Making Your Own Organic Compost

This is our third season to have our raised bed gardens. We decided the first year we built them that we should be composting so that each season we would have nice soil for our veggies.  This year, we are using our very own homegrown compost in our gardens!

This organic compost was made over a planting season's time.  This is our first try at making our own compost and we think it turned out awesome!  It looks very lovely as dirt goes.  Ha, ha!

My honey did all the research and decided to use this old trough we had for our compost.  It may be a bit too large for what we are doing, but hey, it worked for us just fine!  I failed to snap a picture of the cover he uses, but its just a hinged (in the center) piece of plywood that he cover in plastic to help guard it a bit from the elements.  He hinged the cover so it would be easy access for adding our saved organics, stirring and watering.

This is our yield for saving all of our kitchen organics plus some yard trimmings from one season to the next.  One wheel barrow full, and its a large wheel barrow too!  Here's a list of things we save and add to our bin:

Vegetable trimmings or peels
Fruit trimmings or peels
Coffee grounds (including the filter)
Tea bags (I remove the staples from the tags)
Paper towel rolls
Toilet paper rolls
Dried leaves
Small tree or bush trimmings from the yard

In case you're interested, I use a Rachael Ray Garbage Bowl to save all my kitchen organics in.  I got mine at Walmart.  We do not put any cooked food in our compost, that's just a preference of ours.

Also, we live in Texas, so it's neccesary to water your compost in the summer here.  Like now in the Spring,  if we know its going to rain, we just open one end of our bin and let it rain in.  Make sure your bin has drain holes, because too much water is not good either.  If its not the rainy season, we water and then stir about once per week or when it needs it.

We have four raised bed garden sections and my honey added a little of the compost to each bed and then thoroughly mixed it in.  Some beds still needed more soil, so this year we added Miracle Grow's Gard Soil because it was on sale at Lowe's.  Bargain!!

See that luscious green stuff there on the right?  That's our cilantro.  Once you plant it you have it forever!  It really needs no help at all to keep going!  There were even a few plants growing in the rocked area, so I pulled those up and put them back in their correct spot.  Even though they looked wilted the day I transplanted them, they are perfectly fine now!

This is our tomato and pepper section.  We planted the marigolds in the center isle to help keep bugs away!  Just a tip I learned from Pinterest!

We use a soaker hose system that my honey hooked up so that all four beds are fed by one connection.  We have this hose connected to our condensate water collector that you can read about HERE.

This view is all four beds.  You can see the water hose hooked up to the PVC line that feeds all the connected soaker hose.  He's pretty smart that honey bun of mine!

Do you compost?  If so, do you have any good tips for us?  Please leave a comment.

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

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