A New Compost Box

There’s nothing that tells the neighbors “Pay us no mind, we are a normal family” like spending a cold, windy, and wet weekend building a 8' x 4' x 3.5'  timber structure and covering it with chicken wire in an urban setting. Yep, we are average like that. Daniel and I have been outside constructing a huge new compost system and I can scarcely contain my glee. 

Because it is moist here for much of the year and there are literally tons of plant matter everywhere, the art and science of hot composting isn’t very necessary in verdant Delaware unless you want to make dirt fast! People just make little piles of leaves, the earthworms and sow bugs come and eat it, and boom! Beautiful dirt. 

Still, I want to master it. The formation of top soil has to be much more intentional in the southwest where I am from. Heat, drought, and poor soil make growing conditions tough for plants and trees. Trees are what bring the moisture though. Rainforests aren’t just growing in a wetter area, the mist rises from the trees. I dream of composting and creating healthy ecosystems on a massive scale paired with plough-free farming and thoughtful construction to reverse the desertification of the southwest.  

Um. Anyway, as I said in my last compost entry I needed a new solution to handle all of our leaves and whatnot in one place, so we built a box with 2 bays and covered the frame with chicken wire. I put all of the old compostables into one side of the bay, and I am putting all new leaves and scraps I rescue off the curb in the other side, hence the bags of leaves I haven't put in yet. It didn't take long to see that the compost was active because it quickly reduced volume by half, heated in the middle, and if I dig into it it's looking a lot more like dirt. I can't tell you how exciting it is to dig in past the frozen surface and see steam rising! 
There are 2 great things about the new placement I didn't anticipate but I enjoy: 
You can't see that the new box abuts the back porch, but it is amazingly convenient to lean over the porch railing to put in scraps and stir things up. 
Also, the basement bathroom is frigid this time of year, but with compost now insulating the wall so it's much nicer to visit the loo. Maybe we should build another for the other side of the house? I'm kidding Daniel, I'm kidding. 
Unless you really want to. 
'Cause we totally could.
If you wanted.

Just like that, composting is fun again!

Compost Troubleshooting

You probably know by now how much I love compost, and how strangely silent I have been on the subject. That’s because I haven’t been having much success with it lately, for reasons not entirely under my control. In a funny way this is valuable experience because I knew exactly what was going wrong in each case as it was happening. Hopefully this can answer questions for the beginning enthusiast wondering “What in the world is wrong with my compost?” 

I have worked with 3 different systems since this spring: 

• A visit to my old bin left with my parents in Texas, 
• a successful, inexpensive, though messy looking cardboard box/pile situation necessitated by a medium sized home bin getting too full, and 
• the aforementioned undersized box. 

LOSS 

When I left Texas last fall I gave my parents 8 double trash bags of compost and my beloved bin. Though they weren’t full, the bags were back breakers because they were full of moist dirt in various stages of decomposition! My parents did not spread the dirt, but put it back in the bin. When I visited in September my mother asked me to move the bin to another spot. When I checked on it there was a much smaller volume of material in the box, and the compost was no longer heating for many reasons. To start off, there was a whole bunch of finished dirt in the bottom taking up valuable space. It was ready for earthworms to finish things up. Secondly, the right conditions were not maintained for heating the new compostable materials. Let’s review those conditions quickly:

1. There must be a great volume of appropriately stacked compostable materials. It’s hard to be specific about how much that is. My mental image is that our compostables need to add up to be at least the same size as a small armchair.  
2. The compost needs to be quite damp. Many people caution you not to get the compost too wet, which seems wise where I live now, but in Texas I watered my compost a little almost every day. The advice that compost should be like a wet sponge is meaningless in the southwest. If you stick a wet sponge outside, it’s dry in an hour there, whereas on the east coast it might take days! The bonus counterbalancing the water use is that the healthy dirt you are making will help retain water in the soil for your plants in the long run. 
3. “Wets” like food and fresh plant matter and “dries” like paper and leaves need to be alternated, always with wets under dry. Food scraps, grass clippings, and manure should be dug into the active part of the pile, covered with dry materials to sop up the excess liquid, and buried in older compost for a pile that smells like dirt, not rotten food. 
4. Add manure, urine, or fresh grass clippings regularly to boost the nitrogen content. Every time I add wet material I add nitrogen. The following measurements are neither precise nor scientific, I just want to convey amounts that work for me in estimates that are easy to picture. If it is manure I use a heaping handful sized amount- though I don’t use my hands! If using urine, a brimming cereal bowl full would be about right, just not in a cereal bowl! An armful of brand spankin’ new FRESH grass clippings is great. I find that burying grass clippings in the pile is most effective so they don’t dry out.    

When those conditions are not met, if you throw yard waste or food scraps in there they just sit on top going bad and luring vermin in search of a snack. I dug into the pile and was astonished panicked by the mass exodus of cockroaches of all sizes and descriptions.

It was like Men in Black II for a few long seconds. I am still a little traumatized. They flew into my hair, guys. Don’t let this happen to you!

When people advise not to throw oily, animal based, or wet food scraps into your bin lest it attract vermin this is why. This is not to say that you should not put food in your compost. You can, and it is a responsible thing to do. Nature can make mulch by heaping up leaves, but it takes water, nitrogen, and proper handling, or a whole lot of happy worms to actually make compost. Otherwise you are just feeding the local wildlife. 

I spread the compost that had been sitting for a year on a sandy bed in my parents back yard and layered the rest back into the bin with strict care instructions. I try not to dwell on how it’s going without me! 

WIN

My black plastic compost bin was overflowing for reasons I shall later state. Then our tree was in a big rush and lost all of its leaves at the end of August. I had nowhere to put them, but no way was I going to bag them up and put them on the curb! 

My best option seemed to be a compost pile, as in, pile the compost. To get a pile of anything to actually compost you need to pile it high not wide. I find that my pitchfork is essential for this. Also, I cheated. I got a big cardboard box and set it up with both ends open like a chimney on the ground. Then I filled it with whatever I needed to compost that wasn’t fitting in my other bin: food scraps, yard clippings, and newsprint sale circulars to name a few. I made sure to keep it damp. As the ‘post piled up I slid the box higher up, and everything lower down stayed in the square shape. Obviously I wasn’t turning it, and that’s okay! To keep it active I used urine or manure every time I added kitchen scraps, and... it worked!

The top of the pile was loose leaves, the middle of the pile was broken down, heat marked, and barely recognizable. The box was gone. The bottom was gorgeous, rich, black earth full of earthworm casings. It could have used several months more of sitting to decompose the leaf skeletons, but it smells like sweet success!  

LOSS

I saved the worst for last. Spoiler alert, there were rodents and carnage involved. Everything is bigger in Texas. The compost bin I purchased when we moved to this house was smaller than the one I had before. You’d think I could just look at it and tell, but it had been more than 6 months since I saw it last. I noticed the size discrepancy because the compost wasn’t heating up properly, I was starting to throw scraps in the trash can because the scraps were going septic in the bin, and then when I went to visit my old bin– oh yeah, and a few other people I love– I realized the old box dwarfed the new one. 

Then I saw a mouse. 

Then I saw mouse poop. 

Lots of it. 

A new system flew right to the top of my honey do list! 

When I dug into it there was almost dirt at the very bottom, and at about 2/3 of the way up the bin. Other than that it seemed like a great way to mummify old newspapers and cardboard. As I excavated, things I had buried months ago turned up in mint condition. 

Clearly this compost wasn't decomposing. Basically the box was just shielding all of the compostable materials from the elements so that they couldn’t compost. Brilliant. 

Also it was harboring 8-10 mice and about the same number of cockroaches. Thank goodness mice and cockroaches are also bigger in Texas! It wasn’t too alarming since I had a pretty good idea what was coming.   

I killed 2 mice by accident and 2 on purpose. The rest made their escape. By the way, may I borrow a cat? The mice had made a warm, dry little nest in there. At least they shredded some paper while they were at it! The thing is, a compost bin should be the opposite of comfortable for furry woodland creatures! It should be a damp biologically active cauldron of stuff mice don’t have any interest in. The main problem was the small size which did not allow enough volume, and somehow with the way things were layered, water wasn’t getting all the way through. 

Printable Henna Alphabet Letter "J"

Since I started this alphabet series there have been many subtle and not so subtle hints that I skip ahead to different letters of the alphabet, and I have hard-heartedly refused them all! I don't trust myself to keep track of the alphabet out of order.

All were refused, that is, until a friend suggested that J, O, and Y should be the next letters. This has been a staggeringly difficult year for her and her family. Four brain surgeries this summer, just to start the list! To read about her daughter's journey with tuberous sclerosis and find out how to pray for them/ help with medical bills, click here. Heather, I wish you all the joy there is, through the mercy of our Heavenly Father.
For whatever reason this particular letter has taken many times longer than any of the others. God must have thought I needed more time to pray for you!

I am running behind the goals I had set for myself, and I was getting very tense about it. Therefore I will only be posting the three letters this week and letting the other scheduled things go so that I won't be a grumpy mommy!

Click here to download and print in black and white,
Click here to download and print in color.

Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka

In a nutshell- To reseed the desserts, Mr. Fukuoka urged, we must consider and treat nature as one thing: A complete system. Troubleshooting problems with soil, water, and plants as separate entities is resulting in the widespread growth of deserts. Adequate amounts of water will not solve the problems of crop growth and drought. As in the rain forests, rain comes from green plant life, especially trees, more than it does from clouds. Sowing Seeds in the Desert proposes a proven working plan for giving nature the tools to amend the soil and support life once more without the heavy manual labor and capital investment we have come to think of when we think of desert reclamation. I can see it working, and I think it’s genius.

This is important- Did you know that when Laura Ingalls Wilder was crossing the prairie with her family the grass was so high people wandered in and never made it out? If you’ve lived on a prairie or a range, that is hard to imagine. Those grasses are almost extinct, and the rich soil of the high plains is getting poorer and blowing away.

Did you ever wonder why the lion is called the King of the Jungle? Many African savannas and deserts were heavily forested in pretty recent memory. The condition of our soil is changing because of human practices, and with it the vegetation and amount of rain.

We are in the habit of thinking that irrigation and chemical boosts can substitute for rich soil, but it isn’t true.

If you doubt me, think about how carefully you have measured soil elements into raised beds and how difficult it was to grow anything truly productive, especially if you live in an area with a lot of radiant heat. Think of how much water it took, even with organic fertilizers. You need a rich system of plant and insect life and a few years to make great soil and grow a really bang-up garden.

I believe that if we change the way we think about and treat our soil systems, especially in farming and ranching, we can bring the rain back.

A hard pill to swallow- The book’s toughest and most personal challenge to my thinking is about lawn culture. Isn’t the goal of growing anything in my yard to have a wide expanse of green grass? Wouldn’t it be weird and possibly annoy my neighbors if I choose to plant something else that is better for the soil? It’s more socially acceptable to have struggling grass than something entirely different. Even as I say it, I know that social norms are problematic and rarely good guides. I am challenging myself to come up with a drop-dead attractive way to grow soil-healthy “manure crops.” Gulp. Wish me luck!

Pure fun- Guerilla Gardening!  Whether you are a home gardener wondering how to make your green greener, or an environmentalist concerned about climate change, Sowing Seeds in the Desert is practical philosophy well worth your while, and Daniel and I are enjoying many animated discussions on this, my second trip through the book.

Compost Savaged Underpants

 
The two household things I was most upset to leave when we moved were my houseplants, because a house is not a home without growing things, and my compost.

The compost was kind of like a family pet. It was living, it ate anything we could find to feed it: Kitchen scraps of course, unclaimed phone books, leaves we raked out of other people’s yards... and it needed plenty of water in the dry Texas weather. It brought us untold joy because even though the bacteria colonies probably couldn’t be construed as fond of us, we were fond of them. It.
See that's the trouble with having a singular and plural pet. We miss it terribly, feeling guilty about putting our kitchen scraps in the trash. Plus the trash smells awful with bits of food in it!

Alas, I could not saddle the moving company with my compost, there was not an inch of spare room in the car, and what would we have done with a whole house full of stuff AND compost in a tiny two bedroom apartment? Reality warred against sentiment. The compost had to find a new home, and my sister wanted it anyway. I couldn’t bring the whole bin in one piece, the compost would have to be bagged, so I dumped the whole thing out to fork into bags. I was delighted by a few things:

1. There was dirt from the bottom to half way to the top! Chunky dirt, but dirt it was! How thrilling! It could have used 6 more months, but what a good feeling to see that hard won fertile soil at the end of my labors
2. There was so much of it. Six industrial trash bags worth of dirt were in that box. Wow!
3. I expected it to be gross to shovel out, and no doubt it was dirty, but it wasn’t gross. I have a high tolerance for ick, and I love dirt so don’t get mad at me if you think your compost is gross. I just didn’t think mine was.
4. I drove an hour and a half with it filling our car to capacity, when it had been sitting in the Highlander all night, and we didn’t have to roll down the windows. The only smell that was bad was a cabbage I had been lazy about the week before. The whole thing went bad in my fridge, and I didn’t shred it before I chunked it in, and obviously it had not decomposed because it was a big solid ball of odoriferous cruciforous vegetable.
5. Finally, and this is why you are probably reading this, 3 months before, I had tossed some holey socks and underwear into the bin out of curiosity. The socks disappeared without a trace, but when I forked everything out I found this:

As you can see, the cotton is gone. All that is left is the elastic and the nylon thread! Poor Fruit of the Looms!
I really get a kick out of turning trash into garden gold. I love that it’s an act of redemption: Glops of kitchen goo and holey underwear turning into dirt bursting with life. I love that it’s part of the rule-the-earth mandate: Nature mulches, but does not compost by itself.

Do you compost? Why do you do it (or not)? What’s the wildest thing you’ve ever put in it?