Eliminating the middle man when composting.

[Kaleva]

I've done regular composting in the past and when I did it right, the results were something I was proud of but I kept looking for easier ways to deal with kitchen scraps and other materials. I tried worm composting over the course of one winter and that was a failure. I thought about cutting the bottoms out of old 5 gallon bucket and partially burying them in the raised rows and raised beds with just a few inches of the top of the buckets showing. I'd add the scraps and such to each bucket in turn and the worms would come in from the bottom and do their thing but I never tried that.

What I have done over the past couple of years is to bury the materials directly into the soil in a 4 x 8 sized section of a raised bed that I was leaving go fallow for the season. I'll carry the ice cream pail of materials to the raised bed and bury it in one spot approx. 1 square ft. in size. The next time I go out there with another ice cream pail full, I'll bury in a spot next to the first. I continue this process until I end up back to the first spot and by then, much of the 1st batch has either decomposed or been eaten by worms.

I can't do this during the winter so during that time I put the scraps in a 55 gallon barrel located in the basement. It's quite cool down there and there's no issue with bugs. A few days ago it was nice so I shoveled snow off of one section of the raised bed and dug a trench 12" to 18" deep on the east side. I dump about half of the contents of the barrel into that trench and buried it. I repeated the process on the west side of the raised bed. the soil was wet, not frozen and there were quite a few worms in it. I plan on planting Dwarf Grey Sugar peas in that raised bed sometime from middle to late next month using the square foot gardening method.