Underground Composting
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You will need loam and compost each season in your yard. Often it will just be a little, but you can’t get along without it. Earth washes away, sinks and compacts so somehow, if you are working the garden, you will always need a little more. One might prefer not to get it in plastic bags.
With a system of earth swapping you can easily generate a dividend of usable loam while adding nutrients all over your grounds, thereby completing a recycling process underground within your own land, without compost bins.
This Old World way of handling organics is a simple and useful method for any size or type of garden, creating a minimum of disturbance to the appearance of the place. Anywhere it is convenient for you to have the trench is fine.
- Dig a trench somewhere you have open ground, preferably in a ‘behind the view’ type of place. You will want a location that doesn’t have large tree or shrub roots. It will be most useful if the width and depth of the trench are at least 12” to 18”.
- Or just dig a hole if that’s all you have room for. The deeper the hole the smaller will be the footprint on your land for the amount of compost recycled, so on a small property, deeper may be better.
- Right away you will have a dividend of the trench loam you dig out to use elsewhere.
I call this Earth Swapping.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
- When making the trench, there will be a surprising amount of loam coming out of even a modestly sized one. Try to work directly to a tarp or buckets, or have a wheelbarrow tending the work since you will probably want to take some of the loam to other parts of your property without handling it again.
…
- The nutrients provided by the compost you add into the new trench will disperse underground, so you never need to turn anything, but you may want the trench somewhere near plants you especially want to nourish.
….. - Locating a digout on high ground is especially good, if you can, because the organics you add will travel naturally downhill through the earth to the plants below.
- Make a new trench whenever you need the loam that will be generated, and you have some suitable compostable material upncoming to refill with. You don’t have to fill the whole trench right away, gradually is fine, as the clippings come to hand.
- Over time you can work your way around the property. Just keep track of where you have already been.
… - Need some finished compost? Go into a trench you made a couple of years ago and take some. You can just leave the trenches and reuse the same locations after some years, or you can choose to overplant them when they have finished settling.
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Choosing Your Ingredients
- Restrict your compostables to garden clippings from the plants that are in the landscape anyway, resticted to clippings that are not parts of undesirable plants.
If you don’t add any fruits and vegetables or other kitchen refuse, you can use this easy system without attracting (new) pesky creatures.
Do use trimmings and clippings from your garden maintenance of good plants, as well as parts of annual plants you dig up after they have passed their season. Fast degraders are some of the best candidates. Tree leaves can be good, but it depends who your trees are. Some make better compost than others, so consult the Internet for details on this.
- The compostable materials don’t need to be degraded beforehand as they will do that in the earth as well or better than in a plastic composter. Just put your trimmings into the trench. Making them smaller by rough chopping will speed composting up but it is not necessary.
- You can refill nearly to the top with your compostable amendments, layering in a little of the trench loam you took out now and then as you come back up to the top. Water heavily to settle everything. Add some more material as needed, then a little of your loam at the top, and a sprinkle of mulch on the surface if you want neatness.
- Before long the trench will sink a fair amount, so at some point you will be adding more earth or compostable materials to bring you back up to the grade of the nearby areas. Topping off the trench in the fall is handy because you will probably have a lot of cleanup clippings and some leaves to recycle then, and these materials will have all winter to begin to helpfully decompose.
- When filling back the trenches with compostables, if you happen to have unwanted grass sods, use these deeply, and put the sods in upside down for good measure. Your other composting materials become the next layer up. Layer in some of the loam you took out of the trench. Put worms in if you like.………..
Wheelbarrows have many other uses too
Some Problems to Avoid
- Don’t use things that take ages to degrade, like woody things, twigs, tree and shrub root balls and such.
- Don’t use weedy things that you are trying to remove from your land. Some may come back even from bits of stems or seeds in your underground compost.
- Don’t use any plant materials if they appear to have leaf problems that fungus or insects might have caused.
- Although you may be able to recycle only a small percentage of the organic material from your property, that small amount is very meaningful to your resident plants.
THE EXTRA RECYCLABLE MATERIAL
- If there is extra compostable material, as there probably will be, you can arrange for it to go (or take it) to an alternate location where the recycling into earth can take place off your premises, to be used ultimately by someone else. This way it wont be wasted.
- Your mowing service may ritually take away your extra plant trimmings and other non smelly organics, if you organise things that way with them. This way your excess clean compostables will end up with grass clippings in a suitable organic home, just elsewhere.
- I keep a trash can dedicated to garden organics. I have put holes in the bottom so that it doesn’t retain water. Any extra organic material goes into this, and leaves my property with the grass clippings each time the mowing team comes.
PARTICIPATION IN OTHER SMALL WAYS
- Some coffee usually remains in my cup at the end of the day. As I walk through the garden, I give this small encouragement to my acid loving evergreens, trying to keep track of who has already had a recent dose. I’m sure that it makes a difference to each of them.
Drawing by Racket Shreve
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