This is our first year experimenting with compost. Justin’s mother was a natural with it, she seemed to toss some stuff in. Her lab would rip it up. She would rebuild it and then spread it on her garden. The end result was amazing tomatoes.
She claimed, when I asked that year, that it was her first year composting. I have not been that lucky with ours. It has been a slow process, and has not been very usable this year.
Technically we know how to compost. But it definitely is like cooking, you just have to get a feel for it. For anyone who may not know the essentials include kitchen scraps (we avoid meat), yard waste, air, and moisture. In general you want to maintain a balance of green and brown material.
We add things like news paper that doesn’t get burned in the grill, brown cardboard, clippings from the shrubs. We started a lot of new garden beds this year too, so we have been mixing in layers of chopped up sod pulled from the top of the new beds. And chicken litter.
It’s kind of a mess right now because Justin was worried about adding too much chicken litter and sod at one time. So we have to peripheral piles beside the compost and they get mixed in little by little.
Tell us how you do your compost!
By Amber Anderson
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