On a recent stop to an acquaintance's place, the conversation of food waste came up. They don't have a tucked-away location to establish a composting system in their yard, and their municipal service doesn't offer collection. They had experimented with bokashi composting, but with a growing family, I suspect they'll have sufficient to do without caring for a bucket of breaking down kitchen scraps.
But, as they are already accustomed to burying their fermented scraps, it got me thinking on how low-effort and high-impact pit composting can be for those without room for a larger system. The technique is the straightforward practice of putting your compostable matter – such as plant-based refuse, garden plant material, grass clippings, leaves, etc – into a ditch adjacent to where you intend to plant next season next year. With time, this material will gradually break down, enriching the ground and amending its texture, conditioning it to welcome the next season's plants. No additional work is needed from you to utilize this ancient approach.
The method is straightforward of depositing your waste into a trench by where you intend to plant vegetables.
One may employ this technique in a relatively shallow trench, although some advice suggest excavating to 60cm before adding the waste and filling in the trough. Opting for a less deep trench, consider covering your trench with a tarp and securing it securely to stop your garden area from being excavated by hungry creatures that visit your yard.
A further perk of this method is that you won't be worrying about hitting the correct ratio of nitrogen and carbon materials. As anyone who has tended to a problematic compost heap understands, it can be tricky to find the correct ratio, but this approach is more lenient. The ideal practice to incorporate a blend of green material and brown material as you would in a conventional heap, but you can be less precise about the ratios.
Being a relatively dedicated practitioner of no-dig growing, I recoil from the idea of digging a trench alongside or into my garden beds, but I think it's feasible to dig a decent amount of soil without completely destroying the soil horizons. I would think about using this method when redoing a flower bed or undertaking major eradication of invasive plants, since both involve me to work the soil anyway. On occasions when I have to turn the soil, I'm meticulous to replace the soil exactly where it came from carefully and stay away from disturbing soil when it is waterlogged.
Trench composting is highly advisable if you're constructing elevated garden beds in your veg patch, since you can incorporate a stratum of organic matter before completing the bed – with no digging needed.
