🔗 Share this article

On a recent stop to an acquaintance's place, the topic of organic refuse arose. They lack a tucked-away location to install a compost heap in their yard, and their municipal service has no pickup. Previously, they used a bokashi system, but with a baby on the way, I suspect they'll have more than enough to do aside from tending to a bin of processing kitchen scraps.

But, as they are already accustomed to placing their bokashi-ed food waste, it led me to consider on how low-effort and very beneficial trench composting can be for those lacking space for a larger system. The technique is the simple process of depositing your compostable matter – like fruit and vegetable waste, garden plant material, lawn cuttings, fallen leaves, etc – into a ditch near where you plan to plant next season the following year. Over the coming months, this material will slowly decompose, improving the earth and amending its structure, preparing it to support the upcoming season's plants. No additional work is required from you to utilize this ancient approach.

The method is straightforward of depositing your waste into a pit near where you plan to cultivate plants.

You can employ this technique in a somewhat shallow pit, although recommendations advise digging down to 60cm prior to incorporating the organic matter and filling in the hole. Opting for a more shallow method, it's wise to using a cover with a tarp and weighing it down well to stop your beds from being disturbed by hungry creatures that frequent your yard.

Another benefit of this method is that you can avoid the concern about hitting the correct ratio of greens and browns. For those who have managed a problematic compost heap knows, it can be tricky to find the correct ratio, but the trench method is less fussy. It is advisable to mix in a combination of nitrogen-rich material and brown material as you would in a traditional composting setup, but you can be looser with the proportions.

Being a quite committed practitioner of no-till gardening, I recoil from the thought of excavating a pit within or near my vegetable plots, but I feel it's possible to dig a reasonable quantity of soil without totally ruining the soil horizons. I would think about trench composting when renovating a flower bed or removing large amounts of perennial weeds, because both involve me to disrupt the soil in any case. Any time I need to dig, I'm careful to replace the soil to its original location to the best of my ability and stay away from disturbing soil when it is waterlogged.

This method is definitely worth thinking about if you're constructing raised beds in your garden, since you can incorporate a layer of waste before filling your beds – eliminating the need to dig.