practical tips to live green ...everyday 

To Compost or to Non-Compost? That is the Question
By Greg Peterson

Have you ever wanted to start composting but the prospect of building your compost pile stopped you in your tracks?

The problem is, gardens seem to consume organic material faster than we can add it, and when you’re buying it, the costs add up. Building healthy soil by adding household compost is the most organic, affordable, and sustainable solution. And now the average person can develop the soil without earning a composting Ph.D. (stands for pile it higher and deeper).

There are some easy alternatives to composting – I like to call them “non-composting.” They include keeping chickens, lasagna gardening, and vermicomposting, all of which require much less work than composting, while offering the same or better results.

You start by evaluating the amount of organic material your household produces and throws away. If all you produce are kitchen scraps, traditional composting may not be the best method for you, as it requires a lot of organic material.

My favorite way of non-composting is to feed kitchen scraps to the chickens. If your first reaction is, “I can’t keep chickens in my yard,” consider that raising hens (not roosters) is very easy. Chickens are effective at weeding and controlling bugs. Plus they’ll eat your kitchen and yard scraps, provide lots of great organic fertilizer, and give you the added bonus of an occasional egg or two.

Chickens like to have a coop area – a shelter with off-ground perches – for roosting. Keeping your new chickens inside the coop for the first month teaches them that the coop is their home. Afterward, they can run wild in your yard. Just keep in mind that they will eat any new tender plants that are sprouting. I maintain a chicken yard as my hens’ designated living space. You also may consider building a “chicken tractor” (a portable chicken coop on wheels), which you relocate in your yard occasionally so that the chickens do the work of preparing your beds for planting. As for the kitchen and yard scraps, I just put them in the coop area and the chickens do the composting.

If you aren’t quite up for keeping chickens, you might try worm composting, otherwise known as vermicomposting. The worms do their own kind of digging, provide their own kind of manure and do a really great job of munching on your kitchen scraps. The worm system can be as simple as placing a bucket under your kitchen sink with some shredded newspapers and worms, then adding kitchen scraps. Or, you can place an old bathtub or plant barrel in a corner of your yard and vermicompost away.

Another of my favorites is “lasagna gardening,” a process by which you compost and build the soil in your garden all in one process. The name says it all. Start by putting down a layer of dry material, such as leaves, hay or straw, usually one-to-three inches deep. Then evenly spread a half-inch layer of manure over your dry layer to facilitate the slow composting. Finally, add another layer of dry material. You can add layers to your heart’s content and if you want to plant right away, dig a little hole, add some soil and go for it. Over the course of a few months the layers break down and create awesome, slow-cooked, composted soil. A bonus is that you can take your kitchen scraps and tuck them into the lasagna garden and let nature take over.

At the Urban Farm in Phoenix, Arizona, composting and non-composting are both underway, with chickens, worms, lasagna gardening, and traditional composting. The fruits of our labor emerge in great-tasting food that we harvest just about every day of the year.

Using one or all of these methods just about guarantees you a great crop. Remember though, composting takes time, as does raising a great garden. Be patient and compost (or non-compost) away!

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