Food for Your Garden: Starting a Traditional Compost Pile in Your Yard

compost

As a society, we make a lot of waste, especially in this culture of on-the-go single-serve disposables.

What can we do to reduce our waste? Use less, recycle and reuse packaging materials, and compost your organic waste. And if you’re a gardener, there’s no reason to throw away this beneficial (and cheap!) source of nourishment for your soil. Compost is the key to a flourishing garden. Easily turn your kitchen scraps and yard waste into food your garden will love.

The following is an excerpt from Fresh Food from Small Spaces by R. J. Ruppenthal. It has been adapted for the web.


How to Start A Traditional Compost Pile

If you have enough space to start a compost pile in your yard, make sure your local city and county ordinances permit it. Some of them have restrictions because open piles can attract rodents and create odors. Assuming that your area allows open-air composting, consider whether you can fit three piles in your yard: one for new compost, one for aging compost, and one for the finished stuff that goes back on your plants. If you just have room for one, that is fine, but in order for your pile to fully break down, you will need to stop adding new material at some point and let it decompose.

Some compost piles are hot, while others never get very warm, and this is a function of the biological activity in the pile while the organisms do their thing. Getting your pile to heat up naturally depends on a long list of factors, including pile size, materials, layering, moisture, external heat, and other variables. But even if it does not heat up much, sooner or later the stuff will break down and you’ll have some good dirt to use on your plants.

Cold compost is perfectly acceptable stuff; it just takes a bit longer to make. Some gardening purists hold that the nutritional content of hot-cooked compost is far superior, but if you are using it as more of a soil amendment than a fertilizer, then this should not matter much. If you want to follow the pure wisdom, then the minimum size for a hot pile is about 4′ x 4′, which will allow enough internal space to create the proper conditions for this biological activity to take place.93 In lieu of this, any untidy heap will break down at its own pace.

compost bin

A compost bin can fit almost anywhere, either over garden soil or on a patio. ©iStockphoto.com/davidf

What should you put in your compost pile? Will it stink? Do you have to turn it regularly? The answers are: anything organic, a bit, and not really.

Dead leaves, lawn clippings, food scraps (except meat or fat), newspaper, cardboard, and manure are all organic matter and will break down in your compost pile. Ideally, you want to add a diversity of ingredients.

The pile will break down faster if you add both “browns” (dry ingredients such as dead leaves, newspaper, and cardboard) and “greens” (wet stuff such as food scraps, lawn clippings, and fresh manure).

“Greens” contain plenty of nitrogen while “browns” have more carbon, and your pile needs both. Conventional wisdom holds that the proper ratio is 2 parts “browns” to 1 part “greens,” but you can vary this ratio somewhat. Just remember that a pile of 100 percent leaves takes a lot longer to break down, and 100 percent food scraps may turn into a very wet and slimy mess long before it breaks down. Also, the more diverse sources of waste you add, the better its nutritional output will be for your soil.

Your new pile will stink a bit at first, but if you have never composted before, then you will be pleasantly surprised. It’s not as smelly as you would think. In its early stages, you can cover the compost pile with burlap, a tarp, or a layer of “brown” ingredients such as leaves or cardboard, which will help seal in the moisture and limit any odors. As the compost ages, it begins to smell more earthy, a fragrance that some actually enjoy.

Your compost is finished when you can no longer recognize the individual materials that went into it.

Aerating the pile is optional, but it may speed up the process by delivering oxygen where it’s needed. Use a pitchfork to turn the pile and make sure that both air and moisture are reaching each part. You can do this weekly or less often. And, if you do not want to turn the pile, then it will aerate naturally with time as the layers break down and settle.


Recommended Reads

How to Create a Nitrogen-Rich, Compost-Fed Soil Bed on Your Patio

Composting as if it Mattered

 

Read The Book

Fresh Food from Small Spaces

The Square-Inch Gardener's Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting

$16.22

Recent Articles

soil health

5 Principles of Soil Health

Wondering how to make your soil (and plants) thrive? Use these principles of soil health to properly prepare your farm or garden to grow. The following excerpt is from Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. It has been adapted for the web. (Photography curtesy of Gabe Brown.) Prefer audio? Listen to the excerpt below from the…

Read More

How to Create Your Own Forest Garden

A forest garden provides a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale—whether only a few dozen square feet or if you have over an acre to spare. Ready to embark on your own forest garden adventure? Check out these articles for inspiration to get started. Featured image by Dani Baker. The Seven Layers of A…

Read More
permanent beds

Permanent Beds: Designing An Efficient Garden

Permanent beds are going to change your gardening game. This type of garden bed helps improve soil health, ensures crop growth, and is extremely easy to design! The following is an excerpt from The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost. It has been adapted for the web. Designing Permanent Beds The term permanent beds is…

Read More
fieldwork

Simplify Farm Fieldwork: Stop Working So Hard

Looking to simplify fieldwork on your farm? The key is to act like a tree: stop working so hard and let nature do some of the work for you.  The following is an excerpt from The Lean Micro Farm by Ben Hartman. It has been adapted for the web. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and…

Read More
seed integrity

Preserving Seed Integrity: How Far is Far Enough?

While there is a lot of information out there about keeping the “purity” of seeds, the true “pure” seed is a myth. There are still best practices that any seed grower should keep in mind; but once they understand seed integrity and let cross-pollination happen, the real fun begins. The following is an excerpt from…

Read More