Ruth Stout style composting (2 spots) - PEP BB gardening.sand.RuthStout

Nicole Alderman wrote:I'd continued documenting since this post....and then it snowed. So I started filling a 5 gallon bucket in our garage, to keep it cool. I figured the snow would melt and I'd be able to dig it in soon. BUT NO! The snow still hasn't melted, and my bucket was full and there was nowhere for the new compost to go! So I used a snow shovel to get down to the mulch, then dug the mulch out and put some of it in a pot. Then filled the hole with the 5 gallons of compost. Put the mulch on top of it, and then covered it with snow to help keep away winter-hungry creatures...and to make the garden bed a bit prettier.

I've been using this method for 2 years, and I really like it! It seems to always create my happiest gardens.  These squash were watered I think twice during the (abnormally hot) summer, and did fantastic. I give credit to Ruth Stout composting!

Love Ruth Stout, have her hard cover book from the 1970's, long before the jonnie come lately changed a few word & hijacked her methods.
Most of the new books that everyone tells me I should read, when they find out I garden, are clever rewrites of Ruth Stouts book.
They update the new buzz words so young gardeners will buy their books & most of the stuff has been around for well over sixty years.
She lived it long before she wrote anything for a magazine or a book, tried & true, did not care about the money like many of the posers of today.

I found out a 5 gallon bucket can quickly get too heavy for me, so I filled it partway 5 times to equal 2 bucketfuls. Some were general food scraps, but the bulk was where I cleaned stuff out of my freezer. I had chronic fatigue and other health issues for a couple of years, so some produce sat in the freezer instead of getting cooked. They weren't packaged well enough to avoid severe freezer burn for that long.

I had some chop and drop areas that needed much more mulch, so I pulled the thin layer of chopped stuff aside, dumped the buckets, and covered with wood chips.

To document your completion of the BB, provide the following:
  - a photo of the bucket of kitchen scraps next to the opened mulch
  - a photo of the empty bucket and the new mound of mulch
  - repeat for second bucket
  - describe the volume of your bucket(s) and how full they were

These were two full five gallon buckets.

I've been mulching over my lawn recently, coverting it into a food forest and need to build up the soil, so.... BB time!

Over the summer of 2021, I collected and deposited 4 10 litter buckets of kitchen scraps in 2 different areas of my gardens. 40 liters of kitchen scraps is equivalent to 10.56 gallons and thus fulfills the requirements for the Ruth Stout composting BB. I have attached pictures of all the buckets and the before and after pictures of covering the scraps with mulch.