My Baby, My Compost Pile

My compost pile is like a baby (without the midnight feedings!).  I tend it carefully, make sure it's fed and warm, that it has a drink now and then, that it doesn't need changing, and when the time is right--when it has proved itself to be ripe and mature--it is released to do some good (I spread it around the garden).

I started composting in Meridian Idaho--we lived there 1978-1984.   We had a half acre with 12 fruit trees, grape vines, and a very large garden.  I subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine, and read it cover to cover every month.  They often talked about this thing called composting, new to me.   I gave it a go.  Our first compost pile wasn't contained.  It was just the place we piled garden waste.  We weren't religious about putting fruit and vegetable scraps in the pile, but then, we had a 3 very small children to tend and other things to think about.

When we moved to our current home we established a garden spot and the compost pile was still only a pile for our waste, which I would turn once in a while.   I never knew there were actual containers you could use to enhance compost development, until about 25 years ago.  Metro (a local government entity) began selling Earth Machines for about $25.  I have 2.  In theory I would be adding to only one at a time while the other stewed and cooked the compost undisturbed.   But we have a huge amount of waste to add, so they both get fed until once a year--in spring--I back off feeding one of them for a month so it can finished "cooking" and be spread soon.

the earth machine (not my photo)

In the fall I add tons of cut up cornstalks, bean vines, pumpkins, and leaves (mulched or not) along with our regular kitchen waste and weekly grass clippings.   Kitchen waste is more bulky when we have corn cobs or grapefruit rinds, so those I quickly cut up with scissors when they go in the kitchen bowl. Any time of year I add cuttings from plants.

Successful compost requires some balancing between carbon and nitrogen.  Never put in a weeks' worth of grass clippings (nitrogen) without balance from kitchen waste and carbon brown matter.  You'll end up with a reeky mat of slimy grass.  If I'm short of brown matter such as leaves I can tear up paper bags and egg cartons or shred newspaper, and adding a shovel full of soil helps too.  If I have too much grass, some gets stirred into the compost bins and the rest spread between garden rows to keep our shoes from getting muddy.

Never add bread or meat.  Meat will attract raccoons, possums, and worse.  Bread gets gross and mushy.  No branches or heavy woody stuff or weeds.  Just about anything else goes!  I'm such a compost nerd that I have been known to bring empty plastic bags to a picnic and take home the melon rinds or other organic stuff.  I bring compostables home from my son's house.  And I have picked cores, peelings and rinds out of peoples' garbage to bring home to feed my baby,  my compost pile . . .

 Composting is super satisfying for these reasons:

• something from nothing (in other words, you create valuable fertilizer from stuff you would otherwise throw away)
• reduces garbage by a whole bunch
• I become a scientist by balancing ingredients to create the ideal reaction, and watching it change almost right before my eyes
• worms are my new best friends; they eat the kitchen waste and poop out fertilizer

Where To?

We "re-modeled" our backyard in 2011 and since then have added some fun things, like 2 arbors for climbers to drape over, a shed, and a few odds and ends.   This spring I was over at the Imbrie House [a nearby  1866 Italianate-style home, converted into a McMennamins restaurant] and saw this:

Now we have one of our own:

Craig cut the wood; I engraved the signs with a wood-burner.  The locations are places that have meaning to us such as our ancestral homelands, favorite vacation spots, towns we have lived in, and so on.

And as a PS: take a look at our front yard as it was this summer.   We had a glorious late summer into fall, and the yard stayed beautiful.  We're into the rainy season now, so all of the petunias have been pulled out and composted.  The marigolds plants are still growing strong as of Nov. 7 except the flowers are growing moldy quickly due to the wetness.  Their days are numbered.

Shed

Last winter I dreamed about building a backyard shed.  Not a sleep-dream, but the kind of dream where you troll the internet looking for something that fits the vision in your mind.   We work out in our large yard frequently and I was tired of trekking to the front of the house into the garage every time I needed a tool or fertilizer for the backyard.

Craig eventually bought into the idea of a backyard shed.  Appearance was of utmost importance so those cheapo vinyl sheds were out of the question.  On April 1 we drove around town looking for the perfect shed; then on April 2 Craig had the terrible bike accident.  But I digress.  The accident is part of the shed memory.

We stumbled across what we wanted on Costco.com.  On sale was a solid wood build-it-yourself shed complete with a shuttered window, interior shelves, and double doors, all for $999.

The Blairs helped us build it.  I painted it.  It's a happy shed.  Before we moved stuff into it, Brooklyn, Jonah and Eli came over for the inaugural 'shed slumber party.'   Snuggled in our sleeping bags we told camp stories and sang hokey songs.  And at about 11 p.m. the kiddies got scared and went home.   Now shed is well-stocked with tools, garden products, paint cans, snow tires, roto-tiller, lawn mower, and scrap wood.  So convenient!

Retaining Walls: Before and After

Out of the 4 retaining walls holding back various parts of our sloping property, 2 were crying out for replacement this spring.   One other was rebuilt a couple of years ago, and the 4th one looked just fine.

The front wall was built of Columbia River basalt in 1984 when the house was new, by me and a couple of teenage boys from our ward who did the heavy lifting (I was pregnant w/ Teresa).  CR basalt is easy to come by here since NW Oregon is one giant prehistoric lava flow.  Above the wall we planted buffalo junipers which had long outlived their beauty and low maintenance.   As the ground has shifted over the years rocks occasionally popped out onto the sidewalk.

the old wall

We planned to replace the wall with boulders many times the size of these, but what to do with a ton of rocks we no longer had use for?   Craig's List of course.  I advertised free rock, u-haul, and in a few days the rocks had vanished.   The building of the new wall (of turner basalt) is covered on Craig's blog here.

new wall halfway finished

Once it was completed, over a period of about a month I dug nearly 100 plant holes.  There are so many commercial nurseries around here it's easy to come by bargain basement prices for nice plants.  I planted only perennials this summer and will fill in with annuals next year.  We have zebra grass, lucifer plant, phlox, black-eyed susan, st. john's wort, coreopsis, just to name a few.

Now the before and after retaining wall in the backyard:

so long to the old pressure-treated timbers

still some fine-tuning to do; what an improvement!

Let There Be Light . . .

Last May we began a summer-long project transforming our backyard from a dark mossy jungle to a light, open, more usable space. Part 1 was to remove some too-large shade trees. The largest of those trees, "the lone fir," was not even in our yard. In 1984 an adjacent home owner planted a cute, dainty two-foot-tall Douglas Fir in the corner of his yard, six inches from our property line.  We mentioned the folly of that to him (the probability of a someday 150-tall fir falling on someone's house) and he promised that at he would cut it down to use for a Christmas tree. Never happened. Craig and I discussed sneaking over in the dark to slice it off, but we didn't want to break our record of never seeing the inside of the county jail.

 the lone fir

Fast forward to a new homeowner and a much taller, heftier tree--the fir grew at least two feet per year. We regularly asked B and G to take it down. They didn't want to give up the privacy and shade it provided.  During every windstorm I lost sleep waiting for the crash.

In early May I approached B and G again, this time with a professional arborist in tow to explain the wisdom of removing the lone fir. They finally agreed. Could it be that my offer of paying 50% of the cost convinced them it was time to act?

In the end, another adjacent neighbor chipped in so the cost was split three ways (total was $500), as were the fir rounds.

 A winter's supply of firewood

All summer we enjoyed a clear sunny backyard. No more picking up a million fir-cones a year, or hacking enormous branches off the fir (at the peril of grave injury), or sinking into the soggy morass at the south end of my sunless yard. The bonus benefit is the flowering plants that languished for decades under the shade of the lone fir suddenly came to life!  Some quadrupled in size and they all bloomed like they never had before. A couple of plants popped up that I thought had died years ago.  Check off step 1 on our way to a beautiful backyard.