Black Gold!

[Mikey]

No, I'm not writing about oil....   I'm writing about what is black gold for gardeners......rich compost!   I have a very small veggie garden and today I decided to work in some compost into the rows before planting the seeds.

Here's a photo of my black gold....


The compost is thick with worms and grubs......  I feed the grubs to the mocking birds and blue jays....


I spread out some compost in each row and worked it in.  Today I planted radishes, two types of chard and three types of eggplant.  I had volunteer tomatoes coming up and I transplanted a couple of those as well.  I love stuffed bell peppers and I will likely plant the remaining part of the garden with bell peppers.  I'll probably buy them in six packs ...

[croft]

Mikey, that looks a lot like our compost box that DH built. There never seems to be enough compost though, right?. You're lucky having the compost pile continue to work year round - mine is buried under a couple feet of snow.

[Joyce]

I have 3 composters in the works right now, in different stages of composting.
2 are the tumbling types, and one is a freestanding box type.
We never throw out any organic waste from the kitchen.
We have a counter top compost can that gets dumped into a compost bucket in the garage.
When that gets filled, it goes into the 'green' composter. (the newest batch)

All the trimmings off my houseplants, and even my dryer lint goes into the composter.
Also coffee grounds, and all my tea bags (label, tags, and all). And when I peel an orange into a paper towel,
paper towel, peel and all goes into the composter.
Jamie and I just split a mango, the skin and the seed all went into the composter.

When we had hamsters, all of the old bedding (hamster poop and all) used to go into the composter too. Now, whenever I change the filters in the aquariums, all the used charcoal goes into the composters. You name it, as long as it is not meat, dairy, or cheese, into the composter it goes.
Although: eggshells are GREAT for the composter...an excellent calcium source.

Another Tip: I save all my used dryer fabric softener sheets as screens for the bottom of my potted plants, keeps the dirt from falling out.

Also, any clay pots the get broken or cracked, I crunch up with a hammer (inside a plastic bag) and throw into the composters. Adds grit for drainage.

[Mikey]

Joanne: Yes, it sure disappears quickly.  Because of the unusual freeze we had recently I have had a lot of plant material to feed the pile.

Joyce: We keep a counter-top veggie scrap container as well.  Sometimes I empty it directly into the garden and other times I will toss the contents onto the compost pile.  I never thought of using dryer lint.....  Periodically the fetching one will swing by Starbucks and bring home several large plastic bags of coffee grounds and that stuff also makes great compost.

I had very few worms in the garden just a few years ago.  I then made a worm bin and put in about 20 worms.  I kept the bin in a bedroom and I fed all the kitchen plant material scraps to the worms.  In about a years time I must have had tens of thousands of worms.  I kept the bin going for about three years and every few months I would remove a pound or two of worms and put them in the garden.  When I re-landscaped the front yard I eventually emptied the bin, freeing a few pounds of worms into the garden.  Whenever I dig in the garden now I feel badly because I usually cut a worm in half......

[SheilaJ]

We do the same as Joyce, although I must admit that sometimes when the weather is just frightful (pouring buckets or solid ice) and the compost bucket on the kitchen counter is full, I just throw stuff in the trash until I can get outdoors again. I dump all my used potting soil in there too.

I have two of the plastic covered bins, one cone shaped and one box shaped. They work well, not too fast, but I rarely stir them. I don't need a ton of compost, so the input and output is just about right for me. I left the door off once for a couple days in the summer, and next time I visisted a RAT ran out of there - scared the crap out of me. Yuck...

[Joyce]

Sheila, we have an attached garage, and on those cold days,
we dump the kitchen counter composter into a 10 gallon bucket in the garage.
That way I don't have to brave the elements.

I just potted up some spring bulbs, and did that center-island-in-the-kitchen-potting-bench technique.

[SheilaJ]

Joyce, good idea about the bucket in the garage! Maybe once I get all my plant supplies out of there I can sneak one in while the dh isn't looking...

Ever since we built my potting bench (kit was an Xmas gift), it's been cold as h*ll and I'm dying to use it! I really hate the kitchen method because I always make such a hideous mess.

[LeeAnne151]

I need to buy a countertop composter, we use an old Tupperware container and admit that when it is pouring rain, we dump stuff in the garbage that we shouldn't. DH would never stand for a compost bucket in HIS garage but I could keep a full one in the laundry room. Maybe I need to buy two.

Lee Valley Tools has a nice one, cheap. It is plastic, not a good looking crock but I'd stick it under the sink so that doesn't matter. The good looking ones are expensive and don't hold very much. Although I could get one good looking one and one plastic one......

We have to buy composted yard debris, never can make enough but we pay the smallest fee possible for our home garbage collection and recycle everything possible. It is very cheap to get a pick up scoop of the yard debris so it is fine if our composters never produce tons. As long as they keep digesting the waste it is fine with me. Our garbage hauler picks up a 32 gallon sized can of yard debris twice a month for free too.