Composting Path

I don't know who said it first (maybeI am imagining it and nobody ever has!), but I believe it anyway - that composting is the beginining, middle and end of organic gardening. Of all the things that we are remembered by in this life, let one of them be that we improved a patch of soil!

I have tried many different forms of composting - bins, tumblers, sheet, dig-in, worm-farms, biodynamic - the latter two being my favourite. However... I am not above experimenting and my latest candidate that is showing promise is "The Composting Path".

Excuse me, but just go back a couple of steps. The principle underlying my garden design is permaculture - maximum efficiency with minimum input for maximum harvest (it just so happens that it suits gardeners like me who don't have 8 hours a day every day to put in). So I like compost heaps that fit in with the routines of my life - daily, weekly, seasonally. I deal with the shorter cycles with a compost bin cum worm farm which mixes kitchen scraps with straw or coir.

The biggest problem I have had is dealing with the large volumes of garden prunings that appear sporadically, whenever I manage to steal an afternoon tidying up in the garden. They don't fit in the regular compost and I loath stockpiling them until I can make a proper compost with them as this means finding a space to put them and inevitable involves double handling (a real AAAGGH! for the lazy gardener).

Paths are essential to avoid stepping on and compressing garden beds, yet they are often a 'single use' element of garden design that take up space but can't be used for anything else.
So why not combine the two - paths and composting? I have trialled this combination for the last couple of years and have found many benefits. Basically it works like this.

The access path between my raised beds is used for 'rough' garden waste like leaves, twigs, corn/canna/artichoke stems, pumpkin/tomato stems, large amounts of weeds, lawn clippings etc etc. I chop them roughly so that they lie flat in the space. Running weeds like Couch or Kikuyu are stacked off the ground so that they dry thoroughly before being composted (otherwise they will sprout again!). These access paths are not ones that I use every day, and are not the ones that visitors are likely to stroll around, so they don't mind being a little bit rough.

Within a few months the pile of material has broken down and is ready for the next layer. After a year or so, when I am renovating one of the adjacent garden beds, I dig out the compost path. Because it has been made from rougher material, the compost is usually richer, more 'humusy' and a better structure than the compost from my kitchen-scrap bins. I dig it out and spread it out onto the beds to improve the soil for the next and subequent crops.

So I have turned a single use element into a multi-use element, avoided a problem created a new option for increasing soil fertility.