Green Made Easy by Chris Prelitz

Author:Chris Prelitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2009-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

GREEN

YOUR

COMPOST

It was 1986, and Heidi and I weren’t really looking for a lot to build on, but the real-estate agent said it was a great buy for California, especially here in Laguna Beach. My first reaction when I saw it was, Yes!It faces south! That was all I needed.Sure it had some challenges: It was basically a big hole in the ground barren of anything except a few weeds. And the soil was hard-packed clay. While I was walking around the lot, however, a vision of a beautiful home nestled into the side of the hill’s slope appeared in my mind’s eye. We took a deep breath and went for it.

After escrow closed, the first thing I did was contact a local tree trimmer and ask to have a load of tree-trimming mulch delivered. He had two different choppers and recommended the finer mulch from a load of eucalyptus they were scheduled to trim the next week. He was grateful to save a trip hauling it to the green-waste landfill, and I was thrilled to get all that mulch for free—a real win-win for both of us. My hope was that the leaves would do what they do naturally on the forest floor: decompose back into the earth, eventually breaking up the clay and making the soil richer.

One full truck didn’t sound like a lot, but when it arrived I could see that it was way more than I’d imagined. I made a good little dent in the pile the first day but decided to stop and take the weekend off. On Sunday, I went over to do some more onsite designing of the house plans, and that’s when the fire truck arrived.

I knew that compost could get hot, but I’d never heard of a pile of chopped leaves steaming. I thought it was kind of funny, but the firefighters weren’t laughing. With shovels and pitchforks, we opened up the center of the pile where the steam was coming from. The rising steam turned into a solid smoky cloud as fresh air touched the hot center of the pile, but a good dousing of water put a stop to the whole mess. The fire department was very clear: the pile had to be gone by the next day—period!

It took four of us the whole next day to spread the mulch out and cover all the weeds and bare spots about six inches deep. As I look back, that was probably one of the best investments I’ve ever made. Six months later, we needed another load of mulch. We went with a half load of pine trimmings to get some different nutrients, and this time, we had a crew standing by with rakes in hand. The first batch of mulch had mostly decomposed already. And when you pushed the leaves aside, where there once was hardpan soil, there was now the start of beautiful black rich earth.

We still get a load or two a year for our walkways, and all of our kitchen scraps go into compost bins that seasonally get dumped under the fruit trees.

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