The Frugal Gardener

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An acquaintance in a small town in New York wondered what the town did with the leaves they collected every fall. From that point on they filled in her fence enclosed garden. The leaves insulated the garden over the winter, making it possible for earthworms to work in unfrozen ground. Come spring she had the leaves tilled into the soil for a beautiful, humus rich garden.

Remembering that the Native Americans were fond of planting a fish in each hill of corn, I asked a local fish market what they did with fish heads, innards, and the like. They gave me a time and place I could pick up buckets of wonderfully fertile material.

Some stuff stinks, no doubt about it. If you have close neighbors, you need to be considerate of their noses. There is also the potential for attracting a range of pests as diverse as coons, deer, cats, dogs, rodents, and flies. Cleanliness, is the secret to odor free organic matter collection and use. The bucket used to carry fish scraps needs to be rinsed, sometimes washed and always left in the air because aerobic bacteria are much less odoriferous than anaerobic bacteria.

When smelly materials are being used, make sure they are used immediately. If fish scraps are going into corn hills, get the scraps when you are about to plant the corn. Smelly materials can be collected anytime, however, but you do need to be ready for them. The best way to do that is to be ready to make or add to a compost pile. A compost pile must have a combination of materials. Any combination will work eventually, but it will get cooking fastest if it has a high-nitrogen material. How do you know what's high in nitrogen? Fish, seaweed, and manure win the trophies. Mix or layer these with some nice weeds, spoiled hay, leaves, or grass clippings and the smell goes away. I always mix in some garden soil as well, which is another odor neutralizer.

Nitrogen is only one of the 16 elements that plants need for healthy growth. When you are starting a garden you should test your soil every year. After you get the humus built up you will find that the nutrients will do a pretty good job of taking care of themselves as long as you keep adding organic material. Actually it isn't the nutrients taking care of themselves. It is soil organisms eating the organic material and excreting fertilizer and eventually dying that keeps things in balance.

I didn't even mention table scraps. When I had a market garden, there were two restaurants I sold to that would bag their vegetable waste for me. It was considerable. We limited it to vegetable because I only delivered twice a week and meat scraps get ripe pretty fast in warm weather. We don't even put our own meat scraps on the compost because of animals.

We have composted meat. The reason we don't do it now is that we don't eat much of it so there isn't much of that kind of organic matter around. Barbara has found that if she puts the meat in the indoor compost containers and it sits around for more than a day at room temperature, it will start to smell. Bins are practical for any compost pile, but particularly for those in which meat scraps are a component. By the way, animals can sniff out meat even when under a layer of other materials.

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