Mucking around with compost this morning

[spinbaby]

I have a big messy cottage garden in front of my house—mostly flowers with a few herbs and vegetables mixed in. This year I’ve had some health issues, so the garden is rather messier than usual, although I have managed to keep it presentable. The parts of the yard that are not right out front have been sorely neglected. The compost piles, for instance.

This morning I finally felt up to dealing with the compost around back. The bin was partially filled with finished compost that needed only to be sifted before tucking it into the garden. To the right of the bin was a big pile of random compostable stuff accumulated this season—mostly weedings. To the left, a pile of last year’s compostable stuff, topped with a lot of brown matter—stems, twigs, dry leaves, that sort of thing. The brown matter hadn’t broken down at all because it was sitting dry on top, but underneath was a nice lot of partially done compost.

For once I decided to be organized about my piles instead of my usual method of random piling. I moved the finished compost to one side of the bin and started layering the other side using "proper" technique, which will theoretically lead to faster breakdown of the organic matter. I started with a layer of the dry brown stuff, then added a layer of freshly pulled weeds, then a layer of the partially decomposed compost. I’ll repeat these layers until I run out of stuff. We’ll see how it looks next spring.