How to Use Compost in Your Vegetable Garden

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Scott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com I will like to talk to you about vegetable gardening. Hi! I like to talk for a little while about compost in the garden. I'm a organic gardener so compost in my garden is probably the most important key for behaving good soil structure, humus in the soil that is later going to turn in to the food to my plants. Now compost could come in any number of different ways you could get it bagged, pelleted from a commercial sources, but my favorite way is to make a my own compost. Now my compost doesn't finish up quiet as nice as some of those commercial products but it uses things on hand in my yard and it turns them onto the soil and you could see here that I have in my soil well there is little bits of leaves, twigs, pine needles, and over the years of adding these to my soil it helps really build up nice. You could see I could just dig in my soil with my hands. I could dig down almost a foot bare handed. It is nice loose soil but my plants really appreciate. The base line for my compost starts in the compost pile. Where I finish it up as here in my compost crumblier. This allows me to turn compost over a lot quicker then it would take if I just left things in the pile. Now the things to look for when you make your compost is that nice dark black color that lets you know that you are really breaking things down in to good organic matter. Don't worry if things don't finish off completely. The worms and the microbes in the soil would help finish that off for you. Some great ways to use this compost in the garden is to actually till it as a amendment and work into your soil, but what I have done over the years and part of the reason I have such a nice loose soil is simply to use this in the garden as a mulch, and as I plant new plants I simply come in mulch around it with a little bit of compost. This helps preserve moisture in the soil, it helps add the microbe organism that are necessary to release the natural food sources in the soil and in the compost that I just added and it is the base line for good organic gardening. If you don't have a compost heap in your yard a compost tumbler is a great place to start but certainly there is room in everybody's yard to make your own compost."