In recent years, many commercial fertilizers have been in short supply and what we can purchase is so expensive. What if I told you that you don’t need to purchase fertilizer to get rich soil that offers so many different types of fertilizers? What if I told you that the fertilizer that your soil needs doesn’t have to cost you a single dime?

Building Compost-The Garden’s Backbone

One of the most known forms of fertilizer you can get is from using compost. Building compost is a simple process.

You need a form (or several forms) of brown material. Brown material includes dried leaves, hay, straw, wood chips, paper, or sawdust.

Next, you’ll need a form of green material. Green materials include household kitchen garbage, green matter from the garden, and fresh grass clippings. Don’t add unprocessed meat, bones, or milk products to your compost. Animal manure is another green compost material that will help break down the pile more quickly if they are added.

The first step in building a compost pile is to shred the plant material into smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces, the more quickly they will break down.

The next step is to place a layer of brown material on the ground and a layer of green material on top of that. Make your layers about three inches deep. Keep layering until you have a pile that is the size of a four-foot cube. You can layer inoculants every few layers, but they aren’t necessary, especially if you use manure. You can also layer in finished compost to do the same thing.

Next, you’ll need to add water to get the pile to heat up. You’ll want to add enough water for the pile to be like a rung-out sponge. Not too much and not too little. The rule of thumb is to add the water at the end of the piling process. When the water starts running out of the bottom of the pile, you have watered enough. Once the pile is done, you will want to cover the pile with a tarp to keep the moisture level in the pile and prevent rain from washing the nutrients out of the pile.

Another component of creating compost is air. Remember when I said that shredding the plant material makes it break down faster? Well, it also causes it to become anaerobic faster. Anaerobic compost stinks. Two steps to take to get rid of that stink are to turn the pile and to add brown material to the pile. Some people recommend adding lime to the compost, but it can make the pile too alkaline so I don’t add it. A compost with balanced ingredients will balance its own pH.

A hot compost pile breaks down more quickly than a cold pile. The difference between a hot compost pile and a cold one depends on how much air you add to the pile, proper moisture, and how small your material has been chopped. Regular turning of the pile makes all the difference in how fast your compost pile will finish out. Your compost is finished when it looks and smells more like fresh soil than the original ingredients.

Vermiculture

Another way that I produce fertilizer for my garden is by producing vermiculture to produce worm castings.  Last year I bought some earthworms, put them in some bedding, and fed them with household peelings and coffee grounds throughout the growing season. We take the worm castings and make worm casting tea and use it in the garden where we need it for a plant quick pick me up.

Wood ashes

We heat with wood in the wintertime, so we have a lot of wood ashes. These wood ashes we spread over our garden and yard.

Animal bones and Eggshells.

We burn animal bones in a fire which makes them brittle. We then break them up into powder and spread them around the garden and yard as well.

Eggshells are pulverized and added to the worm bin to help neutralize the soil.

Wood chips and Grass Clippings

Wood chips and Grass Clippings are the primary forms of mulch that we use around the garden and in the orchard. We have found that if we put down a layer of grass clippings and top it with wood chips, the wood chips will not negatively affect the growing plants because of the added nitrogen of the grass clippings that are closer to the soil surface.

Chicken Manure

In late winter, before planting the garden, we spread composted chicken manure onto the garden, orchard, and added some to the compost pile as well. To keep our chicken house from smelling like one, we remove the previous year’s chicken manure layer and add a thick layer of wood chips into the chicken house. This layer of brown material keeps the chicken house from stinking during the heat of the summer.

Green Manure

Keeping a layer of living green plants growing in the garden during the off-season not only keeps the soil from erosion, but it also adds organic matter, nutrients, and microorganisms to the soil. There’s a lot to this process that I plan to explore during the next year.

If you’re interested in putting in a vegetable garden this year, I have written several books that can help you get started. All available on Amazon.

Simply Vegetable Gardening

The Survival Garden

The Four Seasons Vegetable Garden

Help From Kelp

Using Diatomaceous Earth Around the House and Yard