I was telling mom last night that I need to figure out a compost pile ... it’s more a ‘location’ issue than anything else.
When I started using raised beds, the dirt was from an old brush pile in the back field - when the bulldozer pushed the debris into a pile, it got a lot of fairly rich topsoil pushed in as well. As the brush pile decayed, the dirt improved even more. The issue with it is that it is ‘heavy’ & compacts.
For years, I bought bags of Leaf Gro every spring & added it to the beds. The soil got ‘lighter’ & stopped compacting into a hard ‘crust’ on top - as of last year, it was ‘beautiful’ soil due to Leaf Gro & ‘home’ compost. I started a leaf compost pile 3 years ago because Leaf Gro went over $5 a bag & I just didn’t want to spend that kind of money when our trees were dropping massive amounts of leaves every fall.
I have cow neighbors now (poultry, too but I can’t stand the smell) so I might add some cow manure to the soon-to-be compost heap - not a lot, but I think it would be a nice addition. One issue I see are the oak leaves we now have which are big, ‘thick’ & don’t break down easily. I took a couple of bags mom raked off the new house porch & put them in my old homestead compost bin (all maple) - the oak haven’t broken down much at all. I think the remedy will be to mow over piles collected before going into a compost pile.
Looking forward to some ‘rich’ soil in the raised beds in a year or two - it will take some work.
We had 25 years of goat manure and oat straw bedding plus veggie scraps. Now we just have veggie scraps and every now and then a layer of straw. Our garden soil is epic, when freshly tilled looks like black cake flour.
Oak leaves are very acidic so we don’t use them. That’s mostly what we have.