Composting - it’s never enough!

This is the one thing that’s kept me from trying hot composting: seems like a lot of work for a little bit of “black gold.” To be honest, I’m sort of lazy—so I usually get organic matter by appropriately lazy cold-composting methods. I find that well-rotted wood chips are a great mulch and soil builder. Whenever tree trimmers are working nearby, I try to snag a load, which I leave to mellow for a year or two before using. I also save all fall leaves and let them break down over the winter and early spring. They not only serve as a great garden and orchard mulch, but they also continue to compost after application and so build soil over time; they also seem to feed the plants they’re applied to that season—perhaps something to do with the release of humic acid and other substances. Sweet taters absolutely love a thick mulching with rotted leaves!

And though it’s not exactly compost, one rotting thing I’m a firm believer in is comfrey tea. Melons especially seem to respond well to a good drench or two with it. Bonus: it’s dirt cheap, unlike most of the commercial organic liquid fertilizer products. (And your neighbors will looooove its signature bouquet! :grinning:)

Edit: Of course, cover cropping/green manuring is another way to simplify composting/soil building!

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i also make comfrey tea and chop and drop my comfrey around my trees and bushes. its also great to get a new compost pile to break down quicker. bought a small hand scythe to make the job quicker. i let it grow until the flowers turn dull, then i chop. get 2 harvests this way and the bees get a chance to get the nectar.

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Another believer in comfrey tea! I also use a variety of other dynamic accumulator type plants in these anaerobic brews…

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me too! i have borage , dandelion and nettle i throw in there also. just not as much as comfrey. i find a little blackstrap molasses helps the process along and ands trace minerals. :wink:

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We have mountains of wood chips we use for lots of purposes including as bedding in the barn in inclimate weather…not as soft as straw, but dry and much better then cold wet muck. When we clean the barn we pile it, and the added urine and manure hastens the breakdown.
Hubby would like to do more with worms, but we have huge numbers of them in the piles naturally, and the smart chickens harvest them in winter months.

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We have a large pile of manure from the neighbors steer by the big garden which we turn with the loader. Closer to the house I have a smaller compost pile where the kitchen scraps and pulled weeds from the kitchen garden and ornamental beds go. I built a sifter for the smaller pile that fits inside our garden cart. I shovel the compost onto the screen (1/2" hardware cloth) and slide the sifter back and forth and then dump the debris that won’t sift through. Works well and gives me a nice compost to spread. I built it out of 2"x6". The only change I may make is to make it deeper as some compost falls over the top edge as I shake it back and forth.

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If you are looking for wood chips you could always try a website like chipdrop. It is basically a service where you put your name in and you get on a list that local arborists can access and it gives them permission to dump all kinds of wood chips at your location. Check it out. I have no affiliation with them. However I have put my name on the list to try to get a load of free wood chips delivered, but apparently I am too far out of the zone of most of the tree companies that want to dump free wood chips. I do have a local Tree Service about 2 mi away from my house, but they charge about $70 for I think it is about 9 yards of wood chips. I have bought from them in the past, but they are a pain in the butt to work with since wood chips is not their main business, my requests don’t normally get answered in a timely manner. Oh well you can’t win them all.
Oh, and I do also have a municipal compost site that sells compost. They collect all the leaves and debris from around town and compost it and then sell it back to the local community. The price of the compost is rather inexpensive, however to have them deliver to my address cost about $65 per trip and their trucks Can Only Hold about 6 yards. So it cost me about $130 to get 6 yards of compost. Of course if I wanted to go and get it myself with my pickup truck, it would be cheaper, but it would take a heck of a lot longer.

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