Large root pieces can be chopped up carefully using a sharp shovel to increase their surface area to help them to break down quicker. The roots of legumes like peas, beans and lupin are fantastic to compost as their small roots can trap nitrogen from the air in nodes. This will break down and be released in to your compost giving it a nitrogen boost.
Comfrey grows deep roots which absorb nutrients from the soil and stores them in its roots and leaves. Adding comfrey roots to your compost will increase the breakdown rate of the organic matter and add extra nutrients to your soil. Annual plants are usually removed each year as they die off and their root systems are great for compost. Annual flowers will have small root systems that will break down easily adding extra organic matter to your compost.
Plant roots are a fantastic carbon rich material to add to your compost. Remember to avoid any root systems that might be carrying weed seeds and chop larger roots into small pieces. Microorganisms will quickly break down thin plant roots and legumes will add valuable nitrogen to your compost mix.
I was taught to remove all the branches except the top tuf and plant down about 1. Then to take a folded piece of newspaper placed around the entire stem to prevent cutworms. That was on everything. Sand under the gravel, please, and line with metal edging, not loose brick. I see a few things to consider before you start DIY - the basement door is about to become a feature of your new patio, and should be addressed in its design.
Likewise the trash cans. The tree should not be part of the patio, but a separate area gravel bed is fine, but change the stone to demarcate so that the surface roots are not compacted by heavier foot traffic.
Grind out the stump before laying gravel, so that you can level the area - do a thing right, and you'll do it once. On the latter note - you are likely to see unexpected things happen in your garden for the first year, not only in terms of plants you may not know about, but also water drainage, leaf debris, changing sun angles, overtaxed soil, etc.
Keeping notes on when things are noticed can be helpful to you later on. Though I sense you want a new patio yesterday, please also consider a general zoning of your yard before you start digging. This will assure that your patio is in scale with later plans, and that you attend to a walking path to connect the zones - right now your path goes directly to the shed, and ignores the area that the tools inside it are needed for!
I think you would do well to pull some of this city sidewalk to the bad side of town right up, and reuse the larger chunks in your gravel bed patio - better for walking, as well as furniture legs. The decision to place your patio on a gravel bed makes it easy to add a beautiful shape to it. I suggest a graphed sketch that begins with the house, yard, veg beds, shed and gravel circle for the tree roots. Pencil in boundaries around the veg and shed for future planting.
Looking at your diagram, decide where and what the destination spot should be in the yard. Now, angle your patio toward it, and balance the size of the features against eachother. This will give you some dimension to play with and re-shape - no square boxes flat to the house!
Congratulations, and best of luck on your new home. Front yard design help Q. I started to clear the front yard. Removing the age old juniper and the bark mulch that killed the grass was much easier than expected. I did a drawing for this part of our front garden. And my husband and I really like it. We have to be selective when it comes to choosing plants as the deer just see our property as their pantry.
After a couple of years the pile will decrease in height as the twigs and things compact and decompose. Eventually you'll be able to spade it up, throw some triple mix on top, and use it for another planting spot.
A few years ago I took a bunch of sod and weeds and wet leaves and put them in a big black plastic contractors bag and let it sit for a year, just to see what would happen. I wondered if I'd get some useful organic matter or would it just be a stinky wet anaerobic mess. It was the latter. Very messy. Not a good idea. Comfrey and other deep-rooted plants are sometimes grown especially for the compost pile.
Their deep-ranging root systems capture nutrients, especially potassium, that can be useful in compost or in compost tea. Grass and weeds, however, are valuable not so much for nutrients they may add, but for plain old organic matter. On the general subject of compost as a "nutrient" Even though compost is not rightly considered a fertilizer, it is still indispensable in the garden-- all the benefits of organic matter plus the microherd.
Good luck with the new garden. This's really an amazingly global forum Liz- O. I recently saw a shocking satellite view of OZ with a huge dust plume blowing far out into the ocean; also am hearing there is a major drought happening in South Africa.
We don't get a lot of info about the Southern Hemisphere climate 'up here'; can you recommend a link to a good southern climate covering site? I was buying a bunch of Canadian compressed peat, but somebody was telling me they were tearing up your Northern landscapes to get it kinda like the oil shale issue.
There is no other source of peat around here. Is this a real issue, neighbor? Ah Michigan-- land of snow and snowmobiles and snowblowers and snowmen and snowcones.
Garden waste collections may be easy and convenient, but Judith Conroy of Garden Organic asks, could we be composting more? Making compost is one of the great organic gardening pleasures. Few experiences match delving into a heap to discover the black, crumbly goodness that has formed. These collections do save precious nutrients and organic matter from going to landfill, turning it into useful compost, but it still has to be transported, with further energy expended in its processing and redistribution.
Here are my tips for dealing with the usual offenders. Weeds with tough, perennial roots such as bindweed, couch grass and dock can be drowned by immersing them in a bucket of water for a few weeks; use a brick to weigh them down and ensure that they stay fully submerged. Once the roots have started to decay, they can be added to the compost heap and the foul-smelling but nutrient rich liquid can be used as a feed for container plants.
Before drying, weed roots can be tapped with a hammer to crush their structure, which can be quite a therapeutic activity!
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