JILL SEVERN'S GARDENING COLUMN

Making your own compost pile

Posted

If you have a lot of space, composting is easy: you make a big pile of all your chicken or livestock manure, straw, kitchen scraps, weeds, grass clippings, and other garden debris, water it down, and cover it with a tarp. A couple of months later, you take off the tarp, turn it over, and cover it up again. Then you start a second pile, and a few months later, a third. You keep turning them and making sure they don’t dry out.

In a year – and often even less – that first pile has turned into rich dark compost, ready to enrich your garden soil. And as you continue to rotate through those piles, you keep that cycle of vegetative life, death, and rebirth going with nothing more than a pitchfork and tarps.

In the city, though, it gets more complicated. Smaller spaces require more compost engineering – often bins instead of piles, often made from wooden pallets tied together. (The plastic ones are rarely satisfactory.)

The handy alternative is stuffing your compostables into a big green bin that gets picked up every other week. That’s what I’ve been doing since a colony of rats found my hidden backyard compost piles a comfy nesting place, close to the chicken feeder where they dined. (Since then, I bring the chicken feeder in at night and lock it away.)

This week, I finally found out where the contents of that big green bin go when I visited Silver Springs Organics in rural south Thurston County. It was started by a local guy but is now a subsidiary of one of the three largest waste management companies in the United States.

It’s high-tech composting on a giant scale: A five-acre, open-sided building, with a cement floor filled with air ducts that oxygenate immense piles and control their digitally monitored temperature. The piles get hot enough to kill e. coli and other toxins. Giant machines move and turn each pile once every 15 days to produce finished compost in 45 days.

I found the sight of those enormous steaming piles of organic wonderfulness thrilling. I wanted some.  But Kris Adair, the site manager says that none of it is sold locally to home gardeners except by Old Town Bark in Rainier. Some are donated to local community organizations; the rest goes to big, wholesale buyers like commercial landscapers and the Department of Transportation, which uses it in roadside plantings. Adair does, however, confess to using it on his own rhododendrons, with exuberant results.

He also explains how hard it is to remove the duct tape, bits of plastic, and other forms of garbage that get into peoples’ big green carts.

That includes plastic cutlery that is labeled compostable but would take much, much longer to rot. Adair would also rather not have our pizza boxes, or our paper towels and plates. “We applaud the effort, but in our system, we just want what comes from your garden and your food waste,” he says.

According to Adair, there are more land-intensive and much slower composting operations in Eastern Washington where the paper products and compostable plastic might have a year or more to break down, but none this side of the mountains.

So . . . send your compost to Silver Springs, or keep it at home?

Maybe some of both. The woody branches that need to be ground up before they will compost and the food waste that rodents might like could go in the bin, but the smaller, non-woody garden stuff could stay home. Anyway, that’s my current idea, but I reserve the right to change my mind if I see any tell-tale tunnels in my compost pile.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com

Comments

2 comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here

  • Drutty

    Thanks for the info. "Food" for thought!

    Friday, February 4, 2022 Report this

  • RuthApter

    Since rats are present all around Puget Sound I use 2 plastic composters and one worm bin. All work well and keep my compost away from rodents. It is definitely possible to compost in an urban area. Worm bins can be used inside apartments.

    Sunday, February 6, 2022 Report this