A Post on Compost

I love the idea of having a compost bin in our yard.


Ours is made from 4 old pallets we were able to get for free from the dump. The premise seemed simple enough to us...throw in grass clippings, raked leaves, and all of our food scraps into this magical bin and in the spring we'll have homemade fertilizer for our garden. Right? Um...not really.

Kris opened up the bin this spring with the hopes of finding luscious compost to add to our garden. After digging through layers of rotting food scraps and leaves, he did find what looked like black gold at the bottom of the pile. He spread that all over our new garden bed. We were both excited to be able to contribute our own compost to the garden. What we didn't know, however, will haunt us for the rest of the summer.

Even though it looked like compost, nature apparently hadn't decomposed all of the seeds of everything we put into the bin (weeds, fruits, veggies). So instead of spreading what we thought was fertilizer over the soil, what we spread were hundreds (maybe thousands?) of seeds in the rich dirt...giving them the sunlight they needed in order to sprout again. So now our garden (which was supposed to be weedless) looks like this even before we've had a chance to plant our summer veggies...

(Those are supposed to be empty squares!)

Things I've learned about composting this year:

1. Don't put weeds in the compost bin!
   
2. You can't ignore the compost bin and expect to have fertilizer. It is apparently important to turn the compost over periodically to allow it to heat up and turn that stuff into compost.
   
3. One should sift their compost before applying it/ This might sort out some of the seeds and other chunks of non composted materials so that they don't go into your garden and sprout.
4. Don't use the compost until it is actually decomposed!

So my goal of having a weedless garden this summer is pretty much shot. I'm hopeful that once we pull all of these out, we'll be done with weeding. I can dream, can't I?