really good thing since worms can migrate up out of the ground, and they absolutely thrive in the pile. I think thatÂs been at least as much of a benefit from my compost pile as the compost itself!
One more thing I just thought of! I have a crosscut shredder, and I always empty it onto the compost pile. Every time I empty it I wonder if itÂll decompose easily along with the vegetable matter, and it does! I couldnÂt even tell, in the pile, where the shredded paper had been. It needs to be emptied again. More compost!
Since I dumped little piles of compost here and there as I was screening it I have no way to know for sure, but I think I got at least a yard of finished compost out of the pile and spread out on top of the garden. Black gold! Now I still have to turn the whole garden over to mix it in and prep it for planting. At least IÂll feel like IÂm mixing in some really good stuff when I do it this time!
This picture was at the end of the first day when I had screened close to half of the useable compost. The big pot I was screening into is on the left, and IÂve replaced undecomposed compost where the "hole" was on the right side of the pile since I was running out of places to put all this stuff! The big pile on the leftÂand you can only see a fraction of it from this angleÂwas the rest of the undecomposed stuff that needed to be replaced eventually! And the left part of the pile back inside the silver walls was what still had to be screened. It doesnÂt look like much in the pictureÂbut it took almost three hoursÂa couple shovelfuls at a time!
After getting down to the ground at the bottom of the pile on the left side too, I replaced all the "in progress" stuff back in the compost area. Another "what a job!" While I was doing it I made sure I was mixing all the different types of material up well so there are no more "layers," and I believe it will decompose faster now that itÂs better mixed. When I got done I wound up with a pile that was 6' wide by 3' high, by about 3' front to back, and I still have four BIG bags of maple leaves to put on the pile from last fall, but I need to wait for it to settle down again to have room to add themÂbut not having them falling over onto the end of the veggie area.
Here are a couple pictures taken after I finished up. The first shows the compost spread on top of the soil (with a couple piles left where I canÂt spread it out yet because of my winter sown stuff), and the second is the close up of the pile after it was replaced in my "compost bin."
One more thing I want to add on the topic of compost! When I lived down in Parker I had one of those compost tumblersÂthe biggest sizeÂand I never got anything useable out of it. Possibly it was just that I wasnÂt tending it well enoughÂor that I didnÂt have enough stuff to put in itÂor that I didnÂt cut up the stuff I put in it well enough, but nothing ever seemed to happen to the stuff I did put in it. I wet it over and over, and it always still seemed dry. I speculated that maybe itÂs just too dry a climate for them to work well, but I donÂt now that for sure. For what it cost me, I considered it to be a big waste of money. IÂd be curious to hear if anybody else has ever had better luck with one of those.
Anybody else have any comments or observations or reflections on what theyÂve found when working with their compost?
.....when the pile was opened
the gardener did sing.
On seeing all that good black gold
her spirit did take wing!
Skybird
stevation
Skybird - z5, Denver, ColoradoOriginal Author
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