Harvesting the Compost

A year ago, my son Jacob and I chopped up a massive pile of leaves and old garden waste, mixed it with kitchen scraps and a little manure, and layered it together to hopefully cook into compost.  Yesterday I harvested the pile.

In the fall, I'd stacked plant stalks on top of the compost.  I moved all that stuff, and this is what was underneath.  This compost was dark, rich, and crumbly  It smelled earthy and clean.  Except for some of the outer edges, the whole thing had decomposed uniformly.  As I was shoveling it into the wheelbarrow, I came across something odd.

In two different locations, deep in the compost pile, there were these nests of earthworms, two slimy balls of them, all intertwined together.  Now there were lots of worms throughout the pile, but in these two places, there were knots of them.  Weird.

The pile produced 9 wheelbarrow loads of compost.  My wheelbarrow holds 8 cubic feet of stuff...that's a lot of compost.

I dumped the wheelbarrow loads in the garden.  When I was done, I got this year's pile started, layering chopped up plant stalks, leaves, and grass clippings together.  Toss in a little of last year's compost as a starter, and we should be in business once the weather warms up some more.

Next step for soil prep is raking the compost evenly over the garden, along with some peat moss.  Then till.