Market & Garden Report: Compost
Yard waste transformed into good dirt.
[HOST INTRO] Blame a cool, wet Spring for our slow start to the garden season. But it’s also a perfect time to focus on fundamentals, like good soil. In this Market & Garden Report, correspondent Guy Hand talks to Clay and Josie Erskine of Peaceful Belly Farms about that most basic of garden skills: composting.
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Simple compost bins made from old palates.
(Clay) Home composting is a great way to utilize a lot of the things that would normally go to the landfill.
(Hand) Shovel in hand, Clay Erskine pokes at a pile of yard waste.
(Clay) And you make a simple pile in your back yard and with very little maintenance, have nice crumbly compost for your garden beds or your flowers and your house.
(Hand) But Josie Erskine doesn’t think you need an expensive compost bin to make good soil.
(Josie) You can buy lots of different mechanisms to compost in, black barrels or tumblers. Those are very, very hard to manage because they don’t physically touch the ground, the compost doesn’t. And the ground is full of micro organisms that will help the compost break down and when you put it into those isolated plastic drums you don’t get all the benefit of the earth itself, so I say keep it simple. Make your compost pile on the ground, use found material, chicken wire, pallets . . .
(Clay) I think the simplest compost pile that you could do is to just take a little bit of fencing material and make a round circle with it and wire it together and then have a bail of straw next to it and use your grass clippings from your yard and the vegetable waste from your kitchen and just layer it, grass clippings, little bit of straw, vegetable waste, a little bit of straw.
Compost turns into good soil faster if you turn it over occasionally
(Hand) Clay says you roughly want about two-thirds of the mix to be dry brown stuff, like straw or old leaves, and one-third to be moist green stuff, like grass clippings. Just make sure you don’t compost straw or yard waste that’s been tainted with herbicides.
(Josie) And if you taint your compost with an herbicide, you will have a compost that will make it so that no plants will germinate or it will kill your plants.
(Hand) But after carefully banning herbicides, Clay says compost really doesn’t need much attention.
(Clay) If you take a handful of the compost and squeeze it and it’s dripping, then it’s too wet and you want to add a little bit of straw or sawdust to dry it out and turn it. If you grab it and it’s really dry and flakey, then you need to add some water.  There’s no way to ruin compost, it’s just a natural, biological way of breaking down materials and nature knows what it’s doing.
The sniff test: Finished compost should smell sweet, like good soil.
(Hand) Clay says your compost will become soil faster if you occasionally turn it over. But you don’t even have to do that. As he says, nature is eventually going to make compost whether you’re involved or not.
(Hand) For The Market & Garden Report and Boise State Public Radio, I’m Guy Hand.
