My composting is a little different from most folks here. My property is sand mixed with small sea shells with a couple of inches of soil on top.

The lot for the house was manufactured by dredging a canal. When I first started growing tomotes I would dig a hole and fill it in with Home Depot organic peat.

My orginal raised bed is five feet by sixteen feet. During the summer I place all grass clippings plus other plant clippings and palm limbs. I even raid the piles my neighbors put out for curb side pick up. I but a lot on material in a small space.

I have ruined a lawn mower chopping up plant clippings but it is small price to pay. I use a limb lopper to cut up the limbs to small chunks so they decompose pretty fast. It is time consuming.

I turn the "pile" at least once a week to a depth of three feet.

I am not trying to make black gold to spread in flower beds. Of course when the wife needs a little dirt she raids my compost pile. At the end of the composting season the excess material I remove is spread on the lawn to fill in small ruts. When I remove excess material I am taking out sand and sea shells. Last year I removed thirty, five gallon bucket of excess material.

Down to a depth of three feet I have rich earth and it gets better every year.

Duke

Sounds like you have really been working on your yard...Great job Your neighbors are going to be jealous if they have the same soil you started with.

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This morning I went over an helped the little lady across the street, by trimming her palm tree.

Cut ten limbs and hauled them to my backyard. Spent a couple hours chopping the limbs into little pieces. I ran the leaves over with the lawnmower and piled everything into the compost pile. The real work is spading all the material into the ground. The leaves will decompose in six weeks and the limbs in six months.

A lot of work but in the end it is worth all the effort.

DUKE

Are you trying to make us northerners jealous with the whole "palm trees", "lawn mower" talk? My yard is under a foot of snow still!

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John - Zone 6

are egg shells ok for compost, i read not to use dairy products?

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I feel more like I do now than I did before I ever felt this way.

Hi tkhooper,

I've had to deal with clay soil too and it's a real pain. My flower beds were a little easier to work with because I would just till up the ground and ammend the soil with compost and various top soils whenever I could buy the broken bags real cheap. Of course, doing the whole yard was out of the question because I only have a mini-tiller and this old lady couldn't handle a big one if even she had it. A couple of years ago I did till up one section of the back yard and ammend the soil only because it really needed to be leveled. For the rest of the yard I've been using a soil treatment product called Li'L Perk and I think it has really made a difference. I have also used this in my flower beds too! This stuff is nontoxic and biodegradable. I just buy it locally, but if you want to find out more about what this does PM me and I will send you a website where you can read about it and get more information.

patches

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"Lord, I love you and I need you, come into my heart, and bless me, my family, my home, and my friends, in Jesus' name. Amen!"