Anyone who gardens or simply cooks a lot of vegetables quickly finds out – you must have a compost pile! Vegetable waste translates into useful fertilizer and soil very quickly if you compost, so it is a huge waste NOT to create some composting system – not to mention the cost of buying bags of compost. Seems silly to buy compost when you have all the ingredients for it already, doesn’t it?

The composting system I learned back in the Southeast USA (and which worked wonderfully for me there) looked something like this:

However, I have figured out that this system doesn’t work well out here in the hot, moisture-less air of the desert. You can’t keep the pile wet enough for decomposition to take place at a reasonable pace.

The above photo? It shows the compost bin about a year after creation. Instead of looking like a corral of hay, it should look like soil. As if further proof was needed, it’s stil got decomposing tomato skins in it:

This is obviously not the system for the desert. Ripe compost is supposed to look like heavy, beautiful dirt, not like it’s still decomposing!

So I have moved on to the pit compost method. First I asked my sweetie pie to dig a hole for me and he kindly obliged. Then I filled the hole with a mix of vegetable waste and moldy hay. I covered it with a last layer of moldy hay and then topped it with some wood boards, mostly to keep the hay from blowing away in the wind, but also as a minimal critter control.

I decided to do a two week experiment to see if the pit worked better. To start with I added this bin of vegetable waste on May 11th:

I spread it in with my mulch pitchfork:

…Covered it up with my insulating layer of moldy hay…

…Then watered it:

I watered it once a week then checked it two weeks later. The bin of vegetable waste has decomposed to this:

Pretty cool, huh? In case it hasn’t fully sunk in for you, here’s the amount of decomposition I obtained in two weeks with pit composting:

I’m ecstatic that this is working so successfully! I also noticed that the moldy hay I used as a top layer is decomposing much faster this way too, so much so that I needed to add another layer of moldy hay. Compare with my first photo of my above ground compost system with totally un-brokendown straw and you’ll understand why I’m excited.

The next part of this adventure in composting will be to add bokashi into the mix and see how it goes. I have heard Bokashi praised as a great way to compost in the desert since it requires little moisture. My stinky bucket of bokashi compost is just waiting to jump into this pit and join the party!