The Art of Zen Living

It’s been two weeks since I first piled up my clippings, yard waste, and some kitchen scraps, sprinkled it all with a bit of (crappy) Florida dirt, soaked the whole thing in water and went away and let it sit.  And sit it did!  It didn’t seem to be doing much of anything.  Well, that’s not completely true.  I learned that you really can’t put bread into a compost pile unless you soak it in water and puree it, then dump it on when you water the pile.  If you just tear it up and think burying it in the middle of the pile will keep the birds from finding it, you’d be wrong.  I still don’t know who was more startled - that poor blue jay that popped it’s head out with a big crust of bread and saw me hovering over him, or me, when that head popped out wings all a flapping and beak all a squawking.  Suffice to say it was a rather unique moment, and I felt very much in the now.  I also screamed like a school girl.

I digress.  Two weeks yesterday I set my compost pile up at a total cost of about $4.25.  3 tomato stakes, about 7 feet of a 50 foot roll of plastic fencing, and a few twist ties.  A little American ingenuity, a little America frugality, and we were ready to go.

If you’d like to start your own compost pile, I learned a heck of a lot about it over at Composting 101. The US EPA also has some good information on composting. It’s a bit of a dull read, even for a Government site.

I decided to put down about 10 inches of “green” material, then top it with 10 inches of brown. I sprinkled 2 shovels of dirt over that, added my kitchen scraps, another 10 inches of green material and then about 20 inches of brown material. My green material was the grass I’d taken out to clear space for the garden, and the brown material were a lot of old, dead vines I cleaned off the back fence along with a bunch of leaves I raked from underneath the grapefruit tree. Some instructions say to mix immediately, others to wait. I opted to wait until the pile had been “working” for 2 weeks to turn it for the first time. That’s pretty much all there is to it for basic composting.

Summer is not really a growing season in Florida.  I’m planting a few things here and there, more to test soil mixtures than anything.  Mid August is the next time that it’s recommended to plant in my area.  That means I should have just enough time to make one batch of compost to mix in with the sandy Florida soil.  For the majority of the garden, I’m going to have to dig out the native soil and replace it with a garden mix - I just don’t have time to make enough compost for the size of garden I’m going to be planting.  Still, it’s important to me to keep a compost pile working as it’s a great way to reduce, reuse and recycle.  It’s also a great way to refresh your soil every time you replant.

It’s hard to tell what’s going on in this picture, so here’s the story.  I pulled the top layer off to the right, then pulled the middle and bottom layers off towards the front.  They make up the big pile in the foreground.  Then I moved the top layer into place as the new bottom layer.

Remember earlier when I said the pile had just been sitting there?  When I pulled that top layer off, I found out I was wrong.  The wet, pungent odor that seeped from the middle of the pile left no doubt that my compost pile had been rotting it’s little heart out.  Most cool!

Once I had the top layer back in place as the bottom layer, I added about 25 gallons of wet leaves on top of it.  My original pile had been light on “brown” yard waste, such as leaves, and heavy on “green” yard waste - pulled weeds, grass clippings, and the like.  The leaves had been soaking in a trashcan overnight, just to get them going a little.  On top of that, I added about a week’s worth of kitchen scraps.  I’d been adding the scraps as we generated them, but then I decided to start saving them up and adding them when I turn the pile.  I’m sure you already know I didn’t go out and buy anything to store these scraps in.  So what am I keeping them in?

On the right is the small coffee can that sits by the sink and collects food scraps and used coffee grounds.  Once that’s full, it makes the trip out to the garage and is dumped into the large red coffee container.  So far, I’ve only needed these 2 containers, but I do have a second big red container I can use if I need to.

Here you can see that I’ve stacked everything back up.  All that remains is to put the fencing back around it and give it a good soaking.  One of the things I am doing with this compost pile to speed the process along is mixing a couple gallons of plant food and adding that to the pile every 2-4 weeks.  The pile I start after this one won’t need that extra treatment, but if I want this compost to be ready by the end of summer, adding the plant food should help.  In this case, I’m just using the generic “expert gardener” brand of spray and feed.

Here it is all piled up and ready to rot away for the next few weeks.  If you look closely, you can see the line of garden rocks along the bottom of the fencing.  These rocks serve the important purpose of looking kind of cool lined up there against the bottom of the compost pile.

Growing up, my Grandfather always had a garden every summer.  Specifically, I remember tomatoes.  There were always lots of big, red tasty tomatoes.  I suspect that when he was a bit younger, that back yard garden produced what would have seemed to me to be a bewildering variety of garden goodness.  I also remember that in the back left corner of the yard, year in and year out, there was a compost pile.