Composting: Tricks

Well, not tricks exactly. No magic, no real secrets. But there are several things that I have figured out over a couple years of composting that have helped out.

Composting has a reputation that spans from "easy as pie - throw junk in your back yard and next week, voila, black gold" to "a big fat lie. it will smell and take two years to transform into anything useful." The truth is, like most things, somewhere in between.

The Pile v. The Spinning Contraption

We originally had two composter container deals side by side sitting on the ground along our back fence. This is the ideal scenario. Two is very helpful, so that you have one to fill while the other cooks. A pile on the ground surrounded by a purchased frame or chicken wire or whateves works great. When the pile started to cook it was a marvel to watch - you can feel the heat off the top, and if the mix is right the break down happens pretty quick and beautifully. Problem for an urban gardener - even one with a rather nice sized yard like ours - is rodents. Rats. Damn icky ugly things. Our first year of composting, something kept eating my tomatoes. No deer round these parts (do deer eat tomatoes? I haven't ever had a deer problem). We realized our compost was a delicious easy dinner for rodents and from there they found the tomatoes. Cringe Cringe. I never saw them - they were not near the house. At least that. So we got rid of the piles. Now, if you keep food scraps fully covered, that is supposed to deter animals of all sorts. But its not a perfect solution. So, for my birthday, I got an above ground spinning composter. I expected this to make perfect compost faster and easier and to solve the worlds problems. Not so fast. The first year it never ever seemed to make anything resembling what I was used to from the piles. Always mushy slimy stuff. That is when I learned about the uber importance of the brown green ratio (see below). Even with that improvement, I have still never pulled garden ready compost out of my spinner. Instead I dug a big old hole next to it and dump the almost compost (too slimy clumpy stuff) into the hole and cover/mix it with the hole dirt. I mix it occasionally with my compost turner and then, later, voila - garden compost. I have a pile/hole of good nutritious dirt that I can pull from whenever need be. yay!

Brown v. Green (or, aha! cardboard!)

To get things going you need the right balance of browns (dead dry carbon stuff) to green (live green nitrogen stuff). This is especially important in a contained spiny composter. The right balance seems to be as many browns as you can possibly add. I fill cosmo (the composter) to the top with browns before we start dumping our kitchen scrap bucket in.

I didn't know quite how to do this at first - what to use for browns? You can use dried grass from your lawn (we don't really have that). Dried leaves were our largest supply but leaves take forever to break down. If you use them, mow over them first. But I suggest leaving leaves (hee) separate. They make a great leaf mold, but it takes a long time. You can put them in a garbage bag with holes poked in and flop the bags over a couple times a year. Or, like us, just create a leaf area. We had a low spot in the yard from previous owner's pool. We always pile up the leaves there and they break down and sometimes I mine that area for layers of leaf mold as garden mulch. We always throw bunch of leaves on the garden area in the fall too. Lots of good garden food in them.

So, no dried grass, no dried leaves, what the browns are we going to do? Ah Ha, cardboard and paper! Not sure why it took so long to figure this one out. We seem to collect a decent number of cardboard boxes from things arriving in the mail etc. We stock them up. Rip them up. Great browns. And newspaper - perfect. As far as my internet research tells me, don't worry about the ink. Many gardeners I know use newspaper in their garden. Its fine. I still don't like to use colored pages though. Might be fine too. Twisted up cardboard and paper (brown paper bags!) adds space in the pile too - extra air. That's good.

Never ever throw away toilet paper tubes! Don't recycle them either! Throw them in that kitchen scrap bucket! Paper bags too!

Fruit Fly Blues

There are lots of compost crocks that I have not tried. I have tried a couple. They might work great for you. But fruit flies annoy the heck out of me and the best solution seems to be to keep the "crock" in the fridge. We use a good sized thin plastic bucketish thing that salad from the grocery store came in. Have used the same one for months and months.

Only one composter? Cosmo needs a fridge

After weeks and weeks of filling cosmo with our kitchen scrap bucket (after of course filling him up with browns) he starts to get pretty heavy to turn. Because it keeps breaking down you could fill it up way too much as it would get infinitely heavier. Instead I stop filling and keep turning and let it cook until I deem it ready to go into the dirt hole/pile for faster finishing. Meanwhile we toss our scraps into cosmo's refrigerator: these crazy durable buckets that cat litter comes in. They are recyclable but we keep them and have used them for all kinds of things. Handy buckets with good seal lids. By the time a couple of those are full its time to start a new cosmo load - browns then the "refrigerator" contents and then on and on all over again. The cycle of dirt.