Nevada
Composting
The Compost Pile
Well, here's nearly a years worth of composting. A whole summer of picking up green leaves from the old trees (which I had to cut down) and potato peelings and eggshells. I also threw in the ash from the charcoal grill. I did have two 33 gallon plastic garbage cans that I threw a lot of leaves into. I would spray them down with a hose, occasionally, but I could never be sure that they had enough moisture in them to be breaking down the foliage. I would try to stir up the contents with a pitchfork but the stuff was all fibrous and it wouldn't budge very much. Finally I decided just to dump them onto the pile i had in the side-yard. Pee-u! the bottom material was a bright "rust-red" color and smelled like cow-poop. I mixed it in with the drier stuff in the pile. I then rigged up an irrigation pipe that would keep the pile moist and would be easy to move out of the way when I wanted to stir up the pile.
Old text
These three trees were dropping pollen pods in the spring and leaves in the fall and twigs all year round, and that was when they were healthy. When they started getting sickly they dropped the pollen pods in the spring and twigs and leaves and now pieces of bark that were falling off the branches all year round. At least I had the good idea of using the hand Leaf-Vac to vacuum up all the leaves this past year, instead of bagging them for the garbage man. Bagging them (about 15 bags per season) meant that I had to pick them up by hand because if I used the leaf-vac they came out of the vacuum mulched and the bags would be too heavy and would keep breaking. So I decided to try composting again. The first time I tried it was when I first moved into the house but I didn't know what I was doing. I staked out a 4 x 4 area and strung up some plastic fencing, similar to the orange plastic snow fencing. I didn't know that you needed to keep the pile moist (which is something that you have to actively do here; you have to irrigate all your plants and you also have to irrigate your compost pile). I had this compost pile in the sunniest part of the yard and there were no water pipes nearby. When I finally moved the pile 2 years later it was still just a pile of leaves. I had found a suggestion on a gardening web page that you could compost in a garbage can and that seemed to be the best idea to me. You can move a garbage can out of the way and you don’t have to devote a portion of your yard to the compost pile. I had two spare ones left by the previous owner. They had a lot of holes in them which actually was perfect for their new use. I threw a batch of the chopped up leaves from the Black and Decker leaf-vac in. I managed to put all this seasons leaves into 3 piles, 2 of them being in these garbage cans. The overflow went into a small pile in my west side yard. I throw my potato peelings and my eggshells along with my coffee grounds. With no grass clippings to throw in won’t have much green material to balance out the brown items. I do have the vegetables that I buy and then don’t eat, however. A good compost needs some green material. Of course I won’t put the weeds that I pull up in because they tell you not to put in weeds that have “gone to seed” in a compost pile and I have no idea whether they’ve “gone to seed” yet. When I started these compost piles I had a lot of green material only because these trees were dying and were dropping a lot of their green leaves throughout the summer. It seems to be working. I have a big challenge keeping the pile damp enough, still. I’d do better to run an irrigation pipe to each of these things instead of watering by hand every time that I remember to do it.
All this stuff has broken down pretty much into this pile of dark earth that's about 20 cu ft, I guess.
