Sunday, September 7, 2008

Experiment: Compost a tree stump

A storm several weeks ago knocked down two large trees on our property, one in the front yard and one in the back yard. We now have large tree stumps there. It would be several hundred dollars to have someone come in with a stump grinder, so for now, we're just leaving them.

I try to start a new compost pile about every six months; I have three piles going, so each one gets about eighteen months to "finish". Today, I spread most of my oldest pile around our two small apple trees (maybe they'll make apples next year - that would be exciting). The rest of it, I spread around our tree trunk in back. And I've started a new pile there, with food scraps covered by leaves.

I know the stump will compost eventually. It will be interesting to see if it happens on a reasonable time frame, though (less than a year). If this experiment in the back is successful, we might look into some of the "make a compost pile look sightly" advice, and do the same thing in the front yard.

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