Composting Recycled Garden and Kitched Waste

Materials: kitchen vegetable waste (do not include milk products, meat bones or products, pet or human feces, or woody material like bark, wood chips, or woody branches), plant material gleaned from pruning and weeding your plants that is no longer than a foot long--you can cut it up with pruners or a sharp knife, lawn clippings from lawns that do not use weed and feed, leaves from deciduous trees--shredded by a lawn mower or shredder if large leaves the size of your hand, small leaves are perfect as is, shredded paper from grocery bags that use soy inks for bag printing--check with the store, seed meal.

1. It's best to start this process in the fall, when leaves are falling and you have vegetable plants and perennial flower plants that are done in the garden. You can simply make a pile of ingredients; if you live in the city, you will want to put some type of small fence or wire fencing ring around it to keep critters out.

2. Start with the bigger, bulker vegetable remains, and kitchen scraps and put it on the bottom of your pile. Next put shredded leaves and shredded grocery bags on top of the veggi remains. If you wish a faster end product with higher nutrients for use on vegetable beds, add some seed meal, like cottonseed meal, here. Finish with a sprinkling of soil over the whole pile.

3. Continue in this fashion until you have used up all of your leaves and kitchen/vegetable waste. Your finished pile should be no bigger than five feet long and wide, and five feet maximum tall. It can be smaller if you have less material to compost.

4. If you live in a rainy climate, let it get rained on. Otherwise, use your garden hose to dampen the pile as you construct it to the wrung-out sponge stage of dampness. Those in rainy climates would want to cover the pile, after it is good and soaked, with a large tarp over the winter, to keep all of the good nutrients from leaching out of it due to excessive rain washing it out.

5. You want the largest stuff that will take the longest to break down in the center of the pile, which is the warmest part and most active. As the weeks go by, you can turn the pile-use a garden fork to mix up the pile and put the top layer on the bottom--to speed up the process, or simply leave the pile alone and it will do its thing without your help at a slower rate. You can continue to add kitchen vegetable scraps to your pile, so long as you fork off the top layers of the pile, put in the new kitchen waste, and then cover it again with the top layers to avoid attracting critters.

6. It's also a good idea to store a pile of leaves somewhere out of sight in the garden in the fall. Save these for spring, so you will have some materials to start another compost pile then.

7. If you start your pile in the fall and don't turn it, you will still have some finished compost on the bottom of the pile by spring. You move the top part of the pile out of the way, and shovel up the finished compost. You can use partly finished compost to mulch flower beds, if you cover it with some top soil. It will just finish composting in your flower bed.

8. You can put weeds on the pile, but avoid weeds that spread by runners and running roots like quack grass and avoid weeds that are in flower, so you don't get weed "starts" or seeds in your good compost. These nasties go in the trash can. Or, if you have room and a lot of nasties, you can make up a rough compost pile of the nasties, let them compost and reduce in size, then put it in the garbage can.

**You can never have too much compost if you have a garden. Use any of this on flower beds; use only high- quality compost on vegetable beds, that will produce food that you will put in your mouth and digestive tract. Steve Solomon has written a definite book on composting suitable for vegetable beds called Organic Gardener's Composting, Portland: Van Patten Publishing, 1993. It includes a complete organic fertilizer recipe that I use constantly in my garden. For more information locally about composting, check out Clark County Master Composters/Recyclers (360) 397-6060, or Metro People Places, Open Spaces in Portland.**

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