Lazy Composting

My grandfather’s garden was well established by the time I was born, and he had his methods so well worked out that this kind of hurry-up composting was unnecessary. Instead he had adopted a method of slow composting that, while it took quite a while to produce finished compost, yielded him a steady supply with very little labor. He called it the “lazy man’s method,” and being lazy myself, it’s my method of choice as well. Here is how he described it in his book, Step by Step Organic Vegetable Gardening:

     Start by laying out a rectangle about five feet by twelve feet on a level piece of well-drained ground, marking the corners with stakes. Then lay up an outside wall of one or two thicknesses of sod or cement blocks. The system requires the maintenance of three compost piles, one of which is available for current use, one of which ages for a year, and a third which is being built during the current season.

     Build the pile using all decomposable garbage from the house, and from your neighbors as well, if you can get them to sort their waste, covering each layer with a layer of hay or leaves and a thinner layer of topsoil before it has a chance to become nasty. Early in the spring there will not be much beyond kitchen scraps to put on the pile, but as summer comes on there will be garden weeds, pea vines, etc. As the pile grows, keep building up the sides with sods or other material that will stay in place, and keep covering the succeeding layers with topsoil, or, if available, with thin layers of manure.

     In the fall put all the crop wastes from the garden onto the pile: squash, tomato, and bean vines; the remains of cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli; and so forth. At the end of the season, cover the pile with sods root-side up (so they won’t grow), or with manure, and then leave it for nature to take its course. By the time the pile is two years old, having taken six months to build and eighteen months to cure, it should be fully decomposed; any material that is not can be placed on the bottom of the new pile.

     This kind of composting is also called anaerobic composting because it proceeds without worrying about getting air into the pile. It is essentially controlled rotting, and, as my grandfather was fond of pointing out, the only real difference between well-rotted manure and compost is that the manure went through the gut of an animal first. Both began as vegetation, but the manure was predigested by the gut bacteria, acids, and enzymes of the animal before being deposited and allowed to rot. The process of both rotting and composting is digestion, and either rotten manure or plant compost can be used to fertilize and improve the soil structure of your garden. Which you will use depends largely—as does the method of composting you choose—on the particulars of your situation.

    If you have access to good rotted manure, or a place to compost it, it is the simplest product to use; if not, then composting will provide you with just as many of the benefits, though with a bit more effort. If you have plenty of space and abundant raw materials, but are short of time to manage a quick compost pile (or just don’t need that much compost), by all means follow my grandfather’s long-term, low-work method.