Once this batch dried out, we shoveled it up to the screen which was laid over a large trash can:

And then worked the compost through the screen:

Dylan was fascinated the whole time, of course:

I learned how to tell if my compost was too wet or too dry.

I learned that you can tell a lot by the smell of compost.

I learned that my little bins were not the ideal size.

I learned that you can’t really mess up compost.

When I moved to The Wallow, I made permanent space for my compost. Using pallets, I put together three bins on the east side of the barn.

Now that I’ve got a homestead, a lot more things go in the compost compared to when I was city-living. I shoveled a lot of pig shit last year, for instance. Chicken shit goes in there and the straw used for chicken bedding. Plus we have a lot more yard debris and the wood ash from heating with wood.

Every so often I turn the contents from one bin to another. The more often you turn your bins, the faster everything will process. I’m playing a long game here, though. I like to turn the compost so I can get a look at what’s going on in there, but I’m in no hurry so I don’t do it very often. Everything goes in the bins, and eventually everything comes back out as compost, but it doesn’t really matter to me how long that takes.

Eventually, gold:

This spring I screened one bin to remove any remaining big stuff, then used the compost in my garden box.

Composting might be my very favorite thing about living the hippie-country life. I collect leftover organic matter from around my life, snuggle it all together in one place, and a year or so later with hardly any help from me, what comes out is a thick, rich substance that helps create more life. It’s a peaceful, valuable, sustainable, magical process.

Some kinds of information sit well in my brain. When I decided I wanted to get pigs, I soaked up all the available information about pigs. I read books and websites and joined a discussion forum and gobbled up every detail. I know a lot about pig raising now, because most of the information stuck.

Gardening is a different story, though. When I try to learn about gardening, I just get frustrated. There’s too much information that I can’t remember. The details don’t fit together in a way that I understand. It just seems like a great big mess.

On the other hand, I like the idea of producing my own food. On some level, I want to garden. So I keep coming back to the idea.

Sometimes my hippie self gets mad at all the precision involved in gardening advice. There’s soil amendments and shade/sun considerations and fertilizers and seed starting and grow lights and companion plants and rotating crops and trellises and on and on. My hippie brain shouts, “Can’t I just stick seeds in the dirt?!”

A while back, I ran across the book Square Foot Gardening. This seemed to be right up my alley. The information is pretty straightforward, and the goal is to make gardening as simple, easy, and enjoyable as possible. Plus, the raised beds and square foot sections are pretty, which appeals to me almost more than the food.

Square Foot Gardening still included some ideas that offended my lazy-hippie brain. You’re supposed to make your dirt out of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. What is peat moss? Where does it come from? I don’t know. What about vermiculite? I don’t know. I just want to use dirt, dammit!

I do have a lot of compost, though, because that is near and dear to me. I absolutely love composting everything I can, smelling the composting goodness, watching as it all changes form, and running my hands through the resulting compost gold. Over the last month or so, I’ve been slowly screening my oldest bin of compost to get out the sticks, rocks, and occasional still-identifiable food part to leave only the finished stuff behind.

Joshua made me a garden box out of left over wood from the pig fence. I tried to paint it yellow, but the spray paint looked like crap on the rough cut wood, so I painted it with the leftover purple from when I painted our kitchen.

I absolutely refused to buy expensive dirt. I filled my garden box with top soil (the cheapest dirt you can buy) plus layers of my very own compost, watering a bit between the layers. I planted lettuce, spinach, broccoli, gourds, radishes, peas, kohlrabi, bak choi, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I didn’t pay much attention to how deep you’re supposed to put the seeds. I didn’t read up on whether these plants need full sun or shade. I don’t know how long they’ll take to grow or whether I was “supposed” to start them indoors three months ago.

I just stuck the seeds in my squares and then watered them.

It felt really satisfying to play in the dirt. It was fun to choose seeds. I was excited to put seeds in the ground. And now I’m delightfully curious to see what happens. Sometimes I have the idea that you have to know things in order to do things. I’m sure a lot of other people have this idea, too, and that gets in the way of actually doing things. How many years have gone by when I didn’t garden because I was intimidated by my lack of knowledge?

If nothing happens in my garden box, I’ll be out about $40. I used spare wood, leftover paint, cheap dirt, and some seeds, so my initial cost was pretty light. If something happens that’s not quite right, then I’ll learn as I go. I’ll make mistakes and make adjustments, and that knowledge will stick with me, because it will matter to my actual garden.

Whatever happens, I’ve already enjoyed my gardening experience, and it will probably only be more fun as time goes on. I’m so glad I abandoned the idea that I had to learn how to garden before just going for it!

How about you? Anything you’re not doing because you think you need to know more things first? What if you just went for it?

Or tell me about your gardening journey. There are so many approaches to gardening! I’m glad to have discovered my way of getting things started. What’s your way like?

Gardening Options

I’ve been working on planning my garden for next year. Now that we’ve closed on the Knoxville house, I expect to have lots more room to do up a garden proper. Or get in way over my head. Either way, I’ll be smiling.

Like any good geek, I started with a spreadsheet. Plants down the Y-axis and weeks of the year along the X-axis. Week zero is the estimated last-frost date for my region, and weeks are numbered plus/minus from there. The nice thing about this is that, if my zone changes, I can easily modify week zero and the other weeks will update.

I indicates that I start the plant indoors. G is the estimated germination. Green squares indicate that the plant is growing indoors as a starter. X is estimated transplant date. Yellow squares indicate that the plant is growing outdoors.

If you are interested in viewing this spreadsheet, you can do so at this link. For any gardeners who are reading, your feedback is welcome.

For most of the plants, I have identified a specific Seeds of Change item number that I will order, and I took the estimated dates from those items. I realize that this is an insane amount of detail, and actual results may vary, but I had so many things that I was planning to plant that I really needed some tool to get my head around them, or I would have absolutely no idea what to plant when.

Left of the plant names, I have columns that indicate the Seeds of Change item number, so I can easily compile an order later in the year. I’ve also estimated the number of plants I want to grow, recorded the recommended spacing, and then calculated the total square footage that will be required.

Based on that square footage, I estimate that I will need about ten 4′x8′ beds to hold all these plants, or the equivalent (4′x8′ is just a common size for a raised bed). I had originally planned to use raised beds, because they are similar to the container gardening that I have done until now, and they present various advantages, but they may turn out to be cost-prohibitive on this scale.

By my calculations, I could build five 16×4 raised beds using 2×12×16 boards for a cost of about $600. That breaks down to about $300 for lumber and $300 for 12 cubic yards of screened topsoil. That’s for treated pine boards (set aside, for the moment, the debate about whether it’s safe to use treated lumber in raised beds). Even treated boards will wear out and need replacing eventually if they are in contact with the soil, at considerable labor.

I found a design online at the Noble Foundation for corrugated sheet metal beds with rebar reinforcing. These would last essentially indefinitely, but would run about $800 including the soil. Even more expensive!

Given that it looks like raised beds will cost me $600-$800 right off the bat, I think I’m going to just see what I can do with the good old dirt that’s in my front yard. That’s too much money to spend on solving problems that I might not even have. I can always add raised beds later if I have poor results.

When we move into the new house in Tennessee, I’m planning to build a permanent compost bin. While we’ve been at our rental house in Atlanta, I wanted to compost, but also wanted to be able to keep it when we move, so I’ve been composting in garbage cans.

I started with a big trash can (I don’t remember the gallons, but it’s about 3 feet tall) with a good lid. I drilled holes in the bottom and sides for air flow and bug access. Then I started dumping in our waste.

Some things that DO go in the compost:

• Egg shells and cardboard egg cartons
• Fruit rinds, peels, seeds, and pits
• Veggie tops, bottoms, and wilted stuff
• Coffee grinds and our eco-friendly coffee filters
• Paper towels, cardboard toilet paper rolls
• Swept up random debris and dog hair

Some things that DON’T go in the compost:

• Meat, cheese, or any dairy
• Greasy or saucy stuff
• Bread, pasta, and rice are kept to a minimum
• People or dog manure

In addition to the kitchen and household stuff, which is mostly in the nitrogen/green category, I added yard stuff which is mostly in the carbon/brown category: dead leaves, pine straw, small sticks.

At one point my compost got maggots, which is okay and not a problem, but it is a signal that the compost may be too wet. I worked in a LOT more dried leaves than I had previously been using, and the maggots declined.

Another sign of a problem I enjoy looking out for is the smell. Apparently, contrary to popular belief, compost should smell good. It should not smell like a rotting mess. It should have a clean, earthy, dirt smell. During the maggot period, my compost smelled like shit. Literally. After working in more brown yard stuff, the smell came back to the pleasant earthy smell (with heavy coffee smell overtones!) I really love smelling my compost, both to check in on it and just to get a big nose-full of the earth-happy project I’m working on.

I’m up to two trash cans now, because the first one finally got full, and I’m letting it sit now and do its thing.

Stay tuned for more details of my composting as it moves to its new home in a permanent location and hopefully is ready for adding to the garden in the spring!