The Compost Bin

Let's take a break from all the Woodchuck madness and talk about one of my favorite subjects, compost.

Just because I do a blog called The Compost Bin, doesn't mean that I never run out of compost. Even though I sometimes have three compost bins going at once, I always wind up buying a few bags of the stuff at the garden center. It's takes planning and some effort to have finished compost at a specific time of the gardening season. Now if I was a totally organized gardener with all the time in the world, I'd use my homemade compost tumbler to cook up batches of compost that were ready every month. But that would mean that I'd have to turn the tumbler everyday and constantly check the moisture and get the green/brown ratio perfect. When it comes to compost, I'm more laid back and willing to wait longer if it means less work.

On one of my recent lunchtime walkabouts I found myself in Whole Foods. I'm a brown bagger when it comes to lunch but I'm always searching for a free snack. I head over to Costco a lot. They have free samples of food, plus a book section and patio furniture. I can't think of a better way to spend lunch than reading a cooking book on a chaise lounge eating food on a toothpick. But anyway, sometimes Whole Foods has some free samples out as well, so I hit them up occasionally.

My last Whole Foods trip wasn't very successful in the free food department but it wasn't a total waste. I noticed that they were selling a few varieties of compost. So on a whim, I bought few bags to check it out.

Now if you've bought bags of compost at a big box store then you know that the quality can be hit or miss. A lot of times the bags get soaked in the rain and the compost gets an ammonia smell to it. Yuck! Or you cut open the bag and the compost is just a big brick of soil that you have to chop up with a shovel. No fun!

Whole Foods compost is like the Cadillac of bagged compost. The bags are filled with slightly moist, dark brown, perfectly finished, crumbly compost. And I even saw some tiny worms in there. The only bad thing about Whole Foods compost is the price. Like everything else in that store, their compost is expensive. Because of the high price, I definitely wouldn't use it to fill a raised garden bed. But I had no problem tossing a few handfuls into the planting holes of some new perennials that I bought.

Despite the price, I'm going to have no problem recommending Whole Foods compost to friends and family.