It's Earth Day... time to get dirty!

Welcome to my very first gardening post! My love to garden is probably only second to my love to read and tied with cooking. In fact, one of my greatest cooking pleasures is cooking something using ingredients I have grown in my own garden or picked myself at a farm. I've been wanting to blog more about gardening, so why not christen my blog with dirt on Earth Day!

A garden grows from the ground up, so today I'm talking about one of the best things you can do to enrich your garden soil, and that's making your own compost, or what organic gardeners sometimes call black gold. I'm going to share how I compost in my suburban back yard. I'm also starting an experiment in my compost pile today, in honor of Earth Day and in honor of the world's very first compostable chip bag made by SunChips. More on that further down in the post.

In the meantime, this is my compost pile:

I started composting about a decade or so ago. It's so easy and so green. Well, actually, it starts out green and brown all mixed together and ends up black. ;)

By having a compost pile in your yard, you make your own organic, nutrient rich hummus to use in your vegetable, flower and herb gardens, around trees and shrubs, even in your lawn. Not only that, but you're reducing the amount of household trash you produce.

There are many ways to compost in your backyard with bins and barrels, but I never got around to making or buying one, so I just do it the easy way.

All year long, I keep a stainless steel bucket under my kitchen sink and I fill it with all kinds of vegetative waste from the kitchen such as vegetable and fruit peels and scraps, used coffee grounds, egg shells, stuff like that.


In the fall, I make a huge pile of dry, fallen leaves in the corner of my yard where my compost pile is. To speed things up and make things more manageable, I usually use my mower over the piles of raked leaves to mulch them up to smaller pieces. I often use some of the mulched leaves to cover bare soil in the garden beds for the winter as well.

All year long, in all kinds of weather except rain {I get too wet and muddy those days}, when my compost bucket under the sink is full, I trudge out to the compost pile and mix it all into the pile of leaves with a pitch fork.

I also add garden materials from my yard such as more leaves, plant clippings, spent pine needles from the holidays or from my neighbor's yard, grass clippings if there aren't too many weeds flowering in my lawn at the time, and I even toss in the little piles of manure the deer like to leave for me in the grass throughout the year.

Things that take forever to decompose in the compost pile are avocado pits, mango pits and corn cobs. I actually don't put corn cobs in the compost anymore because the nighttime critters like raccoons love to take them out of the pile even though there's no more corn on them and leave them somewhere in the lawn after they've done what with them, which my lawnmower DOES NOT like.

So I keep adding and turning and mixing and eventually I get some nice black compost to spread in my garden along with hundreds of earthworms who have lived in my pile for the last few months having the time of their life. And that's all there is to making fertilizer for my garden the way nature intended. :)

Now onto my composting experiment. Have you seen the latest ads for SunChips? I think I may have seen this first one while watching this year's winter Olympics, but I'm not sure. Take a look, it's only 30 seconds long:

Isn't that great? A chip bag that's made from plants that will decompose in 14 weeks! What an awesome accomplishment. To show my support of the SunChips company and all the efforts and and advances they are making to make the world a better place, I have decided to compost one of their new bags in my compost pile. I want to see how long it will take in a backyard compost pile.

The SunChips people actually photographed the chip bag in the video every 15 minutes for 14 weeks. I'm going to do my best to photograph every 24 hours or so for as long as it takes to decompose. I'm expecting my bag to decompose a little bit longer than 14 weeks, though, because I suspect my backyard pile might be smaller and therefore not reach temperatures as high as the test compost bin used by SunChips. Let's see how long it takes.

Day 1 Earth Day, April 22, 2010

Empty SunChips bag:

Laying on top of the pile:

It's in there!


In addition to the introduction of the compostable chip bag, SunChips has also incorporated the use of Solar Power to operate their plant in Modesto, CA.

Visit SunChips at http://www.sunchips.com/. They even have a page dedicated to Composting 101 so you can learn more about the benefits of home composting and how to do it!

One last video from SunChips that I love.

What changes will you make for a brighter tomorrow?