Instead of sending organic materials to landfills and paying the city for the service, compost your yard clippings and kitchen vegetable scraps. As much as 1/3 of city waste comes from yard clean-ups and 1/10 from kitchen garbage.

And composting is nature’s way of building soil. Leaves fall, plants die, piling up on the ground and eventually decomposing. We can create our own topsoil by mimicking nature.  This practice is especially important in our high desert area where the topsoil has been lost to drought, drying winds and overgrazing. Once the land is bare and patchy it does not take the wind long to blow away the soil that has been dried out by the sun.

BURY  IT

Because composting depends on keeping your materials moist, in West Texas I prefer to bury compost. I fill my garden paths with leaves, garden refuse, grass clippings, manure, and kitchen waste.  After a few months the materials break down and I spread the compost around the garden, using it to feed the soil and to mulch the plants.

You can dig large pits or small holes, fill them with organic materials and keep the moisture in the ground.

COMPOST  HEAPS

A compost heap can be a free-standing pile of garden refuse. It will eventually break down. A managed compost can be started by making a 3-4’ wide circle with wire fencing 3-4’ high.  You can also make bins using wooden palettes or straw bales. Construct the bins in the shade of a tree, 2 or 3, side by side, so that you can fork materials from one bin to the next as they break down.

Here’s How

• Loosen the soil with a digging fork where you are going to place the compost.

• A good first layer is broken up sunflower or cornstalks or other thick stalked garden refuse, which will allow air to circulate.

• Next add a layer of brown garden refuse: dry leaves, straw, dried perennials. Chop up your materials with a shovel to speed up the process of decomposition.

• Then add an 8-12” layer of green- grass clippings and garden refuse.

• Add some shovels of manure if you have it.

• Make a hole in the compost and add a bucket of kitchen waste, uncooked vegetables, whenever you have it.

• Cover the kitchen waste with shovels of dirt.

• Keep the compost heap watered. It should be as damp as a squeezed out sponge.

• Cover just the top with a tarp to maintain moisture or use a thick layer of hay or straw.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS

Shredders

Though widely favored, I do not use shredders to chop up garden refuse. The gas-driven engines used to operate garden equipment emit high levels of carbon monoxide, in addition to hydrocarbons, or volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and nitrogen oxides. Use shovels, machetes and hand pruners to make materials smaller.

Watering compost heaps

In order for the composted materials to break down, the heap has to be kept moist.  In our climate, one way to do this is to wind a soaker hose through the heap and keep it on a battery-operated timer.

Because water is a limited resource I recommend burying the compost in pits, trenches and holes.

Compost tumblers

Here’s what some tumbler owners have to say:

Gary Oliver: The trick with these things is getting the mix right, which means a whole lot of what we have least of, the green veg matter. Without this, composting is slow, tumbling or not. Some folks use manure to make up for the lack of green.

Jeanne Sinclair: (uses the ComposTumbler) I love it.  ou just put your compostables in there and roll it over every week.

Eve Trook: The problem is that it must be kept damp and, in West Texas in the summer inside a metal tumbler, all the work that is theoretically saved by the ingenuity of the tumbler is spent on wetting down the contents.

Makes really nice chicken nests (holds four chickens simultaneously. They seem to prefer to actually all lay in the same nest on a given day).

Farm Stand Marfa is open every Saturday morning at 10 am, on Highland Street in downtown. Come and partake in the locally grown produce and locally made goods for sale, see what fellow gardeners and craftspersons are up to.

Kitchen compost in bucket, ready to be added to compost pile or hole or path....

Chase burying compost in the path.

Leaves decomposing in the path.