One of my favorite things about having a home garden is that it helps increase your self-sufficiency, and not just with the food that you grow. Another great benefit to a home garden is that it helps to close off part of your waste stream. Having a home garden makes it significantly easier to compost all of your food scraps right in your back yard. This is just one of many great perks that come with gardening. Unfortunately, once the temperatures cool down and the snow starts falling, many of us put our gardening on pause along with all of the benefits that come with it. We return to buying produce from the grocery store and have to settle for our house plants being the only green things around us. But what does this mean for our food scraps, do we go back to throwing them in the trash? Or can we keep benefiting from our compost piles all winter long.
Composting through the winter is already a tricky thing to manage. Add the frigid temperatures of a Gunnison Valley winter to the equation and overwintering your compost might seem like an impossible task, but it can be done. Calder farms is able to keep their compost cooking at 160˚F through the winter. Here are some of their tips and tricks that they use to help keep compost going through the winter.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that your compost pile is alive, and like most living things, it produces its own heat through metabolic processes. So the more metabolic processes going on, the more heat your compost will create. This is why at Calder farms they pay special attention to their compost pile throughout the winter, ensuring that it is as healthy as it can be to avoid freezing during the winter.
It can be easy to just throw some scraps into your compost, and let it do its thing during the summer, but during winter you need to be much more attentive to the needs of your compost. Make sure you have a good ration of browns to greens. Browns refers to the bulk carbon that is added to compost. This can be leaves, straw, wood chips, pretty much anything that is decomposable and full of carbon. The greens refer to things that are high in nitrogen. This includes food scraps, or fresh clippings etc. You’ll want to maintain a ratio of around 30:1 browns to greens. This is a rough estimate, because it is difficult to know the exact ration of carbon to nitrogen in everything that you put into your compost, so don’t get to hung up on this number. Instead just observe your compost, and make adjustments based on what you are seeing (and smelling).
You will want to pay close attention to this ratio in the winter, because you should start adding more brown to soak up the extra moisture, and provide more insulation. You will likely need to add some extra green as well to make sure you keep a healthy ratio.
If your compost doesn’t seem to be breaking things down as fast as it should, you might have too much brown in your compost and you should increase the amount of green in your compost. If your compost pile is starting to smell bad, this indicates that your compost has maybe gone anaerobic, this can be caused by having too much water and or green in your compost. In this case you will want to stir your compost a little, and add some brown if it looks too wet.
Another thing that could help give your compost a leg up in the winter is to chop up your food scraps into smaller pieces. Since the organisms that break down the food are microscopic, the smaller these food scraps are, the faster they will break down. Keeping your compost happy and productive is crucial to having it continue to cook over winter, but it is not the only thing that you can do to help out your compost.
Keeping your compost going through the winter is all about keeping it warm. Now it will generate its own heat, but you can keep this heat in with insolation, and you can siphon some free heat off of the sun as well. It is easy to keep your compost pile insulated. You can do this by surrounding the whole thing with straw, bags of leaves, it doesn’t really matter. You just want to make sure that you can keep in the heat that it is producing.
Helping your compost absorb some free heat from the sun can also be very helpful, and simple. At Calder farms, they cover their compost with a black tarp. They also mentioned that creating a cold frame or moving your compost into a hoop house type structure can help provide the extra warmth that is needed to keep it cooking year round. And if you do not have the space or resources to keep your compost pile going year round, Calder farms has a bin in front of their farm for dropping off food scraps. This will insure that you can dispose of your food scraps properly through the winter, even if you can’t compost them yourself.
Gardening in Gunnison is difficult for a myriad of reasons, keeping your compost going is just one of these. The average amount of time that it takes for something to break down in a backyard compost pile is just about as long as our whole growing season here, so you need to be able to extend the life of your compost at least a little bit, to really get good use out of it. Regardless of whether you are actually able to keep your compost cooking over the winter, it is worth trying. The worst case scenario is that it freezes, and then starts cooking again in the spring. I have spoken to many gardeners who continue to put food scraps on their compost throughout the winter regardless of whether it is cooking or not, so why not give it a go.