Harvesting from Compost

This is a picture of potatoes I harvested from my compost...

...yet, I just ran through all my old posts and was amazed that I've never written about composting. Craaaazy! I love compost. I couldn't garden for nothin' if it wasn't for compost. I've been composting since I was in an apartment and it made the difference between a dead plant and a living one sooooo many times.

This year I built "raised beds." Basically glorified wood squares. Not hard; all you need is wood (they can even cut the boards for you at a hardware store if you need it), an electric screwdriver/drill, drill bits, and screws. I didn't even square things off 'cause we're renting and I don't care if these last forever.

The raised bed on the right is one I composted in.

Anyway, point is, I didn't have enough dirt to fill the raised beds. So, for 3 of them I put in veg kitchen scraps/dry material with the occasional layer of peat moss or vermiculite. (I typically - not always - use the square foot gardening soil recipe.) Imagine my surprise when stuff started growing. I expected a green onion or two, but I had leeks, cabbage, potatoes and garlic all going strong. Also, I now have volunteer squash of some kind and some volunteer tomatoes.

I just let it go. And today, about 4 or 5 months later, my girls and I harvested potatoes. A lot? Nope. But, I just got food from... nothing. And I've already picked green onions and leeks from it when I needed to. All just from throwing my kitchen scraps in a heap and covering it with enough brown material (dry stuff like old leaves, untreated sawdust, shredded newspaper, non-glossy junk mail etc.) so it didn't reek.

Here's the girls holding the "baby" ones; they really liked playing with the tiny ones for some reason. Oh, and there's a carrot, but that's not from the compost.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, if you're not composting and you have an apartment, land, any kind of space... if you have any plants or want to plant things: compost. Do it. It has an awesome payout in natural fertilizer and possibly food, and costs almost nil.

(And also, composting on top of dry dead soil helps it retain water better and encourages earthworms; just make sure the scraps are totally covered or else you get fruit flies. Takes 3-6 months before you can plant in the soil.)