Once our vege beds were set up, we filled them with soil and mixed in some of our own compost to add more nutrients to the mix. This also minimises the amount of expensive soil you have to use. The method we use to create compost means that we have a new bin of compost every two weeks. We had actually tried a few ways to make compost, but we found a Compost in Two Weeks article we read in the gardening section of one of the Australian School of Meditation and Yoga's monthly newsletters seemed to work best for us. The people at the Australian School of Meditation and Yoga have kindly allowed us to reproduce this article below.
Ingredients
2 wheelbarrow loads of fresh lawn clippings ( we have virtually no lawn to cut on our block, but if you ask the neighbors you will find they are usually only to happy to get rid of them!).
1 sack full of brown leaves
1 wheelbarrow full of non-diseased green garden clippings (like leaves, old flowers, and weeds (at your discretion)
1 bucket full of vegetable, fruit (no citrus) and other vegetarian based food scraps (cut corn cobs into smaller pieces, avocado seeds are ok)
1 shovel of cow manure, or a couple of handfulls of pelletised chicken manure
1 ice cream bucket full of chopped up yarrow or comfrey or kelp (or all three if available) to act as a compost starter (we grow our own yarrow and comfrey)
1 handful of gypsum, lime and dolomite (these help to sweeten the soil)
Method
Place your compost bin on the ground in a sunny place with the open base in contact with the earth. Remove the lid and put all the ingredients mentioned above in to it. At regular intervals as you add the ingredients, spray on some water, not to much, not to little. The bin should be jam packed.
Don't add anything new to the bin for the next two weeks.
Everyday you need to turn every bit of the compost heap over. This takes about 5 minutes, and guarantees that the final compost is worth the effort. What we do is to lift the bin off the compost and put it beside the pile, then fork the compost into the now empty bin. If it is working it gets really hot inside the bin and then cools slowly as the two-week mark approaches.
When the compost is ready we shovel it straight on to the vege beds and mix it in. You can grow seedlings in it to. If you want, you can go to the local hardware shop and get a Ph test kit to test the Ph of your compost so you can fine tune the compost ingredients to suit what you want to grow.
