Do You Compost?

A couple days ago I wrote about my Gardening 101 class - the class with just one student, my hubby. I explained about the different types of plants and which ones will be back next year and which ones will be gone after the first hard frost.

In passing, I mentioned both our burn pile and our compost pile. You may be wondering why a Master Gardener has a burn pile when we promote composting so vigorously. It's a valid question and I'll have to admit to adapting the sustainable gardening rules to fit my lazy gardener lifestyle.

My first year as a Master Gardener was amazing: I weeded, mulched, fertilized, deadheaded, pruned and irrigated on an exact schedule.  My garden was perfect! Of course, it was also quite sparse since we hadn't lived in our house very long and the plants I could afford had huge spaces around them, waiting for plant sales to fill in the gaps.

Fast forward ten years.  Several trees have been planted, the veggie garden is filled to overflowing, the butterfly bushes reach higher than the windows and the birds have spread the sunflowers far and wide. Nowadays, I'm lucky to weed every bed every couple weeks and deadheading has moved lower on my to-do list.

Don't get me wrong, everything gets done but not on such a regular schedule and with a lot more time between each chore. And yet (!!) everything keeps growing (except the birch and two service berry trees that the beaver cut down and dragged away about 8 years ago...) and producing leaves, flowers, berries, low-hanging branches and, at the end of summer, frost damaged stems.

Since composting experts suggest chopping up large "yard debris", one year we used a chipper to break up all the branches. It wasn't such a bad idea but it didn't work on the hollyhock stems, the corn stalks or the sunflower stalks. So we used the material we chipped to mulch the flower beds and pushed the chipper into the back corner of the garage with the power washer and the snow tires.

And now my compost pile is built with fallen leaves, dried grasses and paper from the office shredder (the necessary "brown" or carbon part), deadheaded flowers and stems, cut back frost damaged plants, grass cuttings, kitchen waste and weeds that I've pulled before they flowered (the important "green" or nitrogen part). If I remember to keep the pile watered every couple weeks and turn it over every month or so, I'll soon have a rich smelling, earthy pile of humus to put back on the garden. It sounds a little barbaric, using this year's decomposed plants to feed next year's garden, but that's Nature, I suppose.

What's left? Well, I still need to get rid of those corn stalks, the spent hollyhock stems and the huge sunflowers after the birds have picked them bare.

I could cut them up and fill my trash with them (and they'll end up in the household waste section of the landfill, not the compostable yard debris section) but I hate filling up the dump with material I can take care of myself. So we have a burn pile.

Our soil here in Central Oregon is a mixture of many types, depending upon where you live. Generally, we have sandy, volcanic soil but some areas have clay. I've gardened in clay soil in the Portland area and if that was my current fate, I'd use my burn pile ashes to amend my soil and raise the alkalinity. But since I live in rocky, sandy soil, I use the ash to control the weeds in the outlying area of our property. Not a great solution but better than waiting a few years for the butterfly branches to finally decompose in a compost pile!

If you'd like to read more about composting, check out these sites and publications: http://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/intro.cfm
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1189.html
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/node/1070