I HAVE COMPOST!!!!!!

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SQUEEEEEE!!!!!!

Who knew that one could get SO excited about a little bit of compost????

BUT.....

I have tried unsuccessfully to make my own compost for YEARS now.

Then, a little while back, I gave up and bought an actual "compost bin".

I thought that worst case scenario, the stuff I put into the bin would have to break down SOMETIME.

Or not.....  :-(

Now I will admit that I'm not the world's best gardener.

I like having the produce.

Not so big on the effort required.

I'm what you'd probably call a "lazy gardener".

So, had I made more effort with my compost, perhaps I would have had more success.

This morning, I opened the chute at the bottom of my compost bin and started pulling out some of the dried matter at the opening, pretty much in disgust.

Guess what was behind it?

COMPOST.  Beautiful, dark, moist, friable compost!!!!

I'm so excited!  Does that make me weird????  LOL.

It's making me get all enthused about gardening again.

International Composting Awareness Week

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May 3rd to May 9th is International Composting Week.

I had no idea there was such a thing!!! It even includes a compost ball. Who'd a thought? I clicked on it thinking it was some newfangled way to make composting easier. LOL. Turns out it's a real live ball. You know, with food and stuff and tickets that are outside of my budget, even if I was close enough to attend!!!!

There's a big push to encourage composting to reduce landfill and the greenhouse gas emissions that are produced as a result of green waste rotting in landfill.

Most gardeners compost because of the value compost has for the garden. It's nice to think though that such a simple act is helping the environment.

Then again, there isn't much about home gardening that doesn't help the environment is there?

I love that the fresh produce from our yard has no food miles attached to it.

Not to mention the freshness and taste.

Anyway, there are heaps of interesting events being held as part of compost awareness week. Pity I live too far away to attend any of them. :(

To celebrate compost awareness week, it would be great if you could share your favourite composting tip.

Mine is:

Feed your scraps to the chooks and they'll kindly turn it into eggs for you.

LOL. I can't say that I've really mastered the other kind of composting yet. But I will keep trying. :)

So, all you wise gardeners out there, share with me your favourite composting tip in the comments section below. :)

Compost

I gave in to my compost woes and bought myself a compost bin from Cheap as Chips. I listened to all the "experts" that say you don't need to go and buy yourself some fancy bin in order to make compost successfully. But having tried our own "homemade" version for a while now with limited success, I felt the $25 investment was worth it.

It's a fairly simple set up. A metal frame with a heavy duty plastic bag style liner. You put the stuff in the top and it has a little trap door at the bottom where you can remove the compost when it's ready.



I'm not sure how long it will last but for $25, I decided it was worth a go. If nothing else, it will help me decide whether it's worthwhile investing in a commercial compost bin (as opposed to our homemade efforts).

It fits between my 2 garden beds which is perfect for adding waste from the garden and not far to walk from the kitchen either. With chooks, we don't have a lot of waste for composting but I plan to do a big "shred-up" soon with some paper from the office and that can go in there as well.

Yesterday, when I lifted the lid, it had a real "sweet" aroma to it. PERFECT!!!! I'm pretty sure that's what compost is supposed to smell like so I was pretty excited by that. :-)

It's only a small start toward my eventual goal of producing all our own compost on site but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Compost

Yesterday we picked up a nice big trailer load of compost from a place in town. We're yet to master the art of making our own compost. Hopefully we'll get there one day....

In the meantime, we're able to get this stuff which grows fabulous produce (I bought some just before last summer) and doesn't work out too badly priced.

It's $80 for a cube (however much that is). We bought 1.5 cubes (or 3 front loader bucket loads) for $120.

One garden bed we're building up to a higher height. That has only had regular soil in it so far (topped with pea straw mulch) and is struggling to grow much at all. We'll add this compost to the top section and hopefully end up with a much more productive garden bed.

The rest will be used to top up the garden bed we built using this compost last year as well as perhaps setting up a dedicated strawberry patch (if we have enough left over).

Then I'll be able to get busy planting. I'm chomping at the bit to get going on the planting as summer crops probably should already be in by now. That's what happens when you take off for a few weeks.

The chooks got a lovely feed last night of the silverbeet and broccoli plants I pulled out of the garden. Happy ladies indeed and they'll turn that into lovely eggs for me. :)