Shawn W of Brooklin, Ontario writes:
I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest gardener although we have a nice spread in a rapidly growing suburb and my lawn and garden looks as good or better than most, with the exception that since we moved in over six years ago, absolutely no chemicals or pesticides have been used to get it to that state.
The big key has been using our own compost. We have one big composter in the back that we use daily for kitchen scraps, etc. What I have learned over the years is that the composter needs as many “browns” as you can feed it to keep cooking. Browns for us are often mulched leaves, shredded paper, straw, etc.
Our Zero Waste approach to gardening is to collect all of our gardens cuttings – branches, deadfall, leaves, dried out prairie grasses, etc and store it in an upright laundry hamper at the side of our house. It gets very dry and “brown”. The next time I cut the grass with our electric mower I run over the browns, bag it up as mulch and throw it on the composter. The only yard waste that goes into the yard waste recycling program are any weeds (and we have very few because our lawns and gardens are so healthy and drug free!!) In the spring, I can feel the heat coming off the compost that I turn once a week. I also bought two pounds of worms for my composter five years ago and their ancestors are still going strong eating away 12 months out of the year.
And don’t worry about composting in the winter. If you keep adding browns all year, the compost will keep cooking enough to not freeze up even after the past winter – one of the coldest in recent years.
We use the compost to start new plants (low water, low maintenance, native) and top dress existing ones. We also top dress our lawn with a trailer load of mushroom compost annually from a local yard to fortify the clay that our builder thought would suffice as a lawn. Triple mix is pretty much useless for this job in my opinion and peat moss is not a green alternative either!
So my advice to people is to stop throwing away their kitchen scraps and yard clippings. Turn them into beautiful black compost and get your lawn and gardens off drugs!!
Here’s Shawn’s lawn - gorgeous and drug-free since 2002!
Shawn’s entered his photo in David Suzuki Digs My Garden. Want to join him? It’s simple - go to http://www.davidsuzuki.org/NatureChallenge/GardenContest/ and sign up!
