From scraps to compost to vegetable garden
We started our compost bin a little less than a year ago, to reduce the waste we were adding to landfill - now we’re getting fresh vegies from our garden!
This is what it looked like to start with. We mostly put in kitchen scraps, garden clippings, and newspapers.
When it was finished cooking, it looked like this:
We added the compost to the soil before planting a few tomato and basil plants, plus some beetroot.
In a few months, it looked like this. The plant starting to crawl across the garden is a pumpkin vine, which seems to have sprung from a stray seed in the compost.
Right now, it looks like this. I’m afraid the vine is going to smother our house if we let it continue. I’d be surprised if we get a good pumpkin from it, as it’s putting all it’s energy into leaves instead of fruit. The beetroot didn’t really work out - they were tiny. I blame the rogue pumpkin for stealing it’s nutrients!
However, the tomatoes are doing fine.
So far, we’ve grown about 3 kilos of tomatoes. I don’t know how long the plants will keep producing - the hot weather has only just begun in Perth. The basil is doing well so far. Next time we’re going to plant some onions and carrots.
It’s almost magical - we took rubbish and leftovers that would usually have gone into a giant stinking landfill, and turned them into fresh food instead. We’re not experts: we just stuck some scraps in a bin and waited, then put the compost in the ground, stuck in some plants, and watered them while we waited some more.
Anyone can give this a go - it’s not hard, and it’s very satisfying to eat a meal from vegies and herbs you grew yourself! If you want to try it, first check out my original post about Beginner’s Composting and then look into some books on growing your own fruit and vegetables. We’ve found the Yates Garden Guide useful, and the website for ABC’s Gardening Australia tv show is full of interesting stuff to try.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:23 am
All our scraps are going to the chickens, they are great transformers of waste to manure for the garden. But they don’t like coffee/tea/banana peal and that kind of stuff so that goes in our compost heap which is turned into good soil by lots of creepy crawlers. I think it’s the best system ever; Reduce your amount of waste by little efford!
Unfortunately my tomatoes are not florishing, the insects attacked them, so it goes back into the chook pen… But the basil is doing great as well here
January 16th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
We were thinking of getting a Bokashi bin for the stuff that can’t go into the compost, like meat, etc.
That’s a shame about your tomatoes
glad to hear the basil is doing well, though 
January 17th, 2008 at 10:43 am
For the meat leftovers we have the cats
January 17th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Your tomatoes look tasty. I put in my plants a bit late, so I’m still waiting for mine.
re: pumpkins,
I too get compost pumpkins (and compost tomatoes and compost lettuce and compost cucumbers). These plants that pop up from the compost might have come from hybrid parents (depending where the vegies you put in the compost came from) and so they will not necessarily be as high yielding as plants you choose to plant.
But with the pumpkin vine, if you want pumpkins from it you might have to pollinate the flowers by hand (ie. with a paintbrush) because the bees don’t always do a good enough job of cross pollinating. I don’t know whether you need a male and a female plant (which you do with some cucurbits). I don’t like eating pumpkins and usually just weed out any seedlings I find.
I tried growing cucumbers this summer, but because a lot of them didn’t survive the heat, I don’t have male and female plants to pollinate, by hand or otherwise. Maybe next year.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Thanks for the tip, Clare! I might give the hand pollinating a go, just out of curiosity
We had some bees last summer, but we think the neighbours must have gotten rid of the hive because we haven’t seen them this summer.
Some of the pumpkins we ate were organic, others weren’t - I’d guess that we’ve probably got a hybrid. If we were serious about pumpkins I’d prefer to try some heirloom varieties, I think.
Good luck with the cucumbers next year!
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Fantastic, Composting is so rewarding and keeps you “down to earth”. I think I have exactly the same compost bin as you
It is amazing just how quickly it all breaks down. Imagine if everyone composted then perhaps the garbo would only need to come once a month
January 31st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Exactly! It took ours a long time to get started, but now it takes no time at all to break down.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
I’ve moved to WA from the UK and suprised how few people compost here. Trying to get my compost going, but find the compost dries out terribly and worried it won’t break down properly, even though I wet it with water occasionally, any tips?
Problem with aphids on tomatoes, try growing marigold between, as it deters the aphids
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
I agree, I think it’s something we could do better at here in WA. But yes, in this weather the compost does tend to dry out a lot - we wet it maybe once a week in the *very* hot weather we’ve had lately, and try to keep the lid on so that even if the moisture evaporates, it’s got nowhere to go
I’ve also heard that if you add any paper to the compost, you can wet it down before you put it in.
I hadn’t heard that about marigolds before, we’ll have to give it a shot on our next batch - thanks for the tip!