Compost harvest a fruitful garden event

One afternoon last week, Marjorie and I worked in the new strawberry beds that she planted in the spring. As I harvested compost to spread between the plants, she pruned away their runners, part of a new method of strawberry production in Marjorie’s garden, one designed to conserve space by growing the mother plants close together in each bed and squelching their natural tendency to produce runners. Next year’s strawberry harvest will tell us if this works – it’s the compost harvest that I want to talk about now.

I am a serious but lazy composter. For example, I use a three-pail system to handle kitchen waste, a system that is particularly useful during winter, reducing the number of trips to the frozen compost pile to one or two per month.

Three 5-gallon pails sit side by side in a corner of the kitchen, their covers tight. One contains potting soil mixed with an equal volume of perlite and a handful of lime. The other two are composting pails. I cover a week’s worth of kitchen scraps with a thin layer of the soil mixture, continuing this process until the first pail is full, then set it aside and start on the second pail. When both pails are filled, I trudge through the snow with the first pail to the compost piles at the back of the garden, dump its partially composted contents on one of the piles and cover the new addition with a layer of mulch straw.

This is an amazingly effective composting system. By the time both pails are full, the contents of the first pail are well along the journey to compost. In March we can transfer the pails to the back porch, so they take up kitchen space only during the coldest months.

I never turn our two compost piles, never give a minute’s thought to their temperature, carbon-nitrogen ratio, or moisture level. I add kitchen scraps and garden waste to the top of the pile that has shrunk the most since my last visit, adding a layer of straw or garden waste over the top of anything particularly smelly and likely to attract the local skunks.

Obviously, harvesting finished compost is not an annual event in Marjorie’s garden. In fact, I had lost sight of actually producing usable compost and viewed the process as an environmentally sensible alternative to tossing banana peels and coffee grounds into the trash. But then came the summer rains and the resulting shortage of mulch straw.

Lacking material suitable for covering kitchen scraps, I resorted to using the material on the top of one pile to cover the fresh scraps dumped on the other. Day by day, one pile grew as the other shrunk. This went on for a couple of weeks until I realized that I was covering the scraps with finished compost formed over time in the lower half of the shrinking pile!

It was a proud moment indeed when I announced to Marjorie that we could harvest compost for the first time in several years. Grinning from ear to ear, I made her a gift of the dark brown material that looked and crumbled in our hands like chocolate cake.

And at the end of the afternoon, when all four strawberry beds were mulched between their plants with the dark crumbly compost, I felt like a truly accomplished gardener. Next spring, as I bite into the first just-picked strawberry, I will remember the harvest just finished and know the full satisfaction of that accomplishment.

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