Competently Composted

I love compost. Making your own dirt is oddly fulfilling. Thanks to the City of Austin's truly awesome single-stream recycling system and our own efficient composting system, we generate maybe one bag of trash per week. As far as I'm concerned, this makes me one of the leading environmentalists of our time. Maybe that's mild hyperbole, but the idea of generating so little landfill-bound waste feeds my green self-righteousness.

Here is our setup:

Unassumingly holding our kitchen scraps

1) We save kitchen scraps in our fancy bamboo container with anti-stink filter in the lid. Any fruit or veggie parts or scraps, eggshells, and, best of all, coffee grounds.

Soon to be compost

2) These scraps eventually make their way out to Outdoor Compost System (OCS) Phase I. Leaves and grass clippings also may eventually make it into this container if I happen to be willing to get them there, rather than letting the wind take care of things. Chicken coop hay also goes here.

Cutting-edge Outdoor Compost System (OCS) Phase I and II

OCS Phase I is all about layering. Chicken coop hay layer, kitchen scraps layer, grass and leaves layer, and so on. You can see pretty clearly how the closer you get to the bottom (and therefore, the older the decomposing organic medley) the more broken down the layers start to look, but it's not dirt yet. The idea here is to get a good balance of the stuff that soil needs be healthy - nitrogen and phosphates (chicken leavings and grass clippings), other trace ions and minerals (egg shells and kitchen scraps), acidity (kitchen scraps and coffee grounds), and carbon (leaves and hay).

3) Towards the end of the summer when OCS Phase 1 fills up and the summer heat has the microbes all wound up to break down all the materials, everything gets transferred to OCS Phase II. This is where the broken down mess actually becomes dirt. Thanks to my superior engineering skills, this transfer is easily accomplished. Pull up the stakes that hold down the container (simply made by wiring the ends of a fencing panel together to make something approximating a circle). And dump the contents into OCS Phase II. It's best to do this with many chickens around (and after a few drinks) because a lot of bugs, more than you can even imagine existing in the known universe, will explode out of the compost at this point. The chickens will be thrilled. Incidentally, the chickens are also wonderful compost turners and keep OCS Phase II nicely mixed year round.

4) Enjoy your homemade dirt.

Your moldy kitchen waste can become delicious soil in only a few easy steps

Occasionally, composting gives you little surprises. I'm sure you noticed the onions and potato vine growing out of OCS Phase I. These may or may not make it into the garden someday. The more interesting surprises come from seeds somehow surviving the composting process unscathed to grow plants in new places that you would never expect. Typically, I leave them where they sprout and if they make it, I collect the seeds to run a set of experiments I like to call "Semi-natural Selection by Jacob." Also, the random plants that are generally in completely inappropriate places contribute to the wabi sabi philosophy of my garden.

Can you see the tomato plants that sprouted in my flower bed?

Here they are, the Lonely Tomatoes