Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

The best soil in my raised beds did not come from a bag. It came from the compost pile — an unglamorous heap of kitchen scraps and garden waste that has been quietly cooking in the corner of the yard since I started the garden. Every spring I wheel a few barrowfuls into the beds and work them in, and every season the plants tell me it was worth it in a language that requires no interpretation.

The Composting System at Freighter View Farms

Three wire bins, nothing fancy. One accepts new material. One is actively decomposing. One holds finished compost, dark and crumbly and smelling like good earth, ready to use. The bins are simple cylinders of hardware cloth supported by wooden stakes — maybe an hour of construction, never replaced. The magic is not in the bins. The magic is in what goes in them and what you do with the result.

What goes in: kitchen scraps — vegetable peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, fruit cores, anything that was recently alive and is not meat or dairy. Garden waste — spent plants after they come out of the ground, pulled weeds that have not yet gone to seed, the stems and leaves I remove when I prune tomatoes. Fall leaves, collected and stored dry, added through the winter as carbon to balance the nitrogen-heavy kitchen scraps. Grass clippings, sparingly, because too much at once mats down and goes anaerobic.

What does not go in: weeds that have gone to seed — compost piles that do not get hot enough will spread those seeds back into the beds. Diseased plant material — same problem. Meat, fish, dairy — unnecessary trouble with wildlife and smell.

Michigan Composting: What the Cold Season Changes

A Zone 6a compost pile slows dramatically in winter. Mine essentially stops from December through February, which is fine — I am not adding much to the beds in those months anyway. When March comes and the pile begins warming again, I turn it with a fork to reintroduce oxygen, and by May it is active enough to get quite hot in the center. The finished material from the previous year is ready to go into the beds at transplant time.

Leaves are the abundance here that some gardeners do not use well. Bay City in October produces more fallen leaves than I can compost, so I store the overflow in a pile and add them through the year as needed. Leaf mold — leaves left to decompose on their own, slowly, into a fine dark material — is one of the best mulches I have ever used around seedlings. It costs nothing. It takes about a year. It is worth the patience.

What the Compost Does

Beyond the obvious — adding organic matter, improving drainage in heavy clay soil, improving water retention in sandy soil — finished compost introduces billions of beneficial microorganisms to the beds. These are the organisms that break down nutrients into forms plant roots can absorb, that suppress some soil-borne diseases, that build the complex web of soil biology that makes a garden productive year after year instead of declining.

I test my soil every few years, but mostly I watch the plants. Tomatoes in beds that got compost this spring grow differently than tomatoes in beds that did not — darker leaves, more vigorous early growth, better drought tolerance in August. The compost is the explanation.

You can buy good soil. You cannot buy old soil — soil that has been built over years by the same gardener in the same beds with the same materials. That is what the compost pile is making, one season at a time. I find that worth the minor effort of keeping it fed.

The compost that improves the soil also improves seed quality — more on saving seeds from healthy plants here.

Related reading:

• The beds that receive this compost: Raised Bed Gardening in Michigan.
• Composting is the first thing I recommend to anyone starting out — more in How to Start a Garden in Michigan.