The Abbott Family Blog

When I first began composting years ago I used a grinder to chop up everything so it would heat up quickly and ‘get done’. Silly me, and what a racket that grinder made. I can still hear that 10hp engine. Fortunately the wisdom of laziness came my way and I sold the chopper and just began throwing stuff onto the pile. Low and behold, nature knew what to do without my ‘help’.

Well, I do help out a little…

I stack the stuff neatly, especially the ten-foot-tall pile under the tree so it won’t fall over. I pee in a jug at night and pour that on it to help the bacteria, nutritionally speaking. Then I just wait. Most everything returns nicely to ‘earth’ in a year or so.

Our garden compost bin is a 4′ x 6′ area surrounded by stacked concrete blocks which we stack higher as the volume increases. We keep it covered with a sheet of plastic to keep moisture in. The earth worms are especially fond of the paper boxes. The meal worms enjoys the more succulent garden refuse and the mushy kitchen stuff. The mice do the best they can, what with watchful cats hanging around.

The tall compost pile, under the tree, is a free standing ’structure’ self supporting as long as I lay it up with some due care and not just blithely toss stuff into a pile. It is amazing to see how it shrinks down, given all the course branches and such I pile on. It will be 10′ when I’m finished piling the current clippings on. Then in a month or so it will shrink down 4′-5′. I do water it and pour a few gallons over it once in a while, usually when the neighbors are at work (the pee attains a pretty ripe smell). Then the winter rains come along and finish it off. By the way, this pile is under our avocado tree which keeps it well shaded (important). The ladder in the picture is for climbing into the tree to get those avocados and also for climbing up the compost pile to stomp it down.