The start of the fall composting

The neighbors have started to bringing over their leaves and garden waste. Fall gardening has begun. I just relined my 3 bins with chain link fencing that i got from a neighbor. The first wire that i lined the bins with was too thin and only lasted 7 years. I think the Chan link fencing will last a long time. The first picture is showing where I loaded a layer of chopped up leaves, weeds, grass clippings and other garden greens. The leaves are about 90 percent of the mix. After placing them in the bin I level them out and got in the bin and walked on the leaves to compact them down from a 6 inch layer to about a 2 to 3” layer. After walking on them I put a 1/8th to 1/4” layer of dirt and perlite on top of the compacted leaves. The second picture shows what everything looks like after I watered everything for 10 or so minuets. You can see watering it drove some of the dirt mix down into the layer of leaves. The purpose of adding the dirt is to provide more benificial organisms to get the composting activated faster. The perlite is to give the finished compost/soil more ability to loosen up soil in the garden where I put the finished compost. I have been adding the perlite for about 5 years and now my raised garden beds have about 8 to 10 inches of nice loose black soil to plant into. I don’t generally dig up my garden I just use a trowel to dig a spot to plant or I will rough up the surface of an area to plant lettuce, etc. I will continue to fill up this bin with the layers of leaves, dirt and perlite until the bin is full.

The third picture is hard to see what I want to show but on the right side of the picture you can see a horizontal board that was about 3” above the surface of the ground when I built the bin. The ground I placed this bin on was about 1” of black soil and then the clay started. I have dug out about 6 to 8” of the clay and turned it into soil by just mixing the clay into my compost and watering really well to get it to dissolve into the compost mix. It is a tedious process but it works. Now I use this below ground area to put up to 1” branches and anything else that is hard to compost (pumpkin vines and brussel sprout stems). Those items may stay in here for a couple of years before thy are gone.