Tag: Kitchen Scraps

Gardening

The Black Gold of Gardening

by shannonleger
The Black Gold of Gardening

Hey y’all! It’s been a hot minute! I have honestly never been so busy in my life! Between kids school projects, general family life, the blog, the chickens and the coop construction and a few other things I’ve been working on…..it’s just nuts. In a good way! Don’t you love being busy? For me, I’m at my best when busy. Things start getting a little off center for me when I have too much time on my hands. I tend to be a deep thinker which isn’t all bad but it can get to be too intense when I don’t rein it in and it can lead me to not feel my best mentally.

This past weekend I decided to work on our compost bin. We’ve increased our garden plot again this year and I want to make sure we have healthy soil not only this year but for years to come. One way to do this is by adding compost! It’s honestly the black gold of gardening. Other than seasoned manure it’s a top gardening “tool” you can use to ensure the success of your garden whether it be a veggie garden or a flower bed.

I’m all for saving a buck and stretching our budget as far as I can so maintaining a compost bin just makes sense! Why pay for it when I can make my own with a little work, some kitchen scraps, brown material from our yard and surrounding wooded area and some water. It’s one of those things that can seem intimidating but it’s really so simple once you get started! One of the best things for me is knowing that I’’m getting every bit of use out of the food I buy or grow in the garden. Any peelings, egg shells, tops of carrots, beets, rhubarb leaves, etc can go into the compost to create beautiful nutrient rich compost that can then be used to grow more amazing food! And it’s no additional cost to me other than my time. Would you like to create your own compost too? In a few simple steps, you will be well on your way!

Add 3-4 inches of twigs and branches on the bottom of your composter to allow for good airflow on the bottom of your pile. You can build a composter out of wood (use old pallets to save money – wood is exorbitantly expensive these days!) or your can purchase a pvc composter like the one pictured at a local home improvement store or online. Mine is a Garden Gourmet manufactured in Canada by Scepter Corporation. A fun side note: Notice the potato plant growing along the bottom edge of the composter. It’s deep green and robust. A few new little potatoes were sprouting from the plant when we dug it out of the composter! It’s had been under some other scraps we removed. Loving the environment it had already started growing from some potatoes I had thrown in there early in the spring. I transferred it to the garden and it will be a great (and early) producer since it’s had such a head start.
Added some additional kitchen scraps or green stuff as I like to call it. So technical I know! Green stuff can be peelings from fruit or veggies, egg shells, hair (non chemically treated), dryer lint.
Each time green material is added, an equal amount of brown stuff should be added. Here I go again with the technical jargon, LOL! Brown stuff is dry leaves, dried brown grass clippings, these dried up needles and branches from a Christmas arrangement.
Important to remember that each time waste and brown material is added, the pile should be turned. This will help with odours from scraps, flies, and ensure that waste gets hot enough to break down and kill off potentially harmful bacteria. I also add a layer of soil just to ensure things are well covered and add texture and additional nutrients to the pile.

To heat things up I added some fresh lawn clippings on top and mixed it in. Then I watered the pile. The key here is to water until you have a moisture level of a squeezed out sponge. Too dry and you will hinder the breaking down process, too wet will result in a soggy pile which also isn’t ideal for breaking down and creating that compost we want for enriching our gardens. We want the organic material to breakdown not “rot” into a big slimy heap of mess and stench.

Using organic matter such as compost, manure, cover crops in your gardens will greatly improve your harvest which is what every gardener wants! That’s success for a gardener and it’s a great feeling when you start to harvest beautiful fruit and veggies from your own garden. There’s nothing like it! Not in taste, nutrition and certainly not as far as your mental health! It’s a feeling of accomplishment after putting in hours of work planning, then maybe starting seedlings inside, finally sowing the garden, weeding, composting, and tending to each little plant for many weeks before harvest. It’s knowing you are providing for yourself and your family the very best nutritious food that you know is organic and therefore pesticide free. These days, it also means food security. Living through a pandemic and seeing the effects on our food chain…..all the shortages, whether it was from increased consumption (as in the great yeast shortage of 2020, haha!) or from delays in shipping (ill workers on farms or delayed transport due to restrictions) it really opened my eyes to what is possible and it quite honestly scared me. It’s a great feeling knowing I can go in my backyard and pick from a multitude of fresh produce all summer long to create meals for my family. I extend this availability by preserving some of it to get us through the winter months. I will share more in a future blog post on the art of preserving food through hot water canning. Stay tuned!

I truly hope this post has piqued your interest in composting and gardening and provided some good info you can use to be successful in both. I’d love to hear from you! If you have questions or comments or want to share about your composting or gardening adventures, please do so below! Take care and until next time, Happy Composting!