black gold

Stewartia leaves

Yesterday we finished putting the P-patch to bed for the year- at least the short season one. We finished cutting up the glad leaves, cutting down the tomatillos and the cosmos and left the kale for someone to glean for the food bank. We also migrated about 20 steer manure bags of compost we made in our short season plot and moved it to our long season (permanent plot). This stuff is amazing. Some call compost black gold, I call it Picardo platinum. It is beautiful.

We learned the technique of bag composting from our P-patch neighbor who shared her secret. She pulls up all the seedlings and weeds, chops them up if necessary and then puts them into plastic bags (usually black garbage bags) to compost. Depending on the freshness of the greens, the temperature and the intensity of the sun, we have compost in as a little as 2 weeks. This stuff is amazing and rich. We don't need it as much in the short season which gets tilled and cover cropped every year. The soil in our permanent plot which is awful. We are constantly trying to improve it with amendments.

It was so much fun to dump all the bags into each bed and just revel in its richness. I will dig it in sometime today (if the weather and work permits) and sow some cover crop for the winter.

At home we do a bit of composting, but not to the level of our P-patch compost operation. We have a worm bin that is hard to keep up with (feeding them, not the actual compost). I thought it would difficult, but its quite fun to see what the heck they are eating. We compost leaves and grass clippings too, but I need to do a better job of that.

Worm composting information can be found here. General compost information can be found here.

In Seattle, coffee grounds can be obtained from Peets and Starbucks (call ahead for availablity). These are great addition for the worm bin. Ours is quite caffeinated. :) You can also call your local independent coffee place and offer to take their coffee grounds, they'll love you for it.

Winter composting or lasagne composting can be done very simply by just layering green material with leaves or brown materials much like a lasagne and covering with burlap sacks. Call a small coffee roaster to see if they have some laying around. They make great path material as well as covering the compost. They smell pretty darn good also.