The fall season brings in a lot of work for the home gardener. There are garden beds to clean up, harvest to accomplish, tools to make ready for winter storage and so on. At the same time, composting should not take a back seat to anything. After all, it was compost that was largely responsible for all that harvest bounty. Autumn is still a great time to make and use compost.

First of all make a plan for spring planting. For most of us that will mean peas, lettuce, onions, garlic, and carrots. As soon as the ground can be worked, these can be put in. The section that calls for peas will not need compost if it has been composted the year before planting because the peas will fix nitrogen on their own. Carrot beds, on the other hand, are best composted the year before, or in this case the fall before planting.

To prepare for carrots, layer an inch of finished compost on top of the bed and dig it in to a depth of eight inches. Actually, the most amazing carrots I have ever seen were grown on a peat bog. However, peat is low in nutrients so it was almost a hydroponic growing setup with chemical fertilizer being sprayed on in liquid form. For the organic gardener wishing to use the compost well, remove a foot wide trench of soil and scatter it on the rest of the bed. Replace it with peat moss mixed with compost at one quarter of the volume. The easiest way to do this is to fill the trench three quarters of the way with peat moss and complete it with compost. Dust the top with bone meal and mix it together with a fork. If carrots are planted in the spring to be three inches apart in rows three inches apart, a small trench grows a lot of carrots.

Lettuce can actually be sown on top of frozen soil, so if it is prepared in the fall, all that is required is to scatter seed in spring. Just add an inch of compost to the bed and dig it in. Remember to check the bed every now and then to remove any weeds. Surprisingly, they will grow later than anyone seems to believe and it is a lot easier to remove them in fall than from frozen ground in spring.

Onions and garlic like to feed. Prepare their beds with a couple of inches of compost following a dusting of bone meal. Just let it sit over winter and in the spring dig it in with a fork to a depth of about six inches. Optionally, dig it in in the fall and cover it for the winter with fall leaves, preferably chopped up by running a lawn mower over them, to a depth of four inches. Remove the leaves in the spring and let the soil warm for a day in the sun before pressing in onion and garlic sets. If the leaves were chopped in the fall, recover the bed with them as a mulch or remove to the new compost pile.

Spring can bring as much work to the garden as does the fall but some fall preparation with a good bit of compost will let you approach the garden quickly and easily with great results.