Hi fellow dirt people,
We are buying a new home and it already has 5 raised beds in place. We don't usually plant enough to really utilize all 5 beds. My idea is to use one bed at any given time for a fresh/ active compost pile, then when it gets close to finished I'd use another bed to start a new one so I always have one that's fresh that I'm adding to, and one that is finishing/older. Then when the older compost is finished, I can spread the finished compost around the other beds and then plant in the bed that had just held the finished compost, and then rotate every season so that each bed has a chance to rest between plantings and maybe absorb more compost-y goodness.
Idk I'm kind of a newb to this but I thought maybe it would be nice to rotate everything around since we'll have empty beds anyways? And I feel like it would minimize shoveling and wheelbarrowing compost around. Can y'all give me a sanity check on whether you think this is a reasonable plan? Or would you just do a regular bin/pile somewhere away from my beds? Do you think pests and bugs would make the rest of the garden unenjoyable to work in with the compost in close proximity? I'd appreciate any opinions.
Thanks <3
by moderatelyraven
6 Comments
Ooh, I think you’ll want to take a look into hugelkultur. It’s similar to your idea, but much less labor intensive after the beds are built.
My thoughts are that for a good compost pile you want it as high as it is long and wide. A long shallow pile doesn’t make as much heat. Less heat means the stuff you are trying to compost are more likely to grow, stuff like weeds and vegetable scraps. If I was in your shoes I’d probably try and use all the garden beds and have crops for my in all of them even if it they were off season to start with and less efficient. If you really don’t want to use all at once, I ld remove the one furthest from the house and reuse the timber to make a square compost bin at least twice the height. If not a meter or so high with additional materials.
Totally reasonable idea. Some terms to Google (as others have mentioned) are Hugelkultur, trench composting, and “hotbeds”. Depending on your exact setup, you might want to focus more on greens than usual so that things decompose in a reasonable amount of time. One trick I’ve used before in similar setups is to dig a trench *inside* the raised beds to effectively make a deeper compost bin. Also, depending on where you live you might have evaporation issues given the surface area to volume ratio. But absolutely a workable idea!
Worth noting that historically people used to essentially rotate “trash heaps” into growing plots pretty commonly. Meaning, what was a pile of (organic) trash one year became the farmer’s field the next year. This is basically the same idea, as I read it.
https://lancaster.unl.edu/trench-composting-simple-method-reusing-kitchen-waste/
I do not think your idea is bad at all. I use a rotating system for all compost in a similar manner. In my case I have 5 locations for compost. One that I use for a year. It rotates each year. When i start a new pit for the year I dig out the 5 year old compost, which is now soil, and spread it around one of the rows. For my purposes it works great. For reference I live in zone 4, have snow cover 6 months of the year, and have a heavy clay soil.
I have done something similar with potatoes. Since it will give the taters the stuff they need and when you harvest you will end up mixing the pile up.
That’s how we do it in my home country.