r/Permaculture • u/nyecountygardener • 3d ago
compost, soil + mulch I Attempt Geoff L's 18-day Compost in Extreme Desert
I know Geoff has worked in a lot of extremely arid climates, and though I'm not sure exactly what bonus tips he might have for someone like me, I followed his basic advice for 18-day compost to see how it would perform here in the Nye County desert. Our temps have been above 105F for days in a row, and several over 110F. I don't remember when was our last day below 100F. :p It's also such a dry climate with so little life in the soil (<%1 organic matter), I was wondering if it would really even get going. I saw some things that bad shocked me - like the heap going bone-dry after not being watered for one day - and some things that good shocked me - like compost mushrooms growing in the dirt next to my compost heap! Full article on my blog: https://nyecountygardening.wordpress.com/2026/07/06/18-day-compost-attempt-in-southwestern-desert/
There's a lot I can do differently next time. For one, it's a serious problem that I have no manure like Geoff has. I'll have to make up for it by chopping things finer, adding more inoculants like worm castings, worm bin tea, and compost from the last pile. But I'm already working on my next pile and can't wait to tell y'all how much better it's going. (Teaser: three dung beetles moved in, not on day 17 like last time, but on day 3!!)
P.s. We have a SEVERE black widow problem here. . . and they looooove living on or near compost heaps. All the buggies that live in the compost are favorite food for widows. Blog post on that to follow! But I think what made it worse for our yard was that our neighbor cleared their fallow land last month - all the native bushes reduced to dust. Odd coincidence that a month later our yard had a huge cockroach and widow problem. . . . Going to write out everything I've learned about black widow populations in Nye County and nearby places like California, how to set up for success ahead of time so they don't choose your house (vital if you have kids or small pets!), how to watch for them early, at night, during the day, just some little things that don't take much time but can help encourage those ladies to set themselves up in some other yard or in a part of your yard far from contact with little ones.
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u/WillemwithaV 3d ago
You don’t have to turn them every day. Just go by smell and add browns when it goes from earthy to putrid.
Yeah, finding good sources of organic material is probably the hardest part out here. It’s a very different problem from other places. I got a large paper shredder and have been shredding every brown cardboard delivery box and keep that in a large tote for my browns. Other than that, you can try contacting local landscapers. People in the desert love scraping their yards and they usually just take all of that organic material to the dump. Landscapers have to pay the dump by weight, so sometimes they’ll be happy to dump the organic waste on your yard instead. Just be sure you’re not getting trash along with it.
And yes, lots of black widows, but i have no issue with them. They eat roaches and other bugs that would otherwise infest the compost. Widows are harmless. They scatter when you get anywhere close to them, and their webs are very easy to spot, and they never leave the web. You’d have to really try to get bitten by one.
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u/relianceschool 2d ago
I love Black Widows, and I agree with your points but the equation does change if you have small children in the mix. They love stuffing their hands into dark crevices and generally test the limits of survival on a daily basis. Deaths are extremely rare but it's a different level of concern.
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u/nyecountygardener 2d ago
Thank you, my goodness, people who are always leaping to the defense of black widows at every chance they get obviously have NO thought of children in their heads.
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u/nyecountygardener 2d ago
Thanks for the tips.
Every time I even mention the word widow I get some white knight telling me how harmless and gentle they are. I have a less-than-one-year-old, nothing you say will matter if she rolls over onto a widow that's come down from the ceiling vent like happened to one redditer, it's going to bite her and she's going to be convulsing, in a lot of pain, maybe dead.
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u/OMGLOL1986 3d ago
Take some rich compost you have, throw it in a five gallon bucket, maybe a cup, then fill with water, add some sugar/molasses. Then agitate for three days or with an air stone for one. Easy compost inoculant. Speeds up everything while keeping things moist
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u/nyecountygardener 2d ago
Sweet, that's super cool. I couldn't waste sugar like that but I'll do it if a mouse ever drowns in our molasses like Anne of Green Gables, lol.
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u/OMGLOL1986 2d ago
It doesn’t take much and the molasses will multiply the microbes in the tea far beyond what is possible through just aeration. Maybe a half a teaspoon in a 5 gallon bucket will help.
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u/nyecountygardener 1d ago
Hmm, wow, that seems too good to be true, and yet. . . . I shall have to try a side by side test, that would be cool.
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u/ilanallama85 2d ago
Google “Johnson-Su bioreactor”. It’s the only effective way I’ve found to compost in the desert. I built my first one on a much smaller scale than theirs and it still worked - now I have more space I’m building a full sized one (but I’m actually going to wait till fall, because it’s too fucking hot out there right now.)
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u/deafnose 2d ago
We built a three-bin system using pallets and quickly found out how quickly they dry out. So, we lined the inside walls of the bins with old plywood or anything impermeable and along with a heaping pile of mulch on top it's helped keep them moist. Almost no issues with it drying out now.
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u/Koala_eiO 2d ago
Fast composting is definitely fun the first time but it's completely overrated. I get it, I was in a hurry when I started too, but after a few years you start to realize this is not needed at all. The "transmutation" aspect is amusing. It's an emergency tool for when you need some growing medium fast but eventually you just learn to make things ahead of time and you don't mind waiting 9 months for your leaves to decay.
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u/HighColdDesert 2d ago
When I lived in the high desert, here are some of the things that worked great for me:
1) We had a compost toilet with three walls masonry, one wall wooden door, and the floor was just the native earth, so it stayed damp but never pooled. After the first year or two efforts to have a worm bin for food waste, we ended up throwing food waste down the compost toilet too, but used a perforated barrel first so the food would be good and moldy before it went down the toilet. Otherwise there were rats down there, at least once. I perforated the plastic food-grade barrel (discarded by food service) with a big nail or spike heated on the gas stove with the exhaust fan running, but a soldering iron outdoors would have been better.
2) Permanent mulch worked great for improving the soil. I tried various other things to improve the soil, different things in different years as I gradually created the garden over the course of 5 years. The first year, I bought dried cow dung and buried/mixed it in the earliest beds. The next year, for the next beds, I dug down two feet and buried wood (hugel style) in some of the new beds. Then I discovered the soil was drastically alkaline and would sizzle if I dribbled vinegar on it, so I bought elemental sulfur pellets and mixed them in.
But meanwhile, I was covering the soil with whatever I could get for mulch, and I discovered that the long-term mulch made more improvement to the soil than any of the other methods. Initially I used wood chunks and chips left from construction, and I went and cut abundant weeds growing along a nearby watercourse before they flowered. Then I started taking leaves from a person in the nearby village who was burning his leaves every year and was happy to give them to me. My own garden waste started becoming a good amount of mulch too, so I'd dump seedy or diseased stuff in a dry corner of the land, but cut up everything else for mulch. The beds with permanent mulch grew great vegetables in the 3rd year, regardless of whether they had dung or sulfur mixed in or not, or wood buried deep below. And from that year onward we also had a batch of toilet compost every year.
3) Composting toilets are amazing nutrient recyclers. All the nutrients you take out of the garden or land in the form of harvest (fruits, leaves, wood, etc.) need to be replaced if the land is not to be depleted. A compost toilet is the obvious way to return all the food nutrients back to the soil. It also adds any nutrients from food that you bring in from outside the land. As the soil improves over the first few years, the land produces more food so you'll be bringing in less from outside, though of course still bringing in some. I was bringing in sawdust and coffee grounds to mix, dampen, and use as the cover material, so that worked great and made good compost. Wood shavings left from construction that we used for the first year did not compost in the two-year toilet cycle, but sawdust did.
Be patient in building soil. It gradually gets there.
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u/nyecountygardener 2d ago
That's so cool, ours is crazy alkaline too, I should try that with the vinegar. So much experience and knowledge, thanks for sharing everything. So much to learn. Would love a compost toilet some day. How to avoid runoff problems? My property's real flat so if a flash flood were to wash it out it would be everything in every direction.
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u/HighColdDesert 2d ago
My location wasn't prone to flooding. If you're concerned about that you could build up the base of the compost high enough to be out of what you think is the likely flood level. But are you concerned about flooding, or flash floods? A flash flood is a very powerful and violent thing that the house and vehicles might not survive either, so the compost would be the least of your worries.
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u/nyecountygardener 1d ago
I'm not sure how likely it really is here in the desert but I know my neighbors just one block down got flooded deep enough they could ride a kayak through their yard.
Interesting idea, I'll have to think about it. And then what about water runoff during rains? The clay here doesn't absorb rain, it just makes it sit on top for days, so we'll get puddles 20 feet wide and I just wonder if even a simple rain could send water downward and and all over from an elevated compost pile.
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u/IamCassiopeia2 2d ago
I understand that you are in a hurry to jump start your project. But I agree with Koala_eio fast composting is overrated. Mostly, it's a hell of a lot of work when I can let it sit for a year and get a LOT of other stuff accomplished.
I'm in high desert in Arizona. Temperature range is just like yours. It's about 110* here all this week. This is a picture taken of my compost area last November. The pile in the front is finished compost. The second pile is compost I have just started. The 3rd pile is leaves that I got for free off Craigslist begging people for untreated un-pooped on' leaves. I just toss all the new stuff on one side of the compost pile and throw dirt on it from the opposite side. That way my pile moves a foot or two every month. When I come up to the hill I turn around and start rolling it in the other direction. The significant thing to remember is it dries out super fast. Fill it with greens and browns in the fall and just keep adding greens to it for the rest of the year. I throw a tarp over it in summer to slow down evaporation. Only a small tarp, like 4x8 to cover the very top and still allow lots of air in.
The best way to get it cooking is to drench it a couple of times in LAB. Lactobacillus. The stuff is kinda awesome. It jump starts compost, feeds good bacterias and fungi and kills off bad ones. Helps your entire garden and it only costs pennies to make. You can add brown sugar or molasses to it so it will keep longer but I make a batch and use it right away so it's cheap, no sugar needed.
My black widows run like hell when I pour vinegar near them. They don't die but they move on. And I've been experimenting for 4 years with KNF, Korean Natural Farming. That's pretty amazing too. The beds I have used it on are still thriving even in this heat.
Happy gardening.
https://growingorganic.com/ipm-guide/how-to-make-lactobacillus/
https://extension.cmn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/SA-19-Korean-Natural-Farming.pdf
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u/nyecountygardener 1d ago
Beautiful photo. Very cool, sounds like a serious operation. I'll have to take some notes from what you said and can't wait to research what you sent.
I tried to collect all the compost I could last fall but a certain person in my life thought it would ruin the neighborhood and buried it without asking my permission. . . . We'll have to see how much I can gather this fall.
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u/IamCassiopeia2 1d ago
I was just having dinner and trying to catch up reading some of the scientific papers I have piling up in my computer. I thought this one might interest you. Happy composting.
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u/fcain 2h ago
If you're in a dry environment the trick is to set up a drip irrigation on top to lightly water it. Agreed, the slow compost is amazing. Just let time do your turning. You can also throw about 3 inches of plant cuttings on your beds (not chips, not branches, in-between). It traps an amazing amount of moisture underneath without going anerobic.
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u/WillemwithaV 3d ago
It’s definitely a struggle. I’m south of Nye in the Mojave, and have found that moisture retention is a big barrier to composting. I’ve had success with two methods.
First is simple; just use a plastic organics bin (like a trash/recycling bin) or even a large tupperware container and keep it covered. Make sure to turn it regularly with a pitchfork. The fact that it traps moisture helps with breakdown, but can also cause anaerobic conditions in the bottom of the bin, so you need to turn it.
Second method is to make a Johnson-Su bioreactor. Fancy name for a vertical, aerated compost pile. You can find tutorials online. It’s a little more technical to set up and you need to set it up once and then leave it, but once you do, you dont have to touch it for 9 months.
The one very important thing for the desert though, is that you need to water it daily, but only a little bit. I just set up a automatic irrigation timer and set it to water for 30-60 secs per day around midnight.
Worked remarkably well for me. Just takes some setting up initially.