Lazy composting

 I'm a lazy, but diligent, composter. My mantra seems to be "why do more work than is really necessary?" Composting just happens. Organic materials break down, and so when we decide to compost, we just make decisions on where we want to have this happen, how involved we want to be with it, and how we want to extract the finished product (what we call "compost). But it does its own thing, so there shouldn't be any pressure around this -- unless you are keen on having compost as fast as you can get it -- and then you can turn composting into a competitive sport, if you want to.

So here is what I find works best for me:

Passive composting

I have two piles at the back of my garden -- in the photo, the main one is on the left, and a smaller one is up on the end of a raised bed (right.) I have a bucket outside near my kitchen door, and I have a container on my kitchen counter. When Karl or I have vegetable or fruit scraps, tea leaves, coffee grounds, or egg shells, they go into the container. Then I dump the container into the large Menards bucket outside the door. When the bucket gets full, I bring it to the compost pile and dump it over. After every bucket dumped, I through leaves on top of it (I collect leaves in bags every fall from neighbors to use for this purpose and for mulching.) I also toss plant debris in the compost pile from the garden -- such as rhubarb leaves, and dead plants* after a killing frost in the fall.

When one pile gets full, I start on the next pile. But the time the next pile is full, the bottom half of the first pile should be composted, so I move the top of the first pile into the second pile and dig out the compost and put it around my garden beds. And that is pretty much it. I find that layering a bucket of food scraps (no animal products except egg shells) and dried leaves will give me decent compost, even if I don't turn it. Moving the top layer of a compost pile into the bottom of the next compost pile to form the base also seems to work well. It seems to me that the faster-to-biodegrade materials sink and "cook" and the larger, woodier items rise to the top, so you end up with a top crust of plant stems. These need to be composted longer than cooked squash skins, for example.

Winter composting

For me, it isn't a big deal to keep composting in winter. I have several 5-gallon buckets that I keep not the patio turned upside down. Stacking these is a bad idea because they freeze together in the winter, and if they are upright, they fill with snow and often freeze and then you don't have much room for scraps. So once a bucket is filled, I move it out into the yard (which is usually 2 feet deep in snow) and fill another bucket then another until we have a winter thaw when I will go out and wade through the remaining snow and dump the buckets out into the compost. I usually don't worry about adding leaves until spring.

If the rabbits get into the veggie scraps in the buckets or in the compost during th winter, I don't sweat it. They generally leave a pile of droppings behind, which is some of the best fertilizer there is, so it is a fair trade.

*any plants that seem like they have powdery mildew or blight of some sort do not go in the compost pile. I typically burn or throw away tomato and squash vines.

Vermiculture

I should also note that I have a large plastic container of worms in the basement that also do composting year-around for me. I will go into more detail about that in a future post