Good morrow my gardening friends. Have you had your morning tea/coffee and walk through your gardens this morning? Today I was walking through my garden when I got a notification saying it was time to repost and fertilize my grapevines. As you know I have also repotted one early because of a grape planter box gift I received from my hubby. That left me with two still in the large pots I placed them in last year and they stopped growing so it’s time to repot and fertilize.

I have heard a lot from all of you about how you about your black gold and how you make it and sometimes hate turning. You have given me so many helpful tips and tricks, thank you so much for sharing. I have a very different approach and thought I would share how I make the garden glitter a sprinkle on my plants, and how I came up with this method.

I was looking up how to make black gold and speaking with all of you online about it and I had some thoughts. First that was if it smells that bad I don’t want to turn it, do I need to turn it? Which lead to a rolling snowball of thoughts. I remembered as a kid when people would make leaf piles on of three things would happen. 1. The leaves would stay in one big dry pile until they put it in bags, 2. the leaves would slowly grumble into the dirt below the trees and become dirt, 3. the leaves would stay dry on time and grumble while the leaves on bottom would rot and smell horrible. I assume option 3 is what happens to the fertilizer compost bin if you don’t turn it.

I wanted a compost been that was like option 2. Light airy, and turns to vitamin enriched dirt. So I decided to experiment. I took one of my old grapevine pots which is a very large but not crazy large pit with big holes on the bottom going a little up the sides, and here is what I did.

Step 1.

Fill bottom of the pot with out four inches of soil made from one part potting mix and two parts mulch. You want the soil to drain fast and dry fast and hold almost no moister.

Step 2.

Water soil so it packs down. You want to mimic what happens to things in the wild when the fall on the forest floor.

Step 3.

Sit pot in a place that gets sun all day from sun up to sundown, but where it can also catch rain.

Step 4.

Whenever you have to trim your plants or are grilling through the scraps in the pot. I even throw roots with a little dirt on them in my pot. You want to make not to through to much in at one time you want there to be a lot of room and air so the plants can dry out and not rot.

Step 5.

Once plants and scraps are dried out or almost completely dried out you can place more on top of them or even throw a little left over dirt on top of them. Wait a few months two to three in the right conditions and you have garden glitter. If you live in an area that doesn’t get a lot of rain you can water your glitter as well. Where I live right now we get a lot of rain so I kind of just let nature do it’s job.

Well there you have it garden glitter. Free home fertilizer/rich potting soil made at home with no ugly smell or nasty turning. I was unable to replant my grapevines without buying soil with garden glitter only three months after starting my new pot of glitter. I also found three avocado plants growing in my glitter I was really excited about that as I have been trying to grow avocados from seed for a while now. I planted those and I can wait to watch them grow!

If you have any questions, tips, or just want to say hi please comment below. I hope you like this post. Happy gardening!