More On Compost!

                                    Screening Your Finished Compost

Our good friend and good gardening pal Dot posed a question recently regarding how we screen  compost once it has matured.  Let me start by saying that we actually have two compost piles. They are side-by-side in a shaded garden area. The first pile is the one we started this time last year (and for many years before that) and basically declared it done in November. That pile of vegetative debris - kitchen scraps, garden leaves and other material from our property only - sat over the winter and continued working, if only slowly. Kitchen scraps were added over the winter, but left on the side to become the starting point for next year's pile. So, there is clearly some overlapping of the heaps.

Screening the finished "over-winter" material is a spring ritual for me. When I was much, much younger, I always thought Opening Day in baseball was the official start of spring. As baseball changed, so did I. Opening Day for me is now the first spring day I can get outside and get gardening!  Yesterday, I spent an overcast and cool two hours in the afternoon screening approximately 100 pounds of fresh,  rough compost from our pile. The primary tool is a primitive homemade "sifter" - a 4 square foot frame with plastic/rubber screening.

                                            Homemade compost screen

The rough compost, soft debris mixed with small sticks and chips, is spread in batches on the sifter. The material is spread around with a trowel and the soft material falls into a container below the frame. The sticks and chips remain in the frame to be returned to the heap for another shot at becoming compost.

After all the sifting, there was eight pounds of woody material that need more time in the heap

 

 

 

 and 92 pounds of "soft as silk" compost ready to get to work. And it's all FREE thanks to Mother Nature!

 

Thanks, Dot!