Compost guarantees happy, healthy garden

Fall is the perfect season to make compost. Our gardens and lawns are still producing all kinds of leafy green trimmings and clippings. Overhead, the trees soon will be dropping all those leaves that shaded the garden during the summer.

Compost is black gold to a garden. It is a rich source of the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium that plants thrive on. It makes even the driest sand or gummiest clay beautifully crumbly, friable soil able to hold water better. A two- to three-inch layer of it used as a mulch helps block weeds from daylight and then sprouting.

Compost making starts with “green” and “brown” plant material, a little water and a space to set up your pile. Green plant material comes from fresh green garden trimmings, lawn clippings, weeds (without seeds) and kitchen vegetable trimmings. Brown material is basically dried plant material from fallen leaves, spent plant material from the vegetable garden and dried weeds and grass. Even a limited amount of pine needles can be used in the mix.

If you don’t have one or the other, it’s not hard to find a neighbor or friend who will gladly give you all you want. “I have a man who brings at least two trailer loads of leaves to me every fall,” says Mary Lou Oberlander who, together with her husband Russ, turns out about 10 yards of compost every year. On the other hand, Linda Rust, who composts on her small lot near Lincoln Heights on Spokane’s South Hill, has next-door neighbors who save up their leaves for her.

You do not need a huge amount of space to create compost.

“I don’t have room to do more than one bin,” Rust says of her small lot. A basic compost pile needs to be about three by three by three feet square, to provide the microbes and bacteria the critical mass of material they need to do their work efficiently.

Add a little space to work, and you have it.

A compost bin can be made of any material that will hold up a pile and is porous to let air through. It can simply be made of wood pallets found free near industrial areas, or of sturdy wire mesh. Or it can be a complicated contraption of barrels mounted on a frame, so they can be rotated periodically.

Finally, there are many commercially designed compost bins designed to look “pretty” (and are usually expensive).

Preparing the materials for the pile is probably the most exacting part of the process.

All the material needs to be coarsely chopped. This can be done by running the material through a chipper shredder or mowing over it with the lawn mower.

If all else fails, some folks have been known to lay their dry brown material in the driveway and run over it with the car.

Remember to throw seedy weeds in the trash and never add meat, dairy or cat or dog droppings to the pile. They smell, draw unwanted animals and can harbor disease.

Begin by adding green and brown material in a ratio of two parts brown to one part green, as in two pitchforks (or buckets or wheelbarrows) of brown to one of green.

“If you have to, you can use a half and half mix,” says Oberlander.

If the pile starts to smell, you have too much green material. If it doesn’t seem to be breaking down, the pile is too dry or there is too much brown material.

Mixing it together gives the microbes the best possible source of food to work on. As you are putting the pile together, soak it with water to the consistency of a wrung-out sponge.

You don’t need to add fancy additives to increase the productivity of the pile.

Now stand back and watch. Within a few hours, you should be able to feel some heat if you put your hand into the pile.

Within two days, the temperature inside the pile should reach 140 to 160 degrees, enough to make the pile steam on a cool day and cook most weed seed and bugs.

This happens because the bacteria start eating the material and generate heat in the process. As the temperature rises, different bacteria join the process.

Once they have eaten all the available food, the pile will begin to cool down, usually after five days or so.

You can track this process with a compost thermometer (a thermometer with a long measuring shaft) available at garden centers or improvise.

“The first year I made compost, I didn’t have a thermometer so I wrapped my oven thermometer in plastic wrap and used that,” Rust says with a laugh. Gardeners are a resourceful lot.

Now, if you want compost in a hurry, you will need to turn the pile when the temperature drops to about 100 degrees. This may take about a week.

Fold the outside layers of the pile into the center of the new pile. Moisten the pile as you turn it.

If you do everything right, you can have a finished batch of compost in about a month to six weeks. Piles hold enough heat to keep working through the winter.

If you don’t need or want the compost right away you can just let the pile be, and eventually it will break down. Some people keep adding material to their piles, and when they need some compost, they dig into the pile. They may never formally turn a pile.

“Composting is as simple or complicated as you want to make it,” says Rust.