FREE GARDENING TIPS!
Compost
Keeping a compost pile accomplishing two things at the same time. It recycles your kitchen and garden/yard waste into organic matter to add back into your garden, which improves your soil quality on an ongoing basis. Here is a good video on composting by Lee Reich, author of Weedless Gardening, You can also find his video on making leaf mold, another excellent soil amendment/mulch, on this same page.
Location:
It is efficient to place the compost near the garden. If it is near the kitchen, that is also handy for adding your kitchen scraps. We made our compost piles out of wood palettes that we picked up for free. I really like the wood slats that Lee uses in the above video that I linked to...I may put making some of those on my husband's to do list someday, but for now, my free palettes work just fine.
Building the pile:
Alternate layers of brown ingredients (like straw) with layers of green ones, like weeds, and finished plants. You are building a type of layer cake, starting with brown, then green, then soil, then brown, green, soil, and so on. The brown layers should be about 3" thick, the green anywhere from 1"-6" thick, depending on the material, and about an inch of soil for those layers. The thickness of the green layer depends on what the green material is. Grass clippings are dense, so 1 inch will do, whereas tomato or bean vines have a lot more air and space in them, so you could go six inches for those. Once your pile is stacked up and full, cover it to help keep in moisture. Your compost should feel like a wet sponge.
Leave the leaves out of the compost and make leaf mold:
Don't bother mixing leaves into your compost pile as they decompose through the action of fungi rather than bacteria. Make a separate pile for them, hence forth the leaf mold pile. They will break down on their own and you just dig down to the bottom of the pile and scoop from there. You can put them in a container 4 -6 ft wide made of snow fence or stiff wire mesh.
Location:
It is efficient to place the compost near the garden. If it is near the kitchen, that is also handy for adding your kitchen scraps. We made our compost piles out of wood palettes that we picked up for free. I really like the wood slats that Lee uses in the above video that I linked to...I may put making some of those on my husband's to do list someday, but for now, my free palettes work just fine.
Building the pile:
Alternate layers of brown ingredients (like straw) with layers of green ones, like weeds, and finished plants. You are building a type of layer cake, starting with brown, then green, then soil, then brown, green, soil, and so on. The brown layers should be about 3" thick, the green anywhere from 1"-6" thick, depending on the material, and about an inch of soil for those layers. The thickness of the green layer depends on what the green material is. Grass clippings are dense, so 1 inch will do, whereas tomato or bean vines have a lot more air and space in them, so you could go six inches for those. Once your pile is stacked up and full, cover it to help keep in moisture. Your compost should feel like a wet sponge.
Leave the leaves out of the compost and make leaf mold:
Don't bother mixing leaves into your compost pile as they decompose through the action of fungi rather than bacteria. Make a separate pile for them, hence forth the leaf mold pile. They will break down on their own and you just dig down to the bottom of the pile and scoop from there. You can put them in a container 4 -6 ft wide made of snow fence or stiff wire mesh.