Sheet Mulching and More: How to Compost Your Move
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 07.17.08
House Move Waste Perfect for the Garden
Only a few weeks ago I claimed that you know when you’re a hippy when you take your compost with you when moving house. Now I’m rethinking that statement – you know when you’re a hippy when you not only move your compost, but you compost your move too. You see, as we all know, moving creates a lot of trash – and much of it is cardboard and newspaper (preferably reclaimed from your local co-op!). And seeing as we are in a new house, with plenty of weeding to do, and plenty of compost needed in the near future – we thought that the best way to get rid of all this waste was to use it in the garden. Cardboard boxes were stripped of tape, flattened and laid out over weeds – they’ll then be covered with topsoil, compost and other organic matter. This is a technique much loved by permaculturists, known as sheet mulching, and can be a great way to tame unruly weeds. When you need to plant something, you simply dig down, puncture a hole in the cardboard, and plant straight through.
Crumpled newspaper, smaller cardboard boxes and random bits of cardboard were all added to the compost heap, mixed with a good deal of cleared plants and weeds, a dollop of our previous compost, some coffee grounds, and a generous sprinkling of the author’s pee. If our previous attempts at this high-fibre method of composting are anything to go by, we should have dark, crumbly, fertile compost by spring. For more on sheet mulching, check out Agroforestry.net, and for more on high-fibre composting, take a look at the Wikipedia entry. And for those readers who raised concerns about adding toxins to the soil, from sounding out fellow TreeHuggers it seemed there was a consensus that corrugated cardboard or newspaper is probably OK, but you may want to go easy on waxed cartons and the like.
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But perhaps a better way to get rid of the used moving boxes is to give them away on craigslist or freecycle for someone else to move with.
If there's a Uhaul in the area, they have a couple programs to reuse your boxes. One is called take a box, leave a box, where you can take what you need or leave for others so they can take. I'm also starting to move, and so far I've paid around $40 dollars for around $160 worth of boxes because I can take others that have been used and turned back in.
Another is Box Exchange, complete with Forums to help you find just what you need. And if you feel you must, they have bio-degradable packing peanuts as well. In addition, if you buy new boxes from them and you decide not to use them, they'll buy back whatever isn't used for the same price you paid.
see their site if you need more info:
www.uhaul.com/sustainability/boxes/
Put unfinished and finished compost beneath the boxes, to encourage earthworm activity. That way you won't have to use commercial fertilizers or pesticides(natural or otherwise) and you'll have great plants. In Minneapolis the tomato plants in my garden are as tall as my (5'09") from how I did my garden.
IIRC, corrugated cardboard contains formaldehyde which is used in its manufacture, so if you're obsessive about being organic, this could make your compost not-organic.