Anyone who planted tomatoes this year found it to be one of the best years ever. But I made a discovery that was really something.
When we had the drought two or three years ago, when Burbank got almost no rain, I let the grass in my backyard die because I would have had to flood the backyard daily to save it.
Dead grass is like a brown carpet. You walk on it and your feet don’t get dirty. I left it that way for a couple of years.
This year, I decided to take the dead grass out and try a garden with more than just tomatoes. I have been growing only tomatoes for the last 20 years or so. I have been composting for just as long.
The Burbank Recycle Center gives composters to residents. I found out that the soil under my grass was completely depleted of any nutrients. No wonder I had to put so much water on it during summer months. My soil could not hold water longer than a few hours.
I had two full composters. In February, I spread the compost out in two areas of my backyard and turned it into the soil with a pitchfork. In early April, I planted my tomatoes and later dill, lettuce, spinach, etc.
What happened next was amazing. I purposely planted equal numbers of like plants and like seeds on composted areas and depleted soil areas.
I used to go to a nursery and buy bags of commercial compost and put it in the soil the same way, but this time I just did it with my own compost.
All the plants in my composted area grew three times larger than the ones in the depleted areas! And they looked much greener and healthier. Commercial compost never did that! Plants from seeds grown in the composted areas were great, and some of those in the depleted soil didn’t even come up. The ones that did come up looked like dwarfs.
I had neighbors come over and look at my garden.
They could not believe it. I even added some commercial plant food to the smaller tomatoes to see if they could catch up, but it made no difference. They never came close to the size of the ones planted in my own compost.
Among everything else from my kitchen, my compost is full of orange, grapefruit and banana peels because I am always eating those things. I don’t know why my compost is so great, but it is.
I would encourage anyone thinking about composting to do it. Not only do I not have to put my green barrel out very often, but using my own compost is so much better than anything I can buy commercially. I literally gave away full buckets of delicious tomatoes to my neighbors this summer.
This was a great year, compost or not. But for me, the name of the game is homemade compost. Give it a try — it’s magic, and it’s organic.
ROBERT RUSH is a Burbank resident.
