I have done it & haven't had any problems. They may call this lasagne composting. For the past few years I have tried to improve my soil that was mostly clay by adding lots & lots of decomposing leaves & throw potatoe peelings, cabbage leaves etc. on to the leaves & they seem to decompose. One of the things that has happened this year is that I have potatoe plants growing. I guess it is from the potatoe peelings. I'm sure others will respond to your posting & have other experiences to share.

Good grief yes! If you make a compost pile a lot of the microbial and nutrient goodness is in the soil underneath the pile.

Place the raw material right in the beds and all the benefits go straight into the growing area.

In my home there isn't a kitchen scrap that doesn't go to the compost pile, the gardens, the dog or the worm bin. Everything that is organic is food for something that can benefit us. To put it in the garbage is to starve one of our friends and helpers and cause a landfill to be filled up that much sooner.

Also called trench composting.

Sheet composting, trench composting, Lasaga gardening are all about the same thing, composting directly in place. The advantage is that you need not move your material to be comnposted to the pile and then back to the garden since it is composted right there. A difficulty would be that later as things are growing you might not be able to get the material on the bed.
Soil under a compost pile may have somewhat more nutrients but because the nutrients in compost are quite stable that soil should not be loaded with the nutreints.

Doesn't trench composting rob soil of nitrogen?

And how does lasagne gardening not rob nitrogen? I would think that things get anaerobic quickly, or that the much-needed decomposition would greatly rob nitrogen out of the soil...can somebody set me straight?

thanks

>Doesn't trench composting rob soil of nitrogen?

Yes, if your kitchen scraps happen to include lots of woody materials such as leftover woodchips from last nights spruce salad or the roast limb of cedar. - Only kidding. (kind of.)

For normal human-diet food scraps, the bulk of it are greens and/or will decompose in a relative heartbeat. I think any fluxuation in nitrogen would be hard to even measure. And even with material that uses nitrogen from the soil for decomposition, it is not robbed, it is merely borrowed.

The main problem I've had with trench composting is the scraps being robbed by critters.

Wayne

g'day monkeyman,

yes i do always, now i just lay it under the layer of mulch hay on the gardens, in the past i had buried it but found if you planted into it before it broke down it did affect the seedling for a bit.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

Generally when you are sheet, trench, composting, purposely, you would not be growing a crop there at the same time so you would not be concerned about your composting "robbing" the soil of Nitrogen.
If you build your lasagna bed properly you will have more than enough Nitrogen to digest the mateiral you put in that bed as well as feed any plants you also put in.

I was thinking about doing this, but I was wondering if I would end up with pockets of smelly, gooey crap in my raised beds where I buried the scraps. I mean, as someone pointed out, kitchen scraps are almost entirely high-nitrogen things.

Kristin

Kristin, Unless you put meat/dairy products in the beds I don't see how you will get 'smelly' areas.

Don't bury the scraps under soil, just tuck under mulch for appearance purposes.

Fruits and veggies don't stink unless they decompose under low oxygen conditions.

I'm thinking that the amount I usually take out in the compost bucket would have to be divided up or spread out under the mulch. Maybe if I took out the scraps daily instead of when the bucket is full, which I think I am going to have to do as the weather gets warmer anyway.

We feed most food scraps to the chickens, including meat and dairy; what's in the compost bucket is usually the things they won't touch and things like wilted contents of flower vases, so, 100% vegan. But then, lawn clippings don't have ay meat or dairy in them either and they sure do get gooey and stink if too big a wad of them decomposes under mulch.

Kristin

I do it all the time, in all the forms mentioned above. My Mom has been doing it for years in a different way, she puts all her scraps into the blender, adds a little water, and grinds it up. She then digs trenches next to her plants, and dumps the stuff in. Two days later, there is very little evidence of her glop, and zillions of worms. She has a small yard, so this works well for her. She can't have a compost pile (no room) so this is the next best thing. Grinding up the scraps takes one big step out of the decompositon process. If she can't get out, or it's raining, she puts it in a clean milk jug, and puts it in the fridge. (You have to be careful what you get out of her fridge, sometimes she has gallons of the stuff!!)

Kathy

For several years now I've been digging holes in the garden, about 2 feet deep, layering with lots of kitchen scraps, garden trimmings, and soil; finally covering over with soil and moving to the next hole. This soil was rock-hard clay with pockets of sand. After using this method for a few years, it's amazing how well everything is growing. I do also cover it all with a few inches of leaf compost in the spring. Ornamentals, vegetables, fruits - it's all doing great. Earthworms like it. The tomatos are lush and blooming now; irises and roses blooming; and the figs are starting to produce. It works for me.

A few yrs. ago our next door neighbors had a picket fence installed which ended up being several feet on our property. They had it moved and we were left w/many holes where the fence posts used to be. The fencing co. was going to fill them in but we insisted they leave them, although they thought we were nuts! I filled each hole w/scraps and the soil in that area (now a very long border) is beautiful.

I freqently throw fruit/veg scraps directly in the beds but have to be careful because our other neighbor is nosy and paranoid. Last summer she had the nerve to ask me to remove a few rotting tomatoes from our potager garden (I had tossed them on the ground). She was convinced that they were attracting rodents into her yard. I thought about removing them and tossing into her yard but of course didn't do that ;~). Instead I covered them up w/a bit of mulch.

this seems like digging around in the soil so much would destroy soil composition over time...which is why I think I will opt to never do this...even though it's tempting ;)

I suspect that if the soil composition is already good, that excessive digging would be a negative - at least that's the philosophy behind no-dig methods. But in some cases - like my old suburban yard, I think that the soil structure was long ago destroyed - first by logging and heavy equipment, then by construction, then by a couple of generations of lawn management. By the time that I got here, the soil was so hard that water ran off from it. In the summer, I literally couldnt dig a hole. Even the grass was struggling.

As the soil improves, I'm being careful to stay off of areas that look good. I use paths and boards as walkways, and apply a thick layer of mulch. For permanent areas, the deep digging is basically over. But for vegetable plots, which are only recently emerging from the stone-hard compacted soil, there will probably still be a couple of years of rebuilding, and in my case that includes trench composting.

The issue of neighbors being concerned is valid - I cover bare scraps with leaves, mulch, or soil as I fill the holes. That way they dont look bad. No meat products or scraps go into the holes - only plant based materials. We do save eggshells, but they get crushed and mixed into the ground for tomatoes, or scattered on the surface for the fig trees.

This seems like a nice and easy idea. But in reality it is difficult. To hide the foodscaps one has to dig it in. The hole cannot be to close the plant otherwise it will damage the roots. If it is far enough - how will it benefit the plant ?
Scattering around the root and then covering with compost may too much work.

-lg

My Mum and sister in Florida both do that, bury their compost material in the garden. Their soil is sand to start with, so it needs a lot of help. They have improved their soil greatly by doing this over the years. I know my aunts and uncles "up north" (northern WI) do the same thing. They have gardens with large open areas between rows that are puzzling to me. Everywhere I have a speck of open dirt I get weeds weeds weeds. So they have lots of open spots where they dig stuff in. I try to keep my plants as close together as possible, so that wouldn't work for me.

However, I do grow things all the time right on top of lasagna beds that are in no way done composting. So it amounts to the same thing. I started tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillos in a cold frame with only about half an inch of dirt on top of compost material. Everything has been growing well, even though the underneath part is not composted very far and even a little smelly when I dig during transplanting. The composting helped keep the plants warm, and I only noticed one tomato plant turning a little yellow thus far, could be lack of nitrogen, anyway I transplanted it today. As a bonus, a lot of squash is coming up from the compost material.

Marcia

Remeber the native americans taught the pilgrims about burying fish and planting on top of them. It again may not be practical far all but almost anything including fish can be used in this manner. Just go a little deeper if smell or critters digging it up are a concern. Many years ago I lived in Hawaii and worked at an ethnobotanical garden. Our neighbor were in the dried fish business and hauled thousands of pounds of guts and scap leftover from the process to the landfill. This wasted their time and gas and valuable plant food. I talked them and my boss into letting me dig a hole. 20 feet by 30 feet and 4 foot deep. I dropped frozen boxes of fish scrap into the hole once a week and layered it with any grass and carbon based materials we had available to us. I did have to bring in additional material to keep up with the flow of fish scraps. I did use a plastic top to keep critters and smells to a minimum. I went back last year and found they still use my original method. Literally producing thousands of pounds of compost a year for this 15 acre garden and keep all those valuable fish scraps from the landfill. They are still known for growing some of the best sweet potatoes and taro of anyone on the island. Sorry this is off-topic but I want any and all to open their minds to all the material that we throw away that needs to stay right on our property. I let very little go to the landfill. Use it or lose it. It is our choice. Be creative and look for goodies in your neighborhood that is going to waste and see if you can put it to use. Lasagne or trench or any other way. It is all good for us and the aina (land). Aloha from Texas