Compost fertilizer in the yard.

[DavidV]

I have a large compost pile. We've been cooking it for a couple years all pretty much in the same heap. Any vegetable, bread, fruit, ....basicly any noin meat waste goes into it if it will rot. Coffee grounds, egg shells. Grass clippings and ground leaves go in not all of them. much of the leaves are spread as mulch each year and the grass clippings only go in if I'm closer to the mulch pile than the woods on the other sides of the yard. In the past I've used the compost when I plant something ....I'd mix it with the dirt a little bit.

Today I screened three full wheel barrels full and spread it around the front yard.it made my compost pile smaller and I figure it will enrich the soil of my front yard. Basicly it just looks like rich dark dirt. I wonder if it's likely to burn the grass at all.

 

[Eric Johnson]

Compost is completely safe for all plants; it won't burn anything. As it rains, most of the goodies will wash down into the soil and help fertilize the lawn. You can just rake whatever is left up and toss it back on the compost pile for further cooking, or it will pretty much disappear once you run the mower over it.

I mulch pretty much all of my garden a couple of times during the growing season with screened compost. It discourages weeds, keeps the moisture in the ground, provides nutrients when you water or it rains, and helps build the soil when you turn it under at the end of the season. You cannot go wrong with compost, IMO.

 

[keyman512us]

Eric?
Do you compost any of "your tree waste" (chips particularly)??

A friend of mine (in the business) "screened his pile this past summer"...over 480 cu/yds. worth of "soil"...just wondering how many "other tree guys" do "dirt farming" so to speak.

 

[Eric Johnson]

You can compost anything organic, but wood fiber takes a lot longer. What I do when I have bark or other woody stuff is create a separate pile that can sit and do its thing for a few years before I add it to the regular compost pile. If you have a really hot pile, usually containing grass clippings, leaves and kitchen scraps, you can get away with tossing a little sawdust into the mix. But as a practical matter, wood just gets in the way, since everything else cooks down a log quicker.

When I have a lot of chips or sawdust, I generally put it in the asiles between the raised beds in my garden. They provide a nice surface to walk on, help the garden retain water, provide a haven for worms (for some reason), and eventually become soil.

 

[smirnov3]

One thing that you can use wood for in gardening is 'bio-char' apparantly this is an old (ie 500 years) trick from South America that has just been re-discovered. In the amazon, the rain usually washes all the fertilizer out of the soil in 1-2 years, so the farmers have to refertilize (using slash & burn) almost annually. But the areas with Biochar stay fertile for decades, possibly centuries.

What you do is you mix throughly charred wood chunks with compost or fertilizer. Not only is the wood porous, but it's also 'sticky' for the good stuff in compost, so that the nutrients seep in & slowly leak back out.

If you have problems with fertilizer washing away (ie lots of rain, or a steep grade), this is the way to go

 

[DavidV]

As a note...do not put the burned up stuff in the compost untill you have screened it. It will kill the worms and change the ph dramatically.

 

[sgcsalsero]

Doing some leisure reading in front of the insert and came across "BioChar" - - figured it would have been discussed here so bouncing up an old thread. "Terra preta" is the Portuguese name for an ancient amazonian indian practice of enriching their soil. Some prominent environmentalists (e.g. tim flannery) and soil scientists are very excited about the three prong potential of it (as a fuel, enriching the soil, sequestering carbon). To do it right though requires pyrolysis, not familiar with this.

For my own part, I'll be less concerned about burning everything down to ash since a little "char" thrown into one of our compost piles, which end up being incorporated into our soil, would seem to be a good thing.