Compost Confessions: The Lazy Gardener's Guide to Corral Composting

My main compost pile starts each fall with a straw-bale corral—2 bales high, 3×5 bales per side. I fill it all year with anything that rots: animal, vegetable, mineral. When bales collapse, I top with thick straw pads and let it sit winter. By spring, it's ~18 inches high—a perfect planting platform for tomatoes and cantaloupe, which thrive without soil splash.

After three summers, my first corral was ready to harvest. But it was coarse—branches, magazines, no turning, no temperature/moisture monitoring, no green/brown balancing. On the hot/cold spectrum, this was "Ice Nine." Definitely compost, but not fine seedbed texture.

I hate shoveling soil. Faced with a 10×20-foot coarse pile, I wondered: why move it? My strawberry bed had already colonized it, plus volunteer tomatoes and sunflowers from birds/gravity. Why not treat it as a planting area? I left it, adding melons and cosmos.

Mid-July: 9-foot sunflowers, fruiting tomatoes, sprawling Charentais melons on the old corral. New corral happily accepts everything. Now that I've embraced laziness, I throw even wilder things: old cotton, silk scraps, faded rugs, dead raccoons, tin cans—anything that might rot. Slow decomposition is fine; I'll plant atop it. If something never breaks down, I'll hit it eventually and pull it out.

This approach forces me to reclaim space from self-sowers (larkspur, strawberries, dill, borage) as corrals migrate. Experimenting this year: two 1-bale-high corrals with thinner finishing straw instead of one 2-bale corral—shallower beds may let me move faster around the garden.

I'll report back! Try these crazy compost corrals and let me know what you think.

(Editor's Note: Published July 11, 2008. Comments welcome; authors may not respond.)