Compost Gardening

By Barbara
February 10, 2009

You composters are so inventive! Credit for this great new idea  – composting under the shelter of hedges – goes to Bill B of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Hedge composting makes perfect sense, and I guess that's what I'm doing with the mound of sawdust that's mellowing down by the raspberries. But when I think of all the people out there who could mow their clippings right into a mound under their hedge, and then use them in their compost later --- the saved labor this method could rack up is mindboggling.

Like most experienced composters, Bill keeps several compost maneuvers going at a time, including four Earth Machines. Last week in my garden I counted up 7 composting projects, and there will be more when I finish layering up some Comforter Composts for spring planting. How many Compost Gardening projects do you have going so far? Today is a great day to start one!

Birds-nest Compost for Spring Cleaning

Windy, rainy weather has scattered lots of twigs and branches over the yard, leaving me with the task of picking them up. This is how Mother Nature does her spring cleaning—using wind and rain to knock loose the last clinging leaves and dead wood up in the trees. Then it’s my turn to tidy up and to figure out a use for this literal windfall of woody stuff.

If you want to create creating a passive, no-turn compost project, a base layer of sticks makes a fine starting point. You can imagine you’re building a really big bird’s nest as you pile up the twigs in a rough circle or in the bottom of your open bin or pen. When you have other ingredients, start layering them inside the frame made of sticks and random prunings. The twiggy base will let air flow up and under the pile, reducing the need for turning to get air into the heap. That’s good, since turning a pile built on sticks can be an exercise in frustration—at least until they make progress toward crumbling into compost.

By Barbara
October 27, 2008


One of the principles that comes up again and again in The Complete Compost Gardening Guide is to compost on-site, in the garden, so that the soil below benefits from compost while it is happening. My latest brain child is a method I'm calling Life Saver Compost, and it couldn't be simpler: as you gather up fall compostables, pile them up in a life-saving circle around marginally hardy plants.

One of my experimental subjects is arugula, a wonderfully versatile salad and cooking green that will survive winter in my Zone 6 garden under a plastic tunnel, glass-topped frame, or inside a water-filled cloche. I'm betting that a 14-inch high wall of rotting garden waste will do the trick, too, especially if I cover the pile with an old blanket to nurse my captive through bad winter storms.

I'm also trying this method on turnips and mizuna – two more marginally hardy greens. Like Walking Compost, in which you set up a pile of garden waste and "walk" it down a bed or row as you turn it, Life Saver compost saves time because you can pile up garden waste within a few steps of where it came from – pull, turn, dump!

If things go well, the payoff from my Life Saver heaps will be huge. In my garden, overwintered arugula, turnips and mizuna are in bloom by the time the last spring frost passes. Then I let them produce a mature crop of seeds. I save some of the seeds in my seed box, but thousands more are shed all over the garden. With no help from me, they show up everywhere in the fall.

In some ways, setting up Life Saver heaps around plants now is like sowing next fall's greens nine months ahead of time.

There is one aspect of Slow Roast composting we need to mention: it attracts critters in search of habitat. In past years I've seen chipmunks set up housekeeping in a Slow Roast heap, and last year the folks at the Hahn Horticulture Garden at Virginia Tech had to stop adding to theirs because a duck decided it was a great place to nest. Many types of snakes are likely to hole up in a Slow Roast, too, which is fine as long as you leave them alone. They would not be there if there was not something for them to eat, like mice and other small rodents.

In summary, we definitely advocate Slow Roast composting, but with caution. If you're troubled by rabbits or easily frightened by snakes, bend the first rule of Compost Gardening, and build your Slow Roast pile away from your main garden.  

Spontaneous Compost-Scaping

Given the chance, you can pretty much expect winter squash or other cucumber family crops to prosper in a compost heap. In March, when I plopped down my new composter in a weedy spot, some of the first items that went in were several shriveled winter squash found hiding in the basement. Thinking they would be tied up for a while in compost-transition, I dressed up the area with some volunteer nasturtiums I found in the garden, hoping they would help smother the weeds.

In July, the monster squash vine burst on the scene, ready and willing to shade out yellow dock and other bad boys. A few weeks later, female blossoms appeared, revealing something unique, compliments of my compost. It looks like the butternuts and Tennessee pumpkin squash I grew last year crossed (they're both Cucurbita moschata). The fruits of my compost squash have butternut curves with green pumpkin-squash rinds. 

Whether or not the fruits ripen to wonderful doesn't matter, because the vine has already earned its keep by looking good, shading the compost and smothering weeds. And the nasturtiums are so happy that they are sure to reseed!

Just goes to show that when you keep a Compost Garden, beauty and wonder just sort of follow you around.