The 10-Year Rewind – Part 14 – Compost Recipe

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 13 is this one — Compost Recipe — from August 2009. It starts with a carefully styled photo of our vegie scraps bin, the kind of thing only a compost-maker would bother to do!

Last night we had some friends around for dinner and I cooked a Moroccan-style tagine recipe called 'Lamb Tagine with Seven Vegetables', served with couscous. So this morning my vegie scraps bin was almost looking photogenic, which is not the word you'd usually use to describe it! And the thought soon popped into my head that this would be as good a time as any to do a little blog on the recipe I use for cooking up compost here in Amateur Land.

There's all sorts of things in here: carrots, beans, onions, garlic, zucchini (courgette), pumpkin (no seeds though), turnips, chick pea husks, strawberries, scraps of mint, coriander and parsley, plus apple and pear cores, a banana skin, tea leaves, coffee grounds, etc.

And this is where it goes: into the tumbler bin. The problem with all these lovely scraps is that they are a bit wet, and also a bit acid, too. Hence the need for a compost 'recipe', as the vegie scraps are the things most commonly added to this bin.

Next ingredient: dry stuff, in this case two handfuls of sugar cane mulch, the cheapest and most plentiful mulch available here in Sydney. Sometimes, if I could be bothered, I use shredded office paper, but mostly I go for mulch, as it's in a big bag in the shed, about 10 feet away, and it's easy. Shredding paper is very boring, and I don't think it's as good as mulch at soaking up moisture, anyway. Dry leaves are another option, if and when you have them. So, virtually every time I add a bin of vegie scraps, I add a few handfuls of mulch, as well.

Next ingredient is a good heaped handful of dolomite lime. This 'sweetens' the mix, keeping its pH closer to neutral. Before I got onto using dolomite, my composts had alarmingly low pH levels, which acidified the soil here, which is inherently acid anyway. I don't add the lime every time I add a bin of scraps. About once a month seems to be enough. 

The next (and last) ingredient is air, and it's probably the most important one, in fact. I give the bin three or five spins, making sure that the end that was facing up prior to the tumbling faces down at the end of tumbling. (Not sure whether this hopelessly disorientates all the poor worms inside the bin! And there are quite a few in there, as I also add in a bit of worm-laden ordinary garden soil to help the whole composting process to get going.) 

Dolomite lime is readily available at any local garden centre here in Sydney. It's just crushed rock, and looks and feels like a soft yet grainy powder. As well as using it in the compost bin, I also use it in the vegie garden regularly, when preparing beds for planting (about a handful dolomite lime per square metre, mixed in with lots of compost and a handful per square metre of chicken manure). Dolomite lime also adds good amounts of magnesium and calcium to the soil, which is generally beneficial for plant growth and health. And, best of all, its action is gentle, so it's the stuff to use. It works slower than ordinary garden lime and it's unlikely to get you into too much bother if you're a beginner by either using too much or using it near the wrong plants. The only exception to that little comment is, of course, if your soil is already alkaline. You'd be mad to add dolomite lime, or garden lime, to already-alkaline soils. In Australia, acid soils are the rule in most areas, including mine, but alkaline soils are common in some areas around Adelaide and Perth, for example, where the underlying rocks are limestone. 

This is the alternative to dolomite lime: garden lime. It's faster-acting and stronger than dolomite lime, so you need to be more careful in applying it. It doesn't contain the magnesium that dolomite lime has, but it's loaded with calcium. I never add it to my compost bin, and I rarely use it in the garden, as it's a bit too heavy duty for my needs. 

So that's my el-basic compost recipe. 

kitchen scraps + mulch + dolomite lime + air

Mix, and repeat endlessly!

It was a dirty job, and I did it ...

And now, for my most irrelevant and deceptive opening photo to a gardening blog ...

Isn't this helleborus flower nice? It's a bit floppy eared and misshapen, but it is a new addition to our garden, springing into showbiz mode from a helleborus plant which just self-seeded into life in a new spot a year or so ago. Hellebores like to do this "traaa-daaa" stuff, and they are well-known for producing new, sometimes-wonderful and sometimes-weird, flowers from random seedlings.

Why is this irrelevant and deceptive? Well, it has nothing to do with compost, and that's what this blog post is actually all about. 

Last Saturday I spent more than an hour shovelling compost — lots of compost — from one bin to another. It was a dirty job, I was the only one prepared to do it, and it was all very worthwhile. Its main drawback as a blog topic is extremely ugly and dull photographs ... hence the helleborus to start ...

Pictured below is my ancient black "Dalek" compost bin now filled to the brim with beautiful, ready-to-use compost, which I made in my much more efficient tumbler compost bin.

Because you can spin it to aerate the compost, the tumbler bin breaks down the organic matter fairly quickly, but it's a devil of a job getting to the made compost inside the tumbler. So, once every 18 months or so, I do the "Big Transfer" job using a shovel and trug — and garden gloves — and all the made compost is moved over from the tumbler to the Dalek, where it is easy-peasy to scoop into a bucket and add to my vegie beds.

And now for an even more boring photo!

Here's the almost-empty tumbler bin, ready for me to add loads and loads and loads of clippings from the garden and vegie and fruit peelings from the kitchen. I always leave a small amount of made compost in the bottom of the tumbler as a "starter culture", as it has worms and all kinds of helpful bacteria down there that will multiply like crazy and get the composting process roaring along again.

And so that's what I did on Saturday. Nobody noticed, not even Pam, and when I pointed out to her what a useful job it was, she still wasn't especially impressed. Just another one of my peculiar enthusiasms.

I don't blame her. Compost is pretty boring, even if it is one of the most essential jobs you can do to improve your soil in the long run (not to mention earning brownie points for recycling, which I hope are eventually redeemable at Heaven's Pearly Gates).

Maybe I should see if there is a special society of unheralded compost makers that I could join? No, I'm sure they'd be really boring and would only want to talk about compost, which is too much for even me. I'm happy to talk compost once every 18 months. That's enough.

Next posting, I promise will have nicer photos and be about vegies and flowers, probably ... although I do have some thoughts on mulch I could share ...

Got it covered

Oh what a difference mulch makes! We've all been indoctrinated in recent decades to value mulch for its ability to disappoint weeds and to keep the soil moisture where it's needed around the plant roots, but today I looked back on a couple of hours of mulching (after a lot of planting) and the thing that really hit me was how much better a garden looks with a fresh layer of mulch. It hides all sorts of blemishes. And down at the landscape supply place it's clear that there's a couple of dozen different mulches to choose from. It actually took me a while to decide, too.

In the foreground, a fresh layer of fine
pine bark mulch around the purple patch
of lavenders and tibouchinas. Much better
looking than plain, dark brown earth. In the
background, the succulents' pebbly cover.

All the vegie/salad/herb beds are mulched with straw.
It's a nice farmyard look on the day it's laid down,
but this stuff breaks down fast, so it'll need topping
up in a month or so. No worries with that, as I keep a
big bag of sugar cane mulch in the shed for this routine
job, but that bag of mulch also comes in handy as a
magic ingredient in making compost. Every few days I
spin the compost tumbler bin, like a good boy should,
but before I do I add a very generous handful of straw
to the bin, which is mostly full of wet vegie/fruit scraps.
The dry straw balances out the wet-dry mixture, and
ever since I started this habit several years ago,
the quality of my compost improved enormously. 

This is just my excuse to run another photo of my pebbly
little succulent patch. All seems well here, in fact I am
sure some of them are showing signs of growth already.

I've used the fine pine bark mulch around
today's plantings of Lomandra 'Tanika'
(the low grass in front) and the Tiger
Grass behind. This 'Tanika' stuff is evergreen
so it doesn't go through a crappy looking
phase each year. It's almost indestructible,
and is often seen in traffic islands and other
very inhospitable spots. I want my garden to be
much lower maintenance, and I'm hoping that
the Tanika, backed by the bamboo-like tiger
grass, will be the least of my worries over
the coming months and years. Time will tell
whether this works or not. It almost feels like
cheating or laziness to plant Tanika – heck, we
keen gardeners are meant to take on impossible
challenges! Well, this keen little gardener with a
dodgy back is simply hoping for a lighter workload. 

I think I've got off track in this post... where was I? Oh that's right, mulch! Without me thinking about this fact too consciously, it has worked out that a key part of the design for this little backyard makeover is that it's the mulch which defines the various beds. Pebbles for succulents, straw for food plants, and the foliage-only and flowering plants are mulched with fine pine bark. Works for me.