home-made dirt
I don't count myself as being any good at making compost. When I read gardening books that talk about how to do it properly, I'm totally intimidated. Combine equal parts high-nitrogen and high-carbon material? Chop to one-inch chunks? Keep wet, but not too wet ("like a wrung-out sponge," we're told)? Turn weekly? I don't do any of those things. But I do pile up all the weeds and leaves and garden waste, with a little extra helping of food scraps, and let it sit for four to six months... and it turns out that's good enough, at least for our purposes! Twice a year we dig into the pile and pull out the dirt at the bottom of it; dirt that looks like a clumpy, straw-filled mess until we put it through a sieve made out of hardware cloth and sift out all the uncomposted bits. Then all of a sudden we've got the softest, blackest soil you could ever want! It's so gratifying to me, because that's how I want everything to work: don't worry about the details, just wait and it'll all come out fine!
Anyways, we've just prepped a couple beds in the garden so far: it's cool enough that I don't think the summer plants will grow at all if we plant them out now, even if there's no more frosts to threaten them (I count mid-May for our last frost date, so we're getting close!). But they're getting big in their cell packs, so yesterday I transplanted some of the tomatoes into individual three inch pots. I buy seed starting medium, but for potting soil it's just our compost mixed with some perlite from the store, and it looks just like the real thing. Since the one of the purposes of this whole operation is to save money, I appreciate not having to pay big bucks for dirt when we can just make it at home! Of course, watching the potting soil production Harvey was asking about the perlite: where does it come from, he wanted to know, and is there any chance we could make it or mine it or whatever ourselves? Ah yes, the self-sufficiency dream! We may be some ways off, but at least we've got home-made dirt.