Secrets to Winter Composting for Incredible Soil Fertility in the Garden

It's winter and believe it or not I'm still creating high quality compost for my garden. Let me take you on a quick tour. Hey Provident Preppers, I'm Kyleen. And I'm Jonathan. Today we're talking about the fertility of your soil. There's a worldwide shortage of fertilizers right now and farmers are really being limited as to what they can put on their fields, especially things like nitrogen. So this is leading to a world food crisis that I think is going to get fairly severe. But let me share a little secret with you. We don't use any commercial fertilizers on our little homestead and we are still able to produce an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. So this fertilizer shortage doesn't affect us and it really doesn't have to affect you. We're going to talk about that today. And there's one other thing that I think it's important to talk about and that's that food that is produced with these large commercial farms, a lot of times they're lacking in the the nutrients that we can produce in our own backyard gardens because we continually put all the nutrients back into our soil and the plants give it back to us. So today we are going to take you on a little tour of our homestead and show you some of the different ways that we close that loop and recycle all of that nutrients back into our soil. The first thing I want to address are kitchen scraps. All of those waste products that you have in your kitchen that are organic and they're still really good stuff. This stuff, all I do is I dump it over the fence and our chickens come and eat it and turn it into eggs within just a few days. Another little great resource that we have are the shavings or the straw that we have down here in the chicken coop. Look at all those girls yeah yeah because they poop in this and we want to make sure that we keep clean. This actually ended up being hay but we wanted to make sure we keep clean stuff on the floor for them and every once in a while we just clean it all out and put it in the compost pile. For the second way to take care of my kitchen scraps I want to introduce you to the loamy. Unlike my chickens who can smell and make a mess loamy can sit in my house and it never smells. So it's super easy to use you just take this lid off and this is a batch that I've already done and if you can see it's just it turns out to be like a beautiful compost and it will change depending on what you put in it. So for instance this one can you see how this some of this like this is four different batches but this is a kind of turned out like a red I think there was probably a lot of oranges in here this one is more green and powdery and this one's kind of fluffy. So with the loamy I'm just going to dump my compost in here and it will never ever smell and you can top dress your plants inside the house or outside but it's super easy it is an expensive tool it costs about six cents for me to run a batch there's three different cycles but one of the things that I really like it for is to return those nutrients into the soil. So these are just eggshells from the garden and just so that they don't take up as much space I like to kind of crush them but I put all kinds of things in there there's napkins there's orange peels that the chickens won't eat right there's my my herbal tea bags citrus all kinds of stuff like that okay whoops don't want to put an avocado pit in there that would not be good for the loamy but pretty much you can put all kinds of stuff in there there is a don't list too these are leaves for my homemade sauerkraut then what I do is I take one of these loamy pods and I don't always use one of these it helps with the nutrients in the soil and breaking it down and all that kind of stuff and then I just pour quarter cup of water over the top because remember it takes water it takes moisture to be able to break it down and heat and the loamy adds the heat then I just take my little lid here hold on put it on push the button and the mode that I usually use is the one that's in between if you use the one that takes longer you'll have a finer compost when it comes out and then there's one that's shorter that I don't like as much so I just have the one right in the middle and five or six hours from now I'll come out and this has all turned into this beautiful kind of compost and I love that like the napkins that we use I can use it but there's no smell it's just all high in nutrients and I can use it to inoculate my garden or I can use it just to top dress some of my indoor plants and it doesn't attract bugs it doesn't smell there is zero smell with this and so if you live in an apartment or like me you just want you have a ton of eggshells and you want a really good way to start breaking down things this is it it totally accelerates it really fast one of the things in our garden that I'm not a huge fan of are these compost tumblers now don't get me wrong they work great for some people and especially if you only have a very small area and you have the time to put the stuff in get it wet and keep it tumbled it's going to work great for you but for me all of the methods that I'm using are so much less work that these just kind of end up sitting here so these might be good for you for me not so much um but one of the things I do is I have if you look at this little basket right here it's just wire that has been put into a circle and when I'm in this garden and I am pulling up stuff that I want to get rid of but I don't want to take it to the chickens and I don't want to just chop and drop it I stick it in there and let it start to decompose behind me these are our worm bins and there's worms inside of there with all kinds of different you know straw and leaves and different things like that and it's busy creating worm castings which are incredible for your garden. Okay now I want to show you a couple things first this area is just for leaves Tom Bartels created a video for our World War III Victory Garden where he talks about how to create this incredible leaf mulch and so that is what we are creating back here and the snow fell too early and so we weren't able to collect all the leaves that we had wanted to from our friends and neighbors but as soon as this all melts we're going to do that. Now the other great composter we have are rabbits and I know you can't tell here but underneath the snow right here is actually rabbit manure and it's amazing we we collected it all from the underneath the rabbits cages and put it here because I'm going to put it on my rabbit or my raspberry beds. One of the things about rabbit manure is that it's not hot. You can put it directly on your garden and you don't have any problems with it. Now you can't do that with chicken manure. Chicken manure is it's just too hot and so that needs to go in something like your compost pits or your leaf pile or something and let it just mellow a little bit. It's high in nitrogen so it will actually accelerate that process. You know with this leaf in your compost pile it's really important that you have moisture. Moisture is just incredibly important because that is what helps it all to break down. If we were to keep these leaves dry they would look the same in the spring that they do right now but because their moisture or they're wet right and there's a lot of moisture that heat builds up and they'll break down. In fact if you look at this pile you'll notice that while there is snow everywhere else there's a bunch that doesn't have any snow on it and that's because the heat that's being generated by that compost pile. Another little trick that we do these are carrots that are planted in here and we like to harvest them all year long and what we do is we take just these bags of leaves and we put them on top the carrots so that we can just come in and harvest the carrots all winter long. This ground isn't frozen but the really cool thing about this is that we use these bags to compost the leaves. So I've got holes in the bottom of the bag and I've got holes in the top of the bag if you can see these little holes so that the moisture can get in and it creates this wonderful insulation for the carrots all while composting the leaves for my compost so we can return the fertility to the earth. Now let's talk about hugel beds. We have these raised garden beds which make it significantly easier for me to garden considering my MS. It makes it so that I can sit down on the side and they're just beautiful and wonderful and easier to work with. Now the secret here is that underneath these beds there are logs and branches and all kinds of organic matter that we just put in here before we put the soil on. Now that is composting. It's breaking down and it creates the logs and the branches hold water like a sponge and makes it available to the plant later but they're slowly decomposing and adding nutrients to this soil right where the plants can get it. So hugel beds are a fantastic solution for raised beds and providing fertility. One of the things that I wanted to talk about that we do all the time on our homestead is something called chop and drop. These are raspberry plants and in the method of organic gardening you want to return the nutrients to the soil but you want to do it in little pieces so that it will decompose more quickly. What you can't see here because of all the snow is that I've already chopped down these raspberries and done exactly what I just showed you so that we can start the process in the winter. You want to do this in the fall so that there's plenty of time for all that moisture and the decomposition to take place. After I get these all chopped down and cut up then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the rabbit manure on top here or some other compost so that the process will work quicker and we'll see how these raspberries do next year. But chop and drop in my regular garden a lot of times if I'm out there working and I have weeds that haven't gone to seed I will just chop them up a little bit and lay them right on top the surface as a mulch. It's really good to do that with garlic and onions because it works really well to discourage some of the other pests and it makes a great mulch. So any of those kinds of things just chop them and drop them. When we go out and prune in the orchard a lot of times that's what I'm doing. I'm just I don't leave them in huge pieces I cut them up smaller but I'll leave them right there so that they can bring more fertility to the soil and it's not a lot of work for me. In my big production garden as well as in the kitchen garden I have these wire baskets just everywhere and I just put stuff in them whatever I want to compost that I'm not taking to the chickens that I don't want to chop and drop just gets put in here and we just let nature do her thing and then when I need compost I just add the fertility to the soil. Another way that we create our own fertilizers is through the JADAM method. JADAM organic farming is an awesome resource but inside of these barrels these are just used pickle barrels that we got for free there's a tap in the bottom we fill it with rain water or you don't want to use hard water in it right but so we fill them up and then we put the plants in there we put comfrey and all kinds of I'll do a whole video on that but we create this liquid fertilizer that's like gold I just drain it out the bottom dilute it and fertilize my plants with it and they do really really well. One of the other sources of free fertility is cardboard and papers. I use the cardboard a lot I'll put it on the ground to sheet mulch and then put lots of wood chips on top it suppresses the weeds and and it will just degrade into the soil and provide some great nutrients for the soil but I do like this bed right here it was a new bed it was free we just got it from somebody and so I wanted to start putting the stuff in the bottom and we filled it with a lot of cardboard and other organic matter and right now it's actually just being a little nursery for plants inside of pots so that I can overwinter them because I bought them on sale of course at the end of the year but the ground was frozen so I couldn't put it in there so these guys are just in here like a little nursery but when I use the cardboard I like to try and take this tape off it's not a huge issue but I do like to try and make sure that I remove as much of that as possible but just think about all the paper products that you throw away and how you might be able to compost them I wouldn't compost like the slick ads or colored shiny things I wouldn't do that but there's a lot of good stuff that can provide some good the woody part that you need for your compost one of the other methods that I think we want to make sure we don't rule out is just leaves and leaving the leaves right where they drop so behind me you see this new food forest that we've planted and it's got this thick layer of wood chips and the leaves off the tree just fell and we're just going to leave them because as those leaves accumulate it's going to create leaf mold and this beautiful rich soil that will be perfect for the food forest so sometimes you don't need to do anything except leave it where it drops the takeaway from this video is to challenge you to close the loop and take advantage of the resources that you have available to you quit letting the garbage man take them away and take the time and energy that it takes to compost it and return it to the soil and grow healthy nutrient-rich foods now I visited the Norfolk Botanical Garden while I was in Virginia oh what an amazing place they had this incredible display of all kinds of different ways to compost some of them were just bins some of them were like the tumblers or containers where you've just got this black tub that sits on the ground and you just keep putting your stuff in it and it composts until you can take that out and reuse it in your garden and in your soil but there are a whole lot of different ideas and not all of them work for everyone so you've got to look at it and choose what works best for you challenge for you is to figure out what ways are best for you to compost there's a whole variety as have we've talked about today and there's more maybe it's salome maybe it's tumblers whatever works for you I challenge you to figure that out and let's get busy doing it because there's no point in throwing this stuff away when we can use it to really enhance our soil so the question of the day for you what is your favorite method of composting what advice can you give to others and maybe what challenges are you facing let's solve them so comment below and thanks for being part of the solution