An Extremely Crude Composting Process

I’ve been evolving a personally-adapted composting system for the past twenty years.  I’ve gone through a number of methods.  I’ve used and then abandoned power chipper/shredders, used home-made bins and then switched to crude heaps; I’ve sheet composted, mulched, and used green manure.  I first made compost on a half-acre lot where maintaining a tidy appearance was a reasonable concern.  Now, living in the country, I don’t have be concerned with what the neighbors think of my heaps because the nearest neighbor’s house is 800 feet from my compost area and I live in the country because I don’t much care to care what my neighbors think.

That’s why I now compost so crudely.  There are a lot of refinements I could use but don’t bother with at this time.  I still get fine compost.  What follows should be understood as a description of my unique, personal method adapted to my temperament and the climate I live in.  I start this book off with such a simple example because I want you to see how completely easy it can be to make perfectly usable compost.  I intend this description for inspiration, not emulation.

I am a serious food gardener.  Starting in spring I begin to accumulate large quantities of vegetation that demand handling.  There are woody stumps and stalks of various members of the cabbage family that usually overwinter in western Oregon’s mild winters.  These biennials go into bloom by April and at that point I pull them from the garden with a fair amount of soil adhering to the roots.  These rough materials form the bottom layer of a new pile.

Since the first principle of abundant living is to produce two or three times as much as you think you’ll need, my overly-large garden yields dozens and dozens of such stumps and still more dozens of uneaten savoy cabbages, more dozens of three foot tall Brussels sprouts stalks and cart loads of enormous blooming kale plants.  At the same time, from our insulated but unheated garage comes buckets and boxes of sprouting potatoes and cart loads of moldy uneaten winter squashes.  There may be a few crates of last fall’s withered apples as well.  Sprouting potatoes, mildewed squash, and shriveled apples are spread atop the base of brassica stalks.

I grow my own vegetable seed whenever possible, particularly for biennials such as brassicas, beets and endive.  During summer these generate large quantities of compostable straw after the seed is thrashed.  Usually there is a big dry bean patch that also produces a lot of straw.  There are vegetable trimmings, and large quantities of plant material when old spring-sown beds are finished and the soil is replanted for fall harvest.  With the first frost in October there is a huge amount of garden clean up.

As each of these materials is acquired it is temporarily placed next to the heap awaiting the steady outpourings from our 2-1/2 gallon kitchen compost pail.  Our household generates quite a bit of garbage, especially during high summer when we are canning or juicing our crops.  But we have no flies or putrid garbage smells coming from the compost pile because as each bucketful is spread over the center of the pile the garbage is immediately covered by several inches of dried or wilted vegetation and a sprinkling of soil.