the fenced area, behind the greenhouse. He managed to find some discarded
mahogany and built it with slats that allowed air circulation. This worked out to
be cheaper than some of the plastic tumbler bins.
With all well and good, I began to pile in the waste—avoiding weeds with
seeds, meat, and fat. This was a vegan heap!
I knew enough to understand that for the bacteria to work, the compost
needed air and moisture. So I sprayed the heap each morning and plunged my
spade through it on an almost daily basis. Still, after a time there didn’t seem to
be signs of decomposition. I was getting anxious.
Scott Titus suggested I add some of his miraculous fertilizer, but it didn’t
seem to do the trick either. At least I needed signs of it heating up.
It was time to rethink the pile-it-all-on process I’d adopted, so I had to fi nd a
way to mix the compost up and get the larger pieces much smaller. I eventually
found a tree nursery that had a small chipper; I blended the whole pile with 2
yards of good topsoil—what a splendid sight.
To avoid having to rent a chipper in the future, I began to use an old kitchen
blender set aside for this purpose to mix up kitchen scraps, tea bags, and so on.
When the container looked fairly full, I simply added water, ran it on the mix
setting for a couple of minutes, poured it onto the heap, and raked it into the
compost.
Try building your compost in three layers. Scratch up the bare soil to allow
the microorganisms an easy route to gain access to the party, then pile on kitchen
waste, weeds, leaves, and other garden trash on top of a gallon of rotted manure.
Try for a recipe based on 1 gallon of scraps to 1½ bushels (12 gallons) of leaves
and grass clippings. Then add 1 cup of lime, 1 cup of bonemeal, and 2 shovelfuls
of soil.
It helps if you shred harder organic matter like pruned twigs. This can be
done by lowering a rotary lawn mower onto a pile of leaves (for example) and
letting the machine eject the shreds against a hard upright surface or carton to be
easily collected. Be sure to wear gloves, safety glasses, and long slacks.
As you put your compost together, be sure to spray each layer with water, as40 • GROWING AT THE SPEED OF LIFE