A new discovery

I thought I would post something farm related. I have been working on the garden the past few days. I did not get to plant a fall garden because of the drought we had. I have been trying to get it cleaned up and ready for fall and I made a discovery.

One thing that I have never had good luck with is getting a compost pile going. We feed all our food scraps to the animals as well as the garden waste. I have tried to make a pile out of wood mulch, horse poop, and leaves but it never worked so well. Well, I think I finally stumbled upon a compost pile of sorts to use for my garden. Let me explain. I do raised bed gardening and when I build my beds, I took off the top good layer of soil from the aisles between the beds and put it on the beds. This helped make my beds thicker but it created the problem of water collecting and standing in the aisles for a few days after a rain. I just put up with it for a few years but this past year I got a load of mixed wood mulch from the city of Fayetteville and spread in the aisles so I was not walking in water. I also put some hay in places after the mulch settled some. It seems that the mulch, hay, dirt washed off from the beds, and the water created compost over the summer. I was not expecting that at all. I went out to get the beds back into shape and when I scraped the hoe in the aisles it uncovered some pretty good mulch. So I have been scooping out the aisles with a shovel and putting on top of the beds. Then I am putting new mulch back in to the aisles so it will do the same thing for next year. I was pretty excited because I am killing two birds with one stone. Here are a few pics to show you.

Here is the before picture. It is hard to tell what is bed and what is aisle in the pic but right in the middle from top to bottom is the aisle. It doesn't look like much and that is why I did not think much about it.

Here is a pic after I have scooped up the dirt from the aisle and put it on the bed. See how nice and dark that soil is.