Learn to Compost for a Self-Reliant Garden

If you know how to compost, you can feed your Square Foot Garden organically and without cost.  You don't need to buy expensive fertilizers or plant food.   You can harvest healthy and prolific vegetables from year to year.  Compost should consist of a variety of ingredients like dry grass, newspaper strips(not glossy), leaves, straw, chicken,rabbit or horse manure(a neighbor might have some!), wood shavings and sawdust, waste from spent vegetable plants, dead flowers and clippings.  From your kitchen you can add in celery waste, potato, carrot and banana peelings, pineapple rind, apple cores, wilted lettuce, broccoli stalks  and the list goes on.  Be sure to always chop things up as small as possible and that will hasten your compost production. Manure is important because it causes the breakdown of  your compost more than anything else.  A compost pile needs to heat up in the center. Turn it often to spread that heat around.  It also needs to stay moist.  You can have a nice ready compost in about six weeks or less depending on how often you move it.