Compost: Soil Amendments for the Square Foot Garden

Time to Move the Garden

It was an unusually cold spring, but all the while I was thinking about the work involved in moving my garden.

That's right. Moving my garden. I had located it about 6m from a neighbour's prolific pine needle dropping tree. I suppose the needles ruined the ph of the soil, because I have to blame someone or something for my garden's failure last year! I moved the raised bed garden walls, which didn't fit together well anymore once I rotated and mixed them up (foolish!), and the Frame-It-All planks didn't sit well because the ground wasn't exactly level. But somehow I managed to get it in place again after two hours of fiddling with the &*^% planks.

Moral of the story: when choosing a location for the garden, look up.

I really digress. This post is meant to be about compost. Focus... focus...

Why I Needed Compost

Each year, and indeed each time after you finish using a square in your raised bed in the Square Foot Gardening method, you are supposed to add a little trowel full of compost and work it into the soil. Two years after putting the garden in, my soil volume had markedly decreased and was looking sort of dry.

The compost that Mel recommends is a mix of 5 different kinds. I only managed three the first time.

Here are some sources of compost I dug up.


1. City of Vancouver: $250 delivered for 6 cubic m (minimum purchase)


I spent many hours researching where to get compost. First, the City of Vancouver is giving away 1 m3 of free compost in the month of May per resident. According to posters at the UBC Botanical Gardens forum, the compost there is what some organic farmers use, but is "rough and full of cedar and bark." I'm not crazy about driving down to the landfill location in Delta to pick up the compost, even if it's free. The cost of delivery, amount being a minimum of 6 m3, is $190. Since I only need 1 m3, delivery is out of the question.


2. Craigslist: Free but you shovel and deliver yourself


Also, I tried Craigslist. Someone in Richmond was giving away their compost, which they had delivered from the City of Vancouver. Even though I emailed the same day the listing came out, it was all gone by the time the poster got back to me. Craigslist has multiple listings for compost delivery, but all were too expensive for my small amount as they all charged a flat fee.


3. MyGardenBag: $170 delivery included.


Another possibility, if you're flush with cash and lazy (I am the latter, not the former), you can try mygardenbag.com. The price for 1 cubic yard of soil amendment is $170, delivery included.


4. Lawnboy Enterprises: $63 delivery included.


Finally, my research turned up Lawnboy Enterprises, just a short distance from my home! Located around the north end of the Canada Line bridge at the foot of Cambie Street, is a little place that reputedly caters to commercial landscapers. You'll see big piles of earth as you bicycle by (as I do on a regular basis!). I'd read a range of reviews of this place on Googlemaps, mostly drumming them for being rude, or not knowledgeable, and giving smaller quantities than promised ("a cubic yard is more like a jacuzzi full, not a bathtub" as they tell you). Since this place seems to have a target customer base of professional landscapers, and not single homeowners, the critics seem like a bunch of whiners to me. What you are getting from them is low cost bulk product, not service and knowledge. That's not their game.


When I called them, they were definitely not knowledgeable about their product or the use of the product. I asked her what was in the compost. She had no idea, but she referred me to the company that produces the compost, giving me their phone number. She asked me whether I could call her back to tell her the answer once I had it. (The answer from the company was: brush, vegetable trimmings, yard trimmings, no manure). Later I asked her why the product was steaming and whether it would burn my plants. Again, she didn't know, and so I called the compost supply company. They assured me that the compost would be all right if I wetted it down and mixed it with the other soil. I called Lawnboy back with all this information as requested because, hey, I'm a nice person and it only took a few minutes out of my day.


How low cost was low cost? Only $29 for the cubic yard of compost, and $34 for delivery. Yeah, you heard right: $34 for delivery! That is less than half of the cheapest quote I received or saw for any compost delivery company. Total cost: $63 plus tax, much lower than any other alternative (except the free compost on Craigslist, but then I would have had to shovel the stuff myself--)

When the truck arrived, the delivery guys were really helpful and patient with me. They let me set up some boxes underneath to catch the falling compost, and one of them even stood under the flowing compost to put my wheeled yard trimmings container to catch the compost so I would have less shovelling to do--his suggestion, and a smart one. This method ended up catching only a small amount, though, while my containers on the ground were perfectly filled. A tarp would have been a good idea as well.

I was quite concerned because the compost was literally steaming as it poured and as I shovelled it. In fact, the next day it was still warm in the containers as I added it to the bare garden bed for mixing. Also, it smelled like poo. Not a good smell. But two days later, it just had a nice earthy smell, a bit woody. The compost quality seemed good: dark, mostly fine, with some wood chips (2 cm x 4 cm) and short sections of branches. Some disturbing contents: 4 small bits of plastic (garden trimmings are in bags and as they are "de-bagged" by machine, sometimes it's not perfect), and a piece of metal the size of half a cigar! Weird. But that may have been in the truck bed, because the rest of the pile was fine.

Mixing Mel's Mix Using the Power of One

First step: line the bed with weed blocker. The black plastic cloth came in a roll of 3x25 feet. Since my bed is 12 feet long, I simply folded the cloth back on itself and cut it in half with a pair of scissors. This was more difficult than it sounds because, my luck, it was windy.

I decided to put the cloth in so it would go up the sides, leaving a 2-3 inch overlap in the middle. I used masking tape to stick the cloth to the tops of the sides so it wouldn't move, then I placed newspapers two layers thick on the bottom of the bed, directly on top of the existing grass and weeds. The wind kept blowing the newspapers around, but with one quick spray of the garden hose, the newspapers stuck to the bottom weed cloth like paper mache. Yeah!

Next, I put a tarp over one of the ends of the bed so that the sides of the tarp were elevated like a rim.

Then I did some mental calculations and came up with this plan. I would mix each component in 55L amounts. The number 55 was simply half the 110L bag of vermiculite. So for for the first batch:

1. Dump in half bag of vermiculite, 55L;

2. One bag of mushroom manure, 25L;

3. One bag of Sea Soil, 32L; and

4. 1/2 bag of 3.8 cubic feet (ft3) Peat Moss, 1.9 ft3 (expands to approximately double volume).

This was about 1/8 of the total volume of the bed. This was still a large volume of material to be mixing all at once. It was truly back breaking labour. I couldn't even lift up the huge block of Peat Moss. I had to roll it end over end to get it anywhere near the bed. Clunk. Clunk. Plop. Then, when I got it to the edge of the bed, I couldn't lift it up to put it inside the bed. Simply too heavy. The peat moss was so compact that it was hard to any quantity out from it. I tried attacking it with my fingers in gardening gloves, and that worked to some extent. Later I used a spade to break it up and scoop it out. Even when I had managed to get it out of the bag, the peat moss was clumpy. I had to break up the clumps with my fingers.

I tried lifting one side of the tarp to mix it, as Mel suggests. Mel also suggests doing it with a friend. That didn't happen. I was by myself and didn't want to wait for my husband to help. I wanted to get it done immediately. The tarp was incredibly heavy. I sweated and sweated. It was pouring down my face, and it was fairly cold outside, 15C.

I also did this while wearing an N95 dust mask. The vermiculite and peat moss are dusty, and the vermiculite may possibly be harmful to inhale. The mask made it worse, as did wearing my glasses, which fogged up from all the action.

Raking the mound did not work. Neither did scooping it up in spades and turning it over. Later I refined my technique and mixed it this way:

1. Add 1/4 bag vermiculite, 27.5 L;

2. 1/2 bag mushroom manure, 12.5 L;

3. 1/2 bag Sea Soil, 16.25 L;

4. 1/8 bag Peat Moss;

5. Repeat.

This way, there was more layering of ingredients and I could mix it more easily. Then I started mixing it with my hands, and gave up on the tarp rolling method. After I finished mixing, I simply moved the tarp to the other side of the bed and dumped it out.

It took me three hours in all to create "Mel's Mix." Nice stuff it is. I enjoyed moving my fingers through the mix. It was so loose and airy, not like ordinary soil. After filling the bed, I removed the masking tape.

My calculations were a bit off. The mix doesn't come up to the 12 inch wall edges. It's short by about an inch. That's okay, since SFG only requires 6 inches of depth most of the time.

I created the square foot grid by buying round maple dowels from Kerrisdale Lumber for 81 cents for a 1/8 inch dowel four feet in length. The 1/4 inch dowel was 1.29 each. The dowels were various lengths, but the shortest was at least 4 feet long. I marked off 12 inch lengths on all 20 dowels and used them as a measuring guide. I cut all width dowels to fit just inside the walls of the bed, using a rose clipper. I tied the dowels together with twist ties. Unfortunately, a few of the dowels were not straight, so I have some wonky squares in the bunch. This whole process took me 1.5 hours! I did not cut the lengthwise dowels, but let them overlap. I made three grids of 4x4.

Finally, I planned out the garden, basing the location of plants according to how much shade they needed. I labelled coloured popsicle sticks with permanent marker: red for beets, orange for carrots, green for peas, blue for spinach, yellow for celery, purple for mizuno. I accidentally planted a carrot square next to another. This violates SFG guru Mel's rule against putting two squares of the same thing next to each other.

Now to wait for something to come up!