I'm seeking advice about composting

Hi! This is my first post that isn't a reply.

TL DR: I've been burying kitchen scraps, pine needles and some other things and I'd like to know if this works, if there are better ways to do it, what are the things that I should absolutely not do and what else can I compost that maybe I haven't been composting.

And here is the long story: my parents live close to the beach. My father has always said that the soil we have in our yard isn't good for planting because it looks a lot like beach sand, and our shy attempts at any planting kind of corroborate that. We've always kind of struggled just to have grass without having to waste a lot of water to keep it green during drought periods in the summer. It's been a while since I moved from there, but I still visit frequently. During the pandemic I spent a bit more time there and decided that composting could be an overall good idea, and thus started to try some things.

After some back and forth with my strong-headed father, we settled on the following system: we have a bucket for putting kitchen scraps, a bucket with some sand from the yard and a hole in the yard (around 1 meter deep with varying areas, usually around 50cm x 50cm or 20' by 20'). We put the kitchen scraps in the bucket, cover them with some sand and when the bucket is full we dump it in the hole in the yard and make sure it's covered to avoid smells. My father puts some leaves and pine needles in hole in the yard too. When the hole is full, I open another one, fill the yard sand bucket with more sand and put the grass from the top of the new hole on top of the old hole so the lawn can stay somewhat presentable. I've been doing this for a couple years now.

So here are my questions:

When I bury the kitchen scraps with sand in the hole, am I making anaerobic composting? Is that bad? Should I be trying for another method? My father agrees with the hole in the yard, but when I tried to make a pile for composting covered with pine needles he didn't like it because he thought it made the lawn look untended.

A lot of information on the internet says not to use peels from oranges and similar fruits, but we've been putting them in the yard holes and adding some limestone we had in the garage to try and correct the supposed acidic unbalance from using citrus peels. How off base am I in doing this?

How about onions and garlic? I've heard some conflicting information on them and I'm hoping it's actually ok to put them in the compost hole, because my dad insists on doing it.

Also, information on the internet often says not to put meat and dairy products, while some sources say that the only problem is the smell and animals that it attracts, which aren't really a problem when they're buried somewhat deep, but we don't do it. Can we put them in the compost hole too?

Finally, cat and dog feces are something that I had to argue with my father for him to stop adding in the compost hole, which I always felt kind of bad for doing, because I doubt the city will find a responsible way to dispose of it after we leave it for the garbage truck.

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I thinks that's all for now, sorry for any broken english, it's been a while since I practiced thoroughly and maybe I'm a bit rusted.

Welcome Arthur on your first post on Permies! I think your English is splendid. Congratulations on composting. With your sandy soil, is there a way to create a raised bed and compost in it? If you put in food scraps and cover with leaves and plant stems, it will keep the animals out and create a base for planting future seeds. Plus, they also break down and add fertility to your bed. Some raised beds can be really pretty.

Hi Angela, thank you
The raised bed seems like a good idea, I'll add that to my list of things I'll try.

As Angela already stated.
Start at the top.
You have a kind of life build up underground and by burying things you disturb the different layers of micro live which has the result that the start up is delayed and the digestion of the fungi and microbes get blocked because you killed much of the life or put their food out of range.

Golden rule is always build up new soil on top and let the life doing their job.
Worms will move what they need deeper and aerate a zone, fungi and microbes digest and transform nutrients for your shallow rooted plants.

Beside this every rain will drain some nutrients deeper in the ground out of reach for your plants.

If you arrange your house, would you like someone puts all upside down and throws you a pizza under the carpet? ;-)

Arthur do Canto Pivetta wrote:Hi Angela, thank you
The raised bed seems like a good idea, I'll add that to my list of things I'll try.

You are welcome. My first raised beds had several inches of cardboard on the bottom. It helps suppress weeds and retain moisture. Plus, worms love cardboard and it might attract some to the bed. Next, I put in wood. It helps hold moisture, which helps to not have to water as often, and eventually breaks down into soil. It is often a free way to fill your bed about half way up!

Next, we shoveled in compost we had made. Do you have access to anyone with a horse barn? Horse or rabbit manure with added hay would be great to add in with the wood. What animals do people keep in your area?

Keep burying kitchen scraps in the bed and add leaves, stems, straw and keep building it up. If you can plant comfrey, the leaves make great additions to a compost and to mulch with.

If you make something birds can perch on over your bed, you get good phosphorus from their poo.

I added hoops over my beds and plastic to make a little greenhouse for seed starting and growing leafy greens then removed it in the summer. You could also add shade cloth or bird netting if needed.

I attached salvaged gates with zip ties, which gave tomatoes and cucumbers something to climb on later in the season.

Great post Arthur. Welcome to Permies!

I live in the desert SW of the USA.  Since moving to the desert regions, we've lived on very sandy soil.  We make what in some areas are called "Zai Holes", but we also call desert hugelculture.  Basically, we do most of our composting in the ground.  It works great.  Sandy soil has a lot of air in it, and we don't seem to get any anaerobic conditions.  We can tell that there is air and composting happening because when we've dug into the beds to see what is happening, we find termites, crickets, cockroaches, and fungus mad at work.  The insects in particular would not be able live in conditions lacking in oxygen.  Our soil does not have worms in it naturally, so these are the composting organisms naturally found here.

Here are some pictures of how we make our beds and of what a zai hole or zai pit is. This soil is currently very sandy with some clay. We previously lived in a place with soil that was almost pure sand, and the method still worked.  We make sunken beds because of being in the desert - we want to catch as much water as possible in the beds, keep them a little cooler than the surrounding ground, and the indentations make little windbreaks.  Deserts tend to be very windy, and wind speeds evaporation more than I would have imagined before moving here.

Each bed below is loaded with any compostable material can find on the property, and then we dump buckets and buckets of kitchen compost to make it more active and damp. Kitchen materials include everything from vegetable and fruit trimmings, tons of lemon peels and onions trimmings, to leftover meat and bone carcasses from making bone broth. Anything we eat goes in the pits. I save some of our choice kitchen waste for our redworm bins, but everything else goes into these sunken beds.

This garden pictured below was started January 2022. The trenches are dug about 2 feet deep, filled with materials, then topped off with about 1 foot of soil.  We dug the first bed where you can see artichokes and cardoon. Then we plant each bed in a mixture of perennials and annuals and start digging the next one. It is October and we are currently digging the very last bed!  It has been a very productive method for us.

We have two more gardens done in this manner in 2020 and 2021 and they are also producing well.  Our goal with this style of bed is to feed the first couple years of plants with the compostable materials in the ground, then let a combo of nitrogen fixers, perennials and taprooted annuals continue to build the soil through their growing processes.

First is an article about Zai hole farming.  In this they compare using paper at the bottom, versus not using paper.  We didn't use paper in any of the beds pictured below, but we are going to do a test bed next with paper.  At the linked article, they found the ones with paper at the bottom had higher food production. They theorized the paper held more water in the otherwise sandy soil (which water sort of falls straight through, typically).

Zai Hole farming with or without paper lined base

I've noticed in our sandy soil with a short growing season, that digging a hole and adding compost materials about a foot deep seems to be the most beneficial. I mostly do this in the spring and fall, and create piles for summer. I bury fruit/veggie scraps and eggshells. I haven't noticed any problems with onion, garlic or our small amount of citrus peels.  
I use a rake to make a trench in the center of my garden bed, a future corn bed is usually a good spot. I put some char in the hole first, then empty the kitchen-scrap bucket on top. I put some leaves on top of the scraps then rake the soil back over and re-cover the bed with mulch/seed.
Most of my annual plant roots seem to be within that first foot of soil. The scraps disappear pretty quickly, but the "bio-char," seems to remain and build up in the soil. Keeping it shallow lets me spread it further and avoid anaerobic conditions, especially when using enough char.
Out of the 100 or so times I've done this, I've had the holes dug up maybe 4 times. I may eventually try putting a piece of weighted down wire fence over the spot and move it along when I dig the next one.
Our dog poo goes in it's own pile in a low point in the land behind the garden near the woods in hopes to deter the diggers as well as deer. I add a shovel of the hot compost, some char, or leaves on top every once in a while.


 

Arthur,

What you are doing is called the Ruth Stout method of composting.

And the best thing is that your father is agreeable.

https://permies.com/wiki/149980/composting/Opalyn-Log-Ruth-Stout-Composting

If those holes will never be used as a vegetable garden then the cat and dog feces in the holes are okay though I like to recommend using an out-of-the-way corner of the yard for those.

https://permies.com/t/193079/composting/reason-shouldn-add-Dog-Eggs

Since you live near the ocean, is kelp available for gathering?  That would make a great amendment to those holes.

So many replies! ^^

I think it's valid to mention that throughout my digging I've not found any worms in the soil, and that the soil only has roots/plants in a shallow layer of less than 15cm, which I try to not disturb too much. I do that by cutting it out and lifting with a shovel and then depositing it on top of the hole that has just been filled. The deeper layers are usually yellow (maybe a bit of light brown) sand from 15cm down to 60 cm, and then a yellow/gray sand with some old broken bricks and other construction junk  that I guess they used to level the terrain some 80 years ago when they started building in the area. Below 15 cm the soil rarely presents naked-eye apparent life, and below 30cm I don't ever find any naked-eye apparent life.

Also, the old holes that have already been covered seem to be very much less compacted. I know this from testing with a metal rod in the old hole vs other spots, where the rod penetrated much easier in the old holes, which were tested after 1 week to 1.5 years.

See Hes wrote:
If you arrange your house, would you like someone puts all upside down and throws you a pizza under the carpet?

If I had a house that was pretty much messed up I would like very much to have someone help me tear it down and rebuild it better.

In the last 2 years since I started "putting the soil upside down" I've seen improvement that hasn't been seen in the 8 years before that, so I'm pretty confident that I'm doing more good than harm.

Next, I put in wood. It helps hold moisture, which helps to not have to water as often, and eventually breaks down into soil. It is often a free way to fill your bed about half way up!

Nice, I've been thinking about doing that. My dad has been stocking wood that a gardener friend of his doesn't know where to dump and by now we have more than enough to heat our house during our not very cold winters (we don't have any snow here, although the temperatures drop below 0ºC one or two days/year). I've been curious about hugelkultur, does making a raised bed with a lot of wood in it qualifies as hugelkultur?

What animals do people keep in your area?

Sadly, we live in an urban area and the only animals close by are cats, dogs, and some birds. Sadly there aren't enough birds to have a significant amount of bird feces, but at least there's a bit.

Kim Goodwin wrote:Great post Arthur. Welcome to Permies!

I live in the desert SW of the USA.  Since moving to the desert regions, we've lived on very sandy soil.  We make what in some areas are called "Zai Holes", but we also call desert hugelculture.  Basically, we do most of our composting in the ground.  It works great.  Sandy soil has a lot of air in it, and we don't seem to get any anaerobic conditions.  We can tell that there is air and composting happening because when we've dug into the beds to see what is happening, we find termites, crickets, cockroaches, and fungus mad at work.  The insects in particular would not be able live in conditions lacking in oxygen.  Our soil does not have worms in it naturally, so these are the composting organisms naturally found here.

Thanks Kim! ^^

I think my situation differs a bit because the soil usually is very damp, I've heard it's because the water table is shallow in the city my parents live in, so that's why I worry that burying the scraps will make an anaerobic environment for composting.

Aside from that, Zai Holes look a lot like what I've been doing, thank you for that, I hadn't found something describing this method yet.

the indentations make little windbreaks.  Deserts tend to be very windy, and wind speeds evaporation more than I would have imagined before moving here.

We do have some strong wind from the ocean, so I've been trying for some windbreaks too. I'll post a picture sometime.

leftover meat and bone carcasses from making bone broth. Anything we eat goes in the pits.

Is that meat and bone that have been cooked? I worry about the oil and salt we use in cooking.

Anne Miller wrote:Arthur,

What you are doing is called the Ruth Stout method of composting.

And the best thing is that your father is agreeable.

Thanks Anne.

I thought the Ruth Stout method involved shallow burying under mulch throughout the garden. I think that isn't exactly what I'm doing since I've been putting the kitchen scraps/pine needles/sand mix in holes that are about 1 meter deep.

If those holes will never be used as a vegetable garden then the cat and dog feces in the holes are okay though I like to recommend using an out-of-the-way corner of the yard for those.

Since we'll be trying to grow a bit of food I'll keep the dog and cat feces out of it for now then.

Since you live near the ocean, is kelp available for gathering?  That would make a great amendment to those holes.

Sadly, we don't often see kelp in our beach. Isn't the ocean salt in the kelp a bit worrying?

Thanks for all the replies everyone, sorry if I'm somewhat curt, writing in english sometimes is kind of a juggling act for me and I end up doing a bad job of being clear and nice while trying to not be too verbose.

Arthur,  your methods are well thought out and I think they are working quite well as is.

I think the dog/cat waste could go in a separate hole, where you won't plant any annuals.
It would be great way to prepare a place for a berry bush or fruit tree.


I think your father's involvement is excellent!
In particular, adding pine needles to the holes is a good idea.
Ideally they would be added with every bucket of food waste.
They will help create a better compost and ultimately a better soil texture.

The metal rod test is a good measurement, but have you dug up your oldest holes?
Digging up the oldest holes can let you know how well your method is working.

William Bronson wrote:Arthur,  your methods are well thought out and I think they are working quite well as is.

I think the dog/cat waste could go in a separate hole, where you won't plant any annuals.
It would be great way to prepare a place for a berry bush or fruit tree.

Thanks William, I think my father will be quite happy to have a place to put the animal waste that isn't the trash can, so that's what I was looking for. I'll talk to my parents about where they would want a fruit tree that also is a place where the possibility of bad smell won't bother them.

I think your father's involvement is excellent!
In particular, adding pine needles to the holes is a good idea.
Ideally they would be added with every bucket of food waste.
They will help create a better compost and ultimately a better soil texture.

I've heard a relative saying that the pine needles are bad for the soil, but I think his experience with it had been a hole full of only pine needles. Otherwise, I've read something about the pine needles causing the soil to be more acidic, but I've also read that this effect wasn't enough to outweigh the benefits of composting them. My overall impression is that with enough variety and nothing extremely bad/toxic, nature tends towards equilibrium.

The metal rod test is a good measurement, but have you dug up your oldest holes?
Digging up the oldest holes can let you know how well your method is working.

In my eagerness when I started I dug up a couple of old holes a bit early (around 2 or 3 months) and found some things not completely deteriorated, like a few orange peels and a couple of pineapple crowns. It also did smell a bit bad, but that's hard to qualify. I've been waiting to dig up some of the old holes to see what I find and I hope to do so in the next few days, so I'll take some photos to share. Some of the oldest holes have small trees in them, so I couldn't dig them, but by now there are a few that I can dig that should be old enough by now. ;D

Ha, Arthur, you got me.  I have not read any of her books though I was going by the two threads I linked. Those two sound like what you are doing to me.

So I asked Mr. Google thinking he knows more than regular folks.

Birdsandblooms said, "It's called The Ruth Stout Method and I can personally vouch for the fact that it saves labor, feeds plants and conserves soil moisture. The concept is simple: mulch plants and beds with natural debris such as leaves, straw, twigs, prunings, kitchen scraps and pulled weeds. Then let nature do the rest.

Add some mulch on top of those holes, push the mulch down so the lawn looks nice then take some pictures throughout the process and get a PEP BB:

https://permies.com/wiki/98577/Ruth-Stout-style-composting-spots

Anne Miller wrote:
Add some mulch on top of those holes, push the mulch down so the lawn looks nice then take some pictures throughout the process and get a PEP BB:

I've been thinking about doing that. The PEX BBs look like a fun way to get motivated to do some good stuff and maybe get a cool certificate along with a healthy experience. ^^

Responding to Arthur's question about whether we put cooked meat, bones, and some oily stuff in our pits - yes.

I do pull off most of the fat.

I had selected and written a description to some photos of a new composting hole I opened today in one of the old composting holes, but I got a "Comment too long." error which apparently deleted all the attachments and my descriptions. I'll try again tomorrow because my patience and time are kind short after this.

Yesterday I closed one of the composting holes and opened a new one in a place that included part of two old ones, here are some pictures. I'll do it in two parts in case I get another error.

Part two of the pictures from opening some old composting holes.

Also, I found something interesting in the bottom of one of the old composting holes: this kind of moss-like thing. It was covered in sand and at first I thought it was just an odd colored sand patch (I see some orange ones around old pieces of steel when digging), but this one had a purple tinge, so I got curious and washed it. Inside was this thing, I have no idea what it is, perhaps it's a fungus? Or maybe some weird plant? Or maybe just dead plant in the process of decomposition? No idea. In the picture there's the clump I washed and behind there are some unwashed ones, they look just like a clump of sand in the picture, but inspecting closely perhaps it'll be noticeable that there's a purple tinge in parts of the sand.

Hi Arthur- those black patches look great, where you buried stuff. I think if you can do more volume you will get nice soil, regardless of moisture. I have helped build gardens in a few places with sandy soil (Florianopolis, Cananeia) and after a few years of doing this constantly the soil really looks different. While it will never be the same as non-sandy soil, organic matter will really improve things for you.
(your ovenbird is there probably looking for worms, or maybe to build his nest, I know right now they're stealing mud from my yard every time I turn around).

Some things will definitely take longer to decompose (I'm constantly finding pineapple heads, pinhão shells, skins from fruta do conde, avocados, etc, in my beds) so I wouldn't worry about it too much. If I were you I'd look for other sources of organic matter and make your holes bigger, if you are interested-- cardboard works, as mentioned earlier, I imagine your situation is similar to mine, we don't have too many deciduous trees in Brazil and so it's not just a question of getting bags of leaves or hay.... I personally use a lot of sugarcane pressings in my garden, along with coffee grinds I get from a local business and any other scraps I can find. I don't worry about salt, fat, meat, bones, etc-- some salt is no big deal, plants need it, and I think the only real worry is animals who might dig it up. You say urban, there are probably some kind of rodents (not sure how cold you get- maybe lizards? coatis?). One thing I do is when I have something that I think might attract the feral cats or rats into my yard (I am also urban) is to put a large rock, block or something heavy on the ground on top.
I think you have a good start! And I think that purple thing might be some kind of seaweed or beach detritus.
Waving hi from a few states up from you, in Paraná.

Tereza Okava wrote:Hi Arthur- those black patches look great, where you buried stuff. I think if you can do more volume you will get nice soil, regardless of moisture. I have helped build gardens in a few places with sandy soil (Florianopolis, Cananeia) and after a few years of doing this constantly the soil really looks different. While it will never be the same as non-sandy soil, organic matter will really improve things for you.
(your ovenbird is there probably looking for worms, or maybe to build his nest, I know right now they're stealing mud from my yard every time I turn around).

Some things will definitely take longer to decompose (I'm constantly finding pineapple heads, pinhão shells, skins from fruta do conde, avocados, etc, in my beds) so I wouldn't worry about it too much. If I were you I'd look for other sources of organic matter and make your holes bigger, if you are interested-- cardboard works, as mentioned earlier, I imagine your situation is similar to mine, we don't have too many deciduous trees in Brazil and so it's not just a question of getting bags of leaves or hay.... I personally use a lot of sugarcane pressings in my garden, along with coffee grinds I get from a local business and any other scraps I can find. I don't worry about salt, fat, meat, bones, etc-- some salt is no big deal, plants need it, and I think the only real worry is animals who might dig it up. You say urban, there are probably some kind of rodents (not sure how cold you get- maybe lizards? coatis?). One thing I do is when I have something that I think might attract the feral cats or rats into my yard (I am also urban) is to put a large rock, block or something heavy on the ground on top.
I think you have a good start! And I think that purple thing might be some kind of seaweed or beach detritus.
Waving hi from a few states up from you, in Paraná.

Hi Tereza! Thanks for the kind answer. It's good to see other Brazilians around here. (:

I'd been wondering the bird's name in english, Ovenbird! Makes sense, with their oven-like nests. My parents always called them "Mud John" (João-de-barro). They're quite bold, always circling me looking for some grubs to eat when I'm watering the plants around the yard, digging or splitting some wood for my father.

I wouldn't be up for bigger holes, these ones already give me a lot of work (measured this last one: 85cmx90cmx70cm), but I've been thinking about building some raised beds and starting them as composting bins. We do have some deciduous trees around the yard, but not many (some grape vines, a black mulberry (Morus nigra), and one Lagerstroemia indica (Extremosa), with some others still growing), but we have around 15 pine trees around the sidewalk, which gives us a lot of pines and pine needles. The pines we use as fire-starters in the fireplace. The pine needles we compost a bit, but my father throws away a lot because he thinks it's too much to compost, and as I'm not sure he's wrong I don't oppose.

What I thought weird about those dark patches is that those were only a part of the compost I put in the composting hole, there was a lot more, but it didn't turn dark, it looks orange/pink in the pictures that show the dark patch. No idea if that was a composting failure or just a different color for a different compost, but I'll keep watching and learning.

Are you putting the ash from your fireplace in the hole? charcoal is a great input as well (biochar made from pine needles, perhaps?). I didn't realize the holes were already so big, for some reason I was thinking they were the size you'd put a tree in or something.
Raised beds sound like a great idea, that's how I've always done it unless i'm building a hugelbed (open the big hole, put in wood, then other organic matter, compost, manure, urine, etc, cover, let it rot down). I think for you a hugelbed (also called a hugelbeet) might need to be raised because of how high your water table is there, although I'm no expert on that. You can do the same thing just without the digging, let it rot down. The only issue is covering it so animals don't make a mess.
If you don't mind my asking, it doesn't look like you're really composting to benefit a garden, since the holes are under the grass. Is the goal to just avoid things going into the trash? If that's your goal, bokashi in a bucket might be a slightly less labor-intensive way to go about composting. you could dump the finished stuff on your planted trees (the mulberry probably doesn't need much fertilizing, they tend to do best in miserable conditions, grapes the same, i don't know much about your crape myrtle). If you want to start bigger beds for future gardens, then raised beds may be the way to go.

Tereza Okava wrote:Are you putting the ash from your fireplace in the hole? charcoal is a great input as well (biochar made from pine needles, perhaps?).

Yes, the ash goes to composting. I've been thinking about how I could make biochar from pine needles, but so far I don't have any ideas that would be cheap and easy without defeating my purpose of making biochar (to be environment-friendly), we really have a lot of pine needles (around 1m³ every 6 months? maybe every 3 months... it's kinda hard to gauge when I never paid attention to it before, maybe it's every month).

Raised beds sound like a great idea, that's how I've always done it unless i'm building a hugelbed (open the big hole, put in wood, then other organic matter, compost, manure, urine, etc, cover, let it rot down).

I'm thinking about digging a hole the size of the bed in the place the bed will be, and then using the dirt from the hole to cover the compost that goes into the bed to fill the bed with compost and dirt from the hole. Covering the compost this way has been enough so far to keep it sanitary, I'm hoping it'll be enough for the beds too.

If you don't mind my asking, it doesn't look like you're really composting to benefit a garden, since the holes are under the grass. Is the goal to just avoid things going into the trash?  

The initial idea was to cover the composting hole and then dig it up a few months later to use the compost, in a sort of rotation where I always dig a new composting hole in an old one, but I'm still perfecting this system, since I've planted a few trees on top of the old composting holes and haven't gotten the chance to really dig the old compost to use so far. Especially since my older composting holes were way smaller, so when I open them up I end up digging a lot of sand with the compost, which doesn't seem very good to use yet. I think I've settled on a good size now and I'll be able to get some good compost in a few months. Avoiding things going to the trash was more of a bonus than a goal.

Thought it would be good to post some pictures of the yard since I've started this project. They're slightly different angles, but close enough.

Arthur do Canto Pivetta wrote:Thought it would be good to post some pictures of the yard since I've started this project. They're slightly different angles, but close enough.

Try this, Arthur, less work and way more volume of material can be composted. Even humanure or pet manure or ... .

Compost Toilet Tips from Joe Jenkins: Using Multiple Toilet Receptacles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNeK078EiBo
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Easy Ten Minute Compost Bin from Pallets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul51Uz0qfHU

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How to Make a Compost Bin from Pallets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW_DVNUt7ms&pbjreload=102