Monday, July 27, 2020

The Ozarks Boy’s way to compost

First, dig a hole and put in your table scraps.
Serious gardeners compost their waste, according to what I hear, and if you go and search online it is true. Those people who compost are serious. They are willing to spend some serious cash, some serious time and some serious effort.

Now, The Ozarks Boy takes his garden and yard as seriously as he can, given his work schedule, family responsibilities and budget availability, which are heavy, multiple and low, respectively.

Consequently, the old boy has to compost quickly, easily, effortlessly and cheaply. He has a good way to build soil through composting, and he does it without spending much time, only a little effort and no money on a lot of expensive equipment like drums and tumblers.

He just digs two holes.

When he started composting a couple of years ago, The Ozarks Boy dug a hole about the diameter of

the length of his shovel handle and just shy of a foot deep. Into that hole, he threw a bunch of kitchen scraps—old leftover vegetables, peelings and rinds, empty corn cobs, lots of coffee grounds and paper filters from the coffee pot. He really guzzles the coffee.

Then dig another to cover it.Start filling the second
hole with garbage. When.it is full of garbage, dig
out the first hole again, covering the fresh garbage.
Then, start filling that "new" hole with garbage.
When that hole was about half full or so, he dug another hole the same size next to it and threw the dirt from that hole into the first hole on top of the kitchen scraps. He then used that new hole to dispose of new kitchen scraps. When it was about half full of vegetable waste, coffee grounds and the like, he dug out the first hole and threw the dirt into the second hole.

He did that all summer long, back and forth, back and forth. It wasn’t that difficult. There’s only The Ozarks Boy and the woman he lives with, his wife, who make kitchen scraps. So, he wasn’t out there throwing dirt back and forth every day, just every week or two or sometimes three.

In the late fall, early winter, he dug out one of the holes just a little deeper, piling the dirt into the other hole, and then used that hole all winter to dispose of the garbage. By spring, it was pretty full and ready to be covered up with dirt from the other hole.

That dirt had been sitting all winter and into spring, so most of it was ready to be used for seeds and young plants.

Well, there you go. That’s all there is to The Ozarks Boy’s Way to Compost. That’s pretty simple and easy, perfect for The Ozarks Boy who is kind of lazy. He’d rather sit on the front porch with the dogs and cats, drinking coffee and reading the paper, than get out and do much digging.