Sheet composting begun

Blood meal came in the mail (sounds ominous, doesn’t it?), enabling my grand-dog Felix and me to start the sheet composting project. As you’ll remember, this is a technique for converting some lawn to expand a planting bed. We’d be applying layers of compostable materials to smother the grass and make rich soil for new native plants.

Purple coneflowers will be able to spread into the enlarged bed

    The first step was to mark off the grass section for execution. I did this using short stakes and some stretchy orange plastic surveyor’s tape. I can re-use the tape when this project is finished.

    After moving the stakes around to see how the edge of the new bed would look, I settled on a straight edge parallel to the nearby rectangular vegetable bed and 10 feet from the rabbit fence that protects that area. The ends of the new bed would curve into existing planting areas.

Orange tape marks the edge of the future planting area

    Next I sprinkled a dusting of blood meal on the grass and followed it with layers of newspaper. To pile them several sheets thick, I had to combine sections of the paper, overlapping them so no grass was showing. I avoided glossy supplements that might contain problematic inks. The paper wanted to blow around in the spring breeze but subsided with a generous sprinkling from the watering can. I laid down newspaper in three stages, weighing it down with the next materials before moving on so that the paper wouldn’t dry out and blow away.

I watered the newspaper to keep it from blowing away

    On top of the newspaper I spread a layer of composted cow manure. I had two bags left over from last fall, both open. Some of the contents were frozen, and I couldn’t break them up. I stood the icy parts in the sun to melt. 

Cow manure popsicle warming in the sun against the rabbit fence

In all, it took most of four 50-pound bags to cover the 120 square foot area with an inch of cow manure. I was treating the sheet composting recipe more like instructions for a stir fry than a fine pastry—just adding what looked about right.

A section of newspaper covered with cow manure

    Admonishing Felix not to dig through the manure-covered newspapers, which seemed to be an alluring possibility, I next turned to hauling wood chips from the big heap in the driveway. After many wheelbarrow trips, I’d dumped an 8-inch layer on top of the newspaper. 

Wood chip layer

I added a few inches of fall leaves that I raked from nearby beds, anchoring them down with more wood chips. That’s where the project stands as of Saturday afternoon: a long foot-tall mound of compostable layers, widest in the middle and tapered at both ends.

It doesn't look like much now. Give it two years.

    The next stage will be to pile on a layer of compost, which will boost the population of soil organisms to start the decomposition. The icing on the cake will be a topping of weed-free straw.

    Moving the wood chips wore me out, but the initial investment of time and energy seems like a small price to pay for what should become an area of great soil in a couple of years.