Making fertile soil is essential to gardening on any scale from a single flower plot to a large vegetable garden. In my case I started on a hillside with four inches or less of poor top soil upon solid sandstone/clay. To make matters worse our contractor had the topsoil moved to prevent erosion around our house. This left a back yard that looked like the Arizona desert though we are in Middle Tennessee. We wanted a vegetable garden so I built a large composting bin.

This bin is made of locust wood that I had and which had some bad places in some of it. Bugs and rot don’t affect locust even when buried in the ground, but if there is rot in the locust tree it will continue in the lumber. I had to patch it in a few places last year, but overall it remains very sound. It is 4 ft. By 4 ft. by 5 ft. high. The slats all around are separated with 1/4 inch hardware cloth to provide aeration on all sides. The top is removable as are the front slats that slide into a groove on each corner. This allows full access with a shovel. With these dimensions I can produce and store 75 cubic ft. of compost.

In this picture there are five ingredients, hay, grass clippings, sawdust, and wood chips and dirt. Hay and grass clipping are summer items. In the fall I gather a huge leaf pile and start collecting wood ash from my fireplace. I also add a little 10-10-10 fertilizer from time to time. A year round critical ingredient is kitchen scraps, including egg shells. Occasionally, I will include some paper in the form of used paper towels and paper egg cartons. Dirt mentioned earlier is not technically a component but it is a sources of microbes and habitat for earthworms.

Two groupings of ingredients are nitrogen (green) and Carbon (brown) that work together in microbial decomposition to produce compost. These two categories of ingredients are necessary along with oxygen for the process. Each ingredient has its own amount of either carbon or nitrogen, for example, Wood ash is a very high source of carbon and Kitchen scraps are a high source of Nitrogen. The internet has measures of each chemical component from various sources. I may include some of this later and you can get very technical about it, but the bottom line is that it takes both. I you think you can produce compost from kitchen scraps, your will generate a lot of stink, nitrogen gas, but virtually no compost.

I have a huge pile of wood chips. These are four years old as they decompose very slowly. I don’t add these directly to the composter, but sift out the large pieces and add only the fine matter.

Grass clippings from a lawn mower are a good source of nitrogen, but they clump together and delay the process unless they are layered thinly among carbon items. Even though they may turn brown this is the absence of water and remain a green source. Hay is similar in that it clumps up unless properly dispersed, but its texture allows more air flow than grass.

Like wood chips sawdust breaks down slowly, but it is already fine which helps. Naturally, the type of wood from which the dust is produced has a bearing on its composting quality. Too much tree-sourced ingredients, e.g. leaves, sawdust, decaying wood chips, can slow down the process. I try to use sawdust that has already started breaking down.

For me, it is worth composting just to have a proper way to handle kitchen wastes. I mentioned egg shells are pure calcium which soils need. Banana peels are extremely high sources for producing fertile soil. We eliminate meat, bone, onion and citrus items which eventually rot, but do not produce good healthful soil and must be eliminated.

Conclusion:

Composting it a process of recovering what is waste and converting it into something very valuable. One could just throw it all into a big pile on the ground and it would work over a long time. However, with some organization and a little equipment you can manage a process that might take years into one that takes weeks. I bury our kitchen scraps once a week or two. When I return with the next batch there is nothing but black dirt where last scraps were buried. Yes, things slow down in the deep cold of winter, but even then a well managed process will continue. When your homemade compost is applied to your garden you will be amazed at the fertility, looseness, and productivity of your soil and garden.