HelpfulGardener.com

I saw this on TV it sounds like this will be a lot easier than a compost pile. Roll leaves and grass in any organic material you have in cloth, old blankets, old sheets, old curtains, old rags, roll them up like a 3 foot long Burrito then stack them in a pile. Re stack the burritos pile about once a month this is much easier than shoveling organic material with a shovel and building compost bins. Cloth allows air to flow through. Interesting idea maybe someone will try it and report the results.

Did it by chance say what to do when the old clothes, etc., start to decompose themselves? It is something that is bound to happen since the cloth will start growing mold, fungus & the bacteria will break it down as well. It is an interesting concept though.

Your compost will turn into an unmanageable ball of dirty string. I suppose you could pull out the pieces of fabric, but it will be a long and dirty job. Any tools you use will get tangled in it. Fabric takes a lot longer to compose than grass and leaves. This isn't even taking into consideration what that mess will look like in your yard.

I've used t-shirt cotton knit to tie up plants, and to slow drainage from large holes in pots. What is buried will keep for a few years, and what is exposed to weathering will fade, lose stretch, and break apart within a year.

Burlap and twine degrade well enough, but also break down faster where exposed.

Wool felt could be useful in some applications, but would be expensive to use for a burrito compost trial.

I agree that the miscellaneous fibers would be a mess in fairly short order. And sometimes there's a bit of synthetic in material that will hold it together long after the jute or cotton rots away.

How about stringing bundles of twiggy garden waste and then rolling them over each other for a hybridization of Hugelkultur and composting? I often make a passive pile that is more twigs and canes, and I just let rodents and reptiles aerate it, but it would likely break down faster if I could fork it around for the first couple of months.

A fun and interesting experiment is to put a piece of cotton/synthetic blend fabric into the compost. The cotton fibers will decompose, but the polyester/nylon/etc. will not. What you get out is a 'ghost' of the original garment with either very thin threads, or in some cases, only the threads going in one direction left behind.

I think burlap might be best for this composting method because it would decompose completely - eventually. But I wonder what happens when you go to rearrange your burritos and find the fabric inside the pile has partially decomposed but the outside has not. So you go to pick them up and they fall apart into a pile of compost with half-decomposed burlap all through it.

And somehow, separating all that by hand - plus the work of making the burritos in the first place - is easier or less tiresome than turning a pile with a fork?

This really seems like a sort of Martha Stewart technique, way too fussy. I'd have to see it work to believe it's a good idea.