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Tag Archives: compost

Garden Compost

Every Spring, it’s a big project to move the finished compost to the garden beds and turn over last year’s accumulation of garden waste for next year’s compost. Sunday, despite forecasts of 30% chance of showers and some high winds, I was going to take care of the compost.

 

Getting started. You can see that the mountains are obscured by the ‘scattered showers.

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There’s my two-year-old compost. It filled the pallets a year ago.

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And that is last year’s garden waste.

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The whole setup is framed with seven pallets held together with baling twine from old straw or rotten hay bales.

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Beautiful compost! Gardener’s gold.

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My garlic was planted and mulched last fall.

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And it gets compost to get it through the growing season.

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With some help from Ken all of the compost is distributed to various garden beds and one flower bed.

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Here is a cross section of last year’s gardening efforts!

Shortly after this image, it began to rain and then it rained pretty hard. The wind blew and it snowed sideway too.

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Once the storm passed I returned to the compost project. Here I am getting through the hard part of turning it over and moving it. Also, I replaced the center pallet. It was rotting away at the bottom. There is old horse manure in the wheelbarrow that I layered in the pile. It will help it ‘heat up’ and break down.

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There it is finished. I topped it with some of the dead grass from our lawn mixed with some more manure.

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Next year’s compost!

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All tidied up and ready for more garden waste

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And the garden beds with the compost spread around and garlic mulched again. In the background you can see the beehives. Since it was so cold, they were not out and about.

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Compost – Brown Gold for Gardeners

The weather still feels like March around here – blustery with a constant threat of snow squalls or rain. Still, it’s time to work on the garden and pretend that Spring will be here before summer. It could be one of those years where the temperatures just get hot and stay there without a Spring reprieve from the extremes of heat and cold.

So despite the weather we we did a garden survey and decided that the raspberries we planted last year will need more room and soon, that is if we want to get lots of raspberries and of course, we do! So, where to put them? They are in the new upper garden next to the house, the one we created out of a barren lawn two years ago. The most logical place to expand seems to be the old lower garden on the hillside below the house. The plan is to sheet mulch the area to be added to the fenced garden this summer, put in the fence posts in the fall and add the fencing next spring, just in time to start the big raspberry move.

But first, there were two big compost bins that I had made out of pallets and baling twine the summer before last and they were in the way. So to begin with, I took out the ‘finished’ compost and spread it on the garden beds. What a lovely sight for a gardener – fresh compost – it just doesn’t get any better than that.

And then, I had to dismantle the bins and move the older compost to wait and continue to rot til next Spring.

 

The compost for next year looks really good on top of the pile but down inside there is still lots of work for the worms and other composting agents of the soil.

And I’ve already started on the pile for 2013!

The garlic got a good layer of compost and chicken manure and then I pulled last fall’s mulch back over it to help keep it warm for now and also to supress the weeds.

And it looks like we might soon have daffodils in bloom.