Compost

With garden fertilizer being a bit expensive this year, I’ve been being really careful about saving every little kitchen scrap that can go into the compost bin. We had this little compost bin in Texas and it worked fine. Our garden was bigger there so it didn’t produce enough compost to do much good but here, with my raised beds, I was pleased with the amount of compost it produced in a year.

When we moved it here, of course, it was empty. We had not been putting grass clippings in it and probably won’t because the mower mulches them and doesn’t have a way to catch the clippings. From a few leaves that had been mowed over and just our fruit and veggie peelings, egg shells, etc., I ended up with two five gallon buckets of compost out of there. That was great!

But . . our neigbhor has a compost bin he built. He catches all his grass clippings and vacuums up all his leaves and put those in his bin, along with veggie and fruit scraps, egg shells, etc. Last week he took all the compost out, cleaned out the bin and moved it. He had a LOT of compost. After using all he needed, he asked if we wanted the rest. He’s a young guy so he loaded it all up and filled our raised beds to overflowing.

In fact, I removed about half of what he brought from the asparagus bed and put it where I had planted rhubarb. Only the asparagus and strawberry beds are already planted so I’ll work the compost in with the soil before planting anything else.

From the looks of all the new garden beds being tilled up and the people grabbing up bedding plants at Walmart and Lowe’s, lots of people are planning to have gardens this year. The single 4″ cups of herbs were $5.98 at Lowe’s. Some of the veggies were $4.98. I didn’t look to see what the smaller 6 packs were. It’s still a bit early here for planting but, probably because of shortages and the costs, it seems a lot of people have gardening in their plans.

Since we’re planting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant in buckets, that frees up a couple of the raised beds for something else. I’m going to plant peas and potatoes this week. The potatoes will be in grow bags like I used last year. The peas will be in one of the raised beds. I had hoped to buy some gutters and get those set up for growing peas but that didn’t happen so I’ll just plant them in the beds. I’ll probably plant carrots in one of the smaller raised beds.

I’m so ready to get out and play in the dirt!