What to Do When You Have Run Out of Compost? Plus How to Composting tips!

Has this ever happened to you? Doodly doodly doodly doo. Just need a bit of compost for the old garden. Refurbishing a bed. The old compost heap. You beauty. Slow growing compost. Marvellous. Hey, where's all the compost gone? Oh no, my day of gardening is ruined. G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me and we've got a little bit of compost left but to be honest it's not enough to do the jobs that I want to do at the moment. So that's a real shame. What do you do when you've run out of your own homemade compost? There's arguably nothing better for your garden than your own homemade rich compost made from kitchen scraps, grass clippings and other organic garden waste. Compost adds nutrients to the soil creating food for plants, worms, fungi and microbes. It also helps give the soil structure and water holding qualities reducing the need to water or fertilise as much. But there are times when you're going to run out of this precious resource. It might be a large garden project that you're doing and you simply just don't have enough compost to go around. It could be that you don't have enough garden waste or materials to create enough of the compost that you need or perhaps you're composting but it just hasn't matured yet and you're checking it and it's just not ready to put in the garden. So what do you do then? Well in this video I'm going to give you my tips on how I cope with this horrendous dilemma a lack of compost to work into my vegetable garden. Let's get into it. Before we do get into it I quickly want to explain to you guys our composting setup this three bay method what went wrong and what we're going to do to fix it up. Now this three bay method works really well I'm not going to explain it in detail because I want to get on to the guts of the video but essentially the pallets were for free so it's a low cost design the star pickets were for free and it's just a number of pallets all shaped together in three bays and held into position by good old star pickets hammered into the ground and also they're tacked together with nails and screws essentially that's all it was and this has done us well for a couple of years. I use this synthetic grass because I was under the impression that the stuff would last for lots of years it was supposed to be high grade but it turned out to degrade really quickly in the sun it needs to be gotten rid of and we're on to that but what I like about this three bay method is that you start your compost in one bay and then you turn it over into the next and this is slow composting this isn't fast composting this is slow over many months and then you turn it into the second bay where then the bottom becomes the top and the theory is well it actually isn't a theory it works then it all breaks down underneath because you've got the almost broken down compost and dirt on top of it now and then once that's broken down after another several months you turn it into this bed which is your finishing compost bed this is the compost that you use in the garden but we still have to get this done so that's going to take some time and then once we do get it done you can imagine it's going to take months and months before we get our own slow-growing homemade compost back again once you get this thing going in the three bays you can then when you're finishing one bay off you've already started the first one and you've got this continual process and it works really good and I'll be doing more videos on composting later once I get this properly squared away to give you a better rundown of it but in the meantime we purchased one of those tumbler composters you know those plastic ones that tumble the kitchen scraps and clippings and that around I'm going to put that together and that should give us a faster compost it's not as good as the slow ground stuff but the advantage is it does make compost within about two to eight weeks so at least we'll have something to be or something natural and organic from our own garden I'll also do a video on that and let you guys know what I think of a tumbler style composter and if I'd recommend one well now that that rather long intro and setup is out of the way what can you do? I'm sure you're wanting to know what we do when we're in a situation like this and we've run out of compost for whatever reason first of all you can not use any compost in the garden at all that's the first thing you can do and this is perfectly fine to do simply weed the bed give it a light dig and rake over perhaps a little fertilizer and then plant or sow seed however you will find that over time especially in raised bed gardens that the level will reduce the soil will become depleted of nutrients and even more importantly structure such as moisture holding capacity and microbes and even worms therefore it's still vital that we do something about it because the plants rely on all these other elements to grow well and produce food for us so essentially we're going to have to add compost to that soil at some point if we're going to maintain the health of the overall garden bed there are some substitutes that you can use in the garden in lieu of compost that will help for a little while and they're good to do as a matter of practice anyway and that is mulch mulching is really good as a compost substitute because what it essentially does is you add things to the garden to top dress underneath your plants such as grass clippings that are seed free wood chip or you might buy a mulch such as sugar cane which can be very cost effective or lucerne which can be a little expensive but more nutritious for the plants and these types of mulch break down in the garden bed and eventually do become compost themselves another thing to think about is free compost from your local council i know our council provides the service the only thing is that the compost can be fairly rough because they make it they mulch up the organic matter with big machines and it's good for around fruit trees and we use it for that but i don't think it'd be great in the garden my father-in-law who used to be a farmer and still is an avid backyard container vegetable grower gave me a piece of advice years ago about creating a cost-effective compost growing mix for times when you've run out of your own homemade compost and it was buy the budget three dollar compost or potting mix bags from your local retailer and simply add a handful of organic blood and bone or other organic based fertilizer to the bag mix it up and there you have a nutrient-rich growing medium rather than buying the premium mixes for eight to twelve dollars a bag and i still follow this advice from time to time lately i've been buying the cheaper bags with the blood and bone mixed into it already but mixing your own is definitely a cheaper way to go if you want to save an extra few dollars here and there and yeah of course i'd prefer my own compost but this beats nothing at all in the garden especially when those beds are getting depleted and you really need to do something about it one of the main benefits of using a commercial compost mix is also one of the main disadvantages and that is its sterility homemade compost done the old slow way is full of life microbes, worms, fungi spores etc which are beneficial to the garden and plants whereas many commercial compost mixes are heat treated and don't contain these elements on the other hand a sterile commercial compost mix won't contain grass seeds or weeds or introduce diseases into your garden personally i don't have any moral objection one way or the other for using commercial compost just to say that if you can make enough of your own then that's what i prefer to do but if you have a large garden like ours you may find from time to time your compost runs short so you can either do without for the short term or if you still don't have enough and the garden bed is really needing some love then buying a commercial compost mix in the interim will not only allow you to grow good quality produce without delay it also saved wasting seeds and plants to poor soil structure and helps the local economy at the same time you can even just rest a bed all together and that's what i've done here i've covered this bed over and i'm just going to let it rest and rejuvenate you could even add kitchen scraps and other organic elements underneath here and dig it in and turn it into a composting bed if you like and once it's all broken down perhaps in six months or so you'll have a beautiful medium for growing your next crop of vegetables the other thing that's really good for resting beds like this is when you don't grow anything in it for a period of time pests such as nematodes that feed off vegetable roots they starve to death so you'll have then all the good microbes and things like worms left underneath here and all the baddies they'll be all starved out and gone so that's just another option the only thing is of course when you're resting a bed like this you can't grow in it so that's a downside i guess but if you've got the space resting beds is a option for when you've run out of compost and there you have it that's what i do when i've run out of compost perhaps you do something similar or do you have other composting tips that you'd like to share with us if you do whack them in the comment section below so that we can all learn from them don't forget to give this video a big thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already for more gardening and self-sufficiency type videos such as this one remember you don't have to be self-sufficient in everything just try to be self-sufficient in something and look and see the earth through her eyes because to battle against nature is a lot harder than working with it thanks a lot for watching bye for now