compost

Last year, when we first moved into our house, I had grandiose dreams of a beautiful vegetable garden that would be flourishing by springtime. Then I got to know my yard a bit better, and thought it prudent to give it at least a year -- let the Fall, Winter, Spring and following Summer teach me a little bit about the topography and where it might be best to plant.

In the mean time, I decided to start composting. I tried vermicomposting. I thought I could do it cheap. I was wrong. We had a mad crazy fly infestation. ...So I started a traditional compost heap. I could not for the life of me find anything to raise it up on, and I didn't have enough money to do one of the fancy schmancy barrels.

The yard (with it's 5 shade trees and the remnants of the horrible ice storm that his NWA in the winter of 2008), had tons and tons of twigs. By fall I had raked and moved all the leaves from the front yard to the compost heap. I figured with all that brown matter, we could just dump our food scraps (I've tried to stick to veggies only until I really get it working) on top, flip it from time to time, and we'd have ourselves a working compost pile. I was half right.

The leaves, when dry, are a HAVEN for ants. Thankfully, we only have harmless-to-humans black dudes. So the past few weeks, as I've taken our scraps out, I've found that there are SO MANY ants. And when I opened the shed the other day, roaches (I know, creep me out!) scurried. I got really worried. I talked to my midwife (who is a jack of all trades, ha), and she said to dump some dirt on top.

The dirt helped, but it definitely wasn't enough.

I've gotten so frustrated with the twigs. There are SO many, and if you'd step on the heap, you'd feel them crack underneath you. They're hard to rake and flip. Just annoying. But the ants and roaches motivated me to give them and the whole heap a good flip. This is where the good news comes in.

As I moved the compost, there was no "food" (with the exception of egg shells and onions), so it's definitely composting. The twigs actually make a BLACK (totally healthy) dirt. It is beautiful. And there were hundreds of worms, another great sign of a good compost pile. Some of the worms were longer than a foot and about 2 inches in diameter. Gorgeous!

Half of the heap is leaves, so I turned them, tried to get the dry leaves underneath the wet ones. And I formed a bit of a rectangle essentially with three walls -- two are primarily the twig matter and the other is where I pulled all the leaves to the center. So my plan now is to keep dumping scraps on top of the leaves and covering it up with twig and then more leaves. We'll see how it goes!

It will definitely be at least another year before I am comfortable trying a garden. I really want to plan it well and I don't want to have to put too much money into it. Some people spend thousands just to get a healthy start. My hope is that this compost really works well and can be a huge portion of the healthy dirt we need to get the start we want.