Urban Homestead Garden (squarefoot gardening abridged)

Step 5 Fill 'er up

With newspaper, compost, leaves, and other organics. See the great composting instructables for more.

Comments

[DaniCoexist]

And here's another one our venture partner Claus made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXEJ9OfWBII

SO FUN! xx

[DaniCoexist]

Love this!! Thanks for sharing...like the idea of laying the mulch directly under the soil...will be trying this out ourselves, and also the compost box you have in the bed...I did hear that youre supposed to dilute the concentrated compost "juice" 1:10 as it may make your plants grow like crazy but ultimately be just big and not so strong, but I guess yours are going great and trial and error is what its all about! Check out our little video of ours...this was 2 weeks ago now, so we have much more stuff in the bed and more growth now too... http://coexist.es/en/urban-garden-part-one-dani-gary.html thanks again, we'll be back for more! xxx

[saintneko]

Coffee grounds are a good compost source and also good for lowering the pH, which you will need for most veggies, especially if your tap water is highly alkaline (most municipal supplies are about 8.0, veggies want around 6.5 but that always depends on the plant). Really, anything non-meat that you throw out, including egg shells, can be used for this. :) That's pretty much the only composting instructable you need (and if you can toss in a worm or two, so much the better)

[shellberry]

I was reading about just inserting the stuff destined for the compost directly into the dirt of the pots/garden around the roots of the plant (as opposed to letting it sit in the bin, removes a step). What do you think about this? Also, is it ok to put the warms directly into the pots instead of doing a separate worm colony/compost? I crush up my eggshells with mortar and pestle and put them in a jar of water overnight to soak, then throw the whole thing on the plants in the morning (roots). My tomatoes, especially love it. Learned it from my mom who learned it from my grandpa. :)

[saintneko]

You can do that, but as lil brown bat says, you gotta watch out for the critters it will attract (though the same can be said for having the garden in the first place, but food, especially leftovers, can have much stronger aromas - think of your salad after you've put dressing on it). My favorite thing to do is toss worms in my pots and just leave any leaves that blow in there to compost and be a nice, moisture trapping mulch (though in my part of the world, you'll need more than leaves to really trap moisture in the summer). The worms will eat that and keep your pots nice and aerated, and they poop good fertilizer. One caveat: you'll want to do this in larger pots, smaller ones the worms will run out of food quicker and then bounce out the holes at the bottom. Every time I repot, I find quite a few worms trying to escape. If you have smaller pots, it's probably easier to keep a worm farm on it's own, then you can catch the juice and the castings and apply them as needed. Especially if you keep any bonsai, cause their pots are usually smaller than a worm is long. :) I personally keep a small compost heap, and toss worms in my larger potted plants and do the leaves things, and apply coffee grounds and sometimes eggshells directly to the plants that will benefit. Sometimes I'll toss a small veggie or leaf pile into the pots as I'm potting the plants themselves, give the worms something to start with. One last thing: Worms don't need too much to eat, from what I've read, so if you keep a wormfarm don't overfeed - you'll notice if it starts to smell like rotten veggies.

[lil_brown_bat]

The problem with putting food scraps directly into the garden is critters. Even if you're in the middle of the city, you'd be surprised at what you'll attract. You really don't want this -- at the very least, they'll go from eating your would-be-compost scraps to eating your garden vegetables, and they may do a lot worse damage (some of the rodents can gnaw through just about anything -- like, a garage door -- if they scent food on the other side). Also, some of the species likely to be attracted, like raccoons and skunks, have a very high incidence of rabies in some regions of the country.