Compost, the Harbinger of Spring

It's been the third snowiest winter on record in our newest home state of Minnesota. It has been a persistently snowy April as well, with twelve inches of heavy wet snow on April 1^st, three more inches on the 16^th, and enough to cover the deck on the 22^nd. I suppose this persistent winter was why I was so excited last week to discover I had four buckets of lovely compost ready in the garage, just waiting to be added to my stock tank gardens on the back deck. Nothing shouts "Spring!" more than compost ready for the growing season.

I've always been a composter, with various piles and bins in each house we have lived in. In the early days of this blog, I published a post on composting in celebration of Earth Day. I've even had a compost pile be the selling point of one of our homes.* For years I had a decorative glass bowl sitting on the kitchen counter for coffee grounds, tea bags, vegetable scraps and other sundry organic matter waiting to be added to the outside compost pile as well as a vegetable garden into which the finished compost would make its way.

When we downsized from our last house to a townhome, I downsized my expectations of what vegetable gardening would look like, buying two 2 x 6 foot stock tanks to put on the back deck to plant all the vegetables I used to grow in the ground, just in smaller amounts. The stock tank vegetable gardens were a success, but I couldn't let go of the nagging thought that the soil wasn't good enough unless some homemade compost was involved.

In the middle of my first townhome growing season, Aldi, that purveyor of useful and often surprising seasonal items, had composters for sale. I had my doubts about it's usefulness. It was small, slightly below the minimum three cubic foot critical mass for good aerobic decomposition. But it was small and would fit in the garage, hidden away from our HOA. It was on a stand that allowed frequent tumbling, and it was inexpensive, becoming more discounted in the Aldi way the longer I procrastinated in my decision to buy one. I finally decided to give it a try, bought one, put it together and placed it in the corner of the garage.

Saving kitchen scraps for composting was such a long standing habit it was easy to slip right back into it. I found my decorative glass bowl for the kitchen counter and reverted to my scrap saving ways, though with some modifications. I opted not to add coffee grounds since our frequent coffee consumption would make for a very acidic compost which only a few of my garden vegetables would survive. Since the garage composter was small, I also decided to chop all scraps and garden debris into small pieces. Old floral bouquets that went from vase to compost pile now got cut into two inch pieces. I gave my visiting daughter a pair of scissors and a pile of end-of- season tomato and pepper plants and as well as old hostas and frost-killed annuals to cut up in bite size bits for quicker decomposition. Into the composter it all went.

Swiss chard, lettuce and peppers, Summer 2022

Roma and Patio Princess Tomatoes, Summer 2022

All that was needed now was some activator for the composting process. I've always used garden soil, but access to dirt is a challenge when living in a townhome. Our HOA religiously believes in landscaping fabric covered with decorative stones with an occasional shrubbery popping through. I do, however, have easy access to neighborhood trails that meander through woods and densely forested parks. I also have a husband that strives for 10,000 steps a day. All I had to do was provide him with a hand trowel, a sturdy ziplock bag for one of his walks and convince him that I just needed a few shovelfuls of dirt discretely taken from under the trees a few steps off the trail and into the woods. It was a bit harder than one might think. "Is this even legal?" I assured him that I'd come and bail him out if he got taken away for dirt stealing. I eventually got some nice humusy forest dirt and added it to my composter.

All fall and winter I continued to add organic matter and tumbled the contents with each addition. Yes, the compost did freeze – this is Minnesota – but the tumbling also allowed it to thaw quickly in the spring. About a month ago I stopped adding new material, putting the vegetable scraps in a temporary bucket in the garage, and continued to tumble the old compost for that month. Finally, not sure what I would find in the dark depths of the composter, I emptied its contents into a bucket and did it three more times for four buckets of beautiful black compost. Into the stock tank gardens it went, stirred into the existing soil. Soon after, I planted snow peas, spinach, purple top turnips and broccoli raab. Yeah, they did get snowed on by those late April snows I mentioned earlier, but cold weather crops that they are, they took it in stride and are now well above the ground and look happy in their composted soil. Ah, spring has truly arrived!

*For that story and more about my adventures in composting and how to build a compost pile, here's the blog post:https://marynapier.blogspot.com/2013/04/p-margin-bottom-0_22.html