Kid's Garden w/compost ring
Composting is definitely worth the effort. You can buy some pretty fancy composters and I have a tumbling style that was given to me, but I haven’t really been pleased with any of the commercially available ones. At the Grapevine Botanical Gardens at Heritage Park (on Ball St.), the Gaylord Texan has donated a demonstration compost area with several different kinds of composting systems.
Compost ring w/melon vine
The way we compost is about as lazy as you can get. We have rings made of wire mesh about 3 feet tall and about 3 feet in diameter. We used to have landscape fabric lining the inside, but we haven’t tended them so long that the fabric has disintegrated. What I like about the rings is that, other than making them and setting them up, there is no more work until it’s time to move them. You just put your clipping, trimmings and table waste in the top and it comes out as soil on the bottom and feeds the plants as it does – no turning required. And right now, with the landscape fabric gone, you can see the progression from food and plant all the way to soil It’s pretty cool. We plant heavy feeders like melons, tomatoes or peppers around the ring and they usually block the view of the ring by late spring.
There are lots of ways to compost, though and it will definitely help the environment and probably your soil too. For a family of five, we have very little in our trash collection each week. We shred a lot of our paperwork and that gets composted along with any pressed board things like egg cartons (if they aren’t used for other things. For the five of us, we usually just have one 30 gallon trash bag (barely filled). The rest all goes into the recycling bins.
The only things you wouldn’t want to compost are things like diseased plants, weeds that have gone to seed and fatty or meaty food scraps (we give those to the dogs anyway.)
