The Compost Heap!

Right, so little by little on weekend and sometimes when I feel super energetic after work, I have been working on my garden.

Aspire to grow vegetables in this garden and one of the best and most organic tools for a veggie garden is the compost heap! Not only do I have a place where I can throw the garden scraps, I also have a place to dispose of the non-meat kitchen scraps.

Indeed, in most households, we throw these kitchen scraps and the garden scraps get thrown into the dustbin for the trash collector or bagged up in black bags to go to the dump.

This is a serious kind of waste! Organic material, right in your home is ready for processing to be added to your soil so you can grow food! It is my considered opinion that every home habitat should have a place for composting.

In my case, I am lucky enough in the new home to have space for two heaps... when I eventually manage to build the second one.

The logic here is that once you have material added to one heap since kitchen scraps are something that is generated every single day, then you can stop and allow the compost heap to properly mature and then add your new material to the second heap.

Well, let's look at the process.

Our rental property includes a lucky score of a garden. Not only does it wrap around the building, but it extends behind my motor garage and the neighbor's garage. This means that I have this large area at the back that does not really have much utility.

There are trees that block the way through and there is no lawn there since there is not much sunlight here. It is a bit like a forest floor.

Here is a view of the now much greener lawn grass. This back area will actually mostly become a vegetable garden! Behind and to the right is that little area of which I speak. You can see my spade, pitchfork and garden rake standing against the wall.

As I trimmed the trees, I had a lot of scraps. These have been drying out slowly and I am going to cut them up and add them to the compost pile as brown material.

Here we can see the compost heap at the start. I actually had another place in the garden I started using as a compost more in the open. I needed the clear this space and then used some pallet and shipping wood to create a little enclosure. I will be making another box next to this one for that two stage action.

The wood is propped up by some bricks and then covered in dirt and makes for a sturdy earthwork construction. Haha. But really, nothing more is needed.

The bottom of the box is bare to the earth. This will allow worms and bugs to find their way into the heap and help with the breaking down.

It is a whole ecosystem right there. From bacteria, mites, insects all the way to the geckos and lizards that populate the garden. All and all, this machine will do well in breaking down all those scraps and everything in that food chain will benefit from that.

Great!

Here I have flipped the compost heap a few times with the garden fork. You can see a lot of material is starting to break down.

As I processed the branches, the pile was growing. Once I have the second heap up and running, I think I will need to split the existing heap so I have less to break down.

Here you can see I had a massive amount of plant material to chop up and get through. But I had help and recruited @aimeludick to help me out!

Various garden clippers, cutters and scissors were used to break it down. I also simply used my hands!

We made a lot of progress. What is leftover can almost just be raked out of the way and I can start to build the second composting heap enclosure.

But before I get started on that, I will need to do some trimming of the trees close to the pile. More about that in another post I guess.

Time to get ready for work and hopefully I can return to this little bit of work this afternoon!

Cheers!
@zakludick