I am sure you will get lots of responses here as there are quite a few folks here who use community compost.

My only caution would be that you do not know what is in it and that makes me a little uneasy in terms of being an organic gardener. (I am an organic gardener but not everyone chooses to go the organic route. I just wanted to give you food for thought.)

I choose not to use community compost in my vegetable garden because I don't know everything that is in it so there is no way to know if it contains something I would not put in my vegetable garden. Some community compost contains bits of black plastic trash bags, or may contain chemical residues that were sprayed on whatever plants went into the compost.

In some cities (though I do not believe this is true of any community compost in the state of Oklahoma) there are forms of community compost that may contain sewage sludge or by-products from commercial food processing factories.

Finally, there are a few chemical weedkillers that are most often used by ranchers and farmer to kill broadleaf weeds and these have occasionally made their way into commercial and community compost, most recently in North Carolina this past summer and in many parts of Great Britain in 2008. This type of chemical contamination is fairly rare (though that is small consolation if you're one of the folks it happens to), but it happened here in the USA in the early 2000s and it was a serious issue for the affected people since it turned their gardens into a wasteland where nothing would grow for years. The residues of these few specific weedkillers can persist in the soil for several years and kill anything (except grassy plants) that you plant in that soil. However, the odds of you getting compost contaminated with these broadleaf weedkiller residues are pretty low. Because I live in an area with a lot of cattle and horse ranches and am sometimes given old hay by friends who are ranchers, I am more careful than most people about weedkiller contamination in compost since I know people here who spray their pastures with products traced to compost contamination in the past.

I don't see anything wrong with using community compost if you are cautious and go into it with your eyes open and with an awareness that it might not be as pure as compost you'd make yourself. Look at the compost and see if you see bits of plastic or wire in it....because those things are often found in community compost. You can use a simple compost screen to screen out foreign matter like that if you find any, or maybe you're lucky and your community doesn't let stuff like that get into their compost to begin with.

You also could test your compost by putting some of it in a flower pot or plant flat and trying to sprout (indoors at this time of year) beans or peas in it. Legumes should sprout pretty quickly in compost and should thrive. If they sprout and grow just fine, the compost likely does not contain any weedkiller residues in significant amounts. If they sprout and quickly die, that would make me think twice about using that compost.

If you are concerned about chemical contamination in the compost, use it only in non-food areas. Or, pile it up in a compost bin or a remote corner of the yard and let it decompose further over the course of the winter before adding it to your beds in the spring. Any chemical residues that might still be present in the compost when you pick it up from your community composting facility would break down further over the winter and the compost would be safer when you add it to the garden beds in late winter or early spring.

I am pickier about compost contamination than most people because I am a cancer survivor and the type of cancer I had has been linked to,among other things, the increases in chemicals used in commercial food production over the last half-century or so. So, for me, it is important to be extra-cautious. Not everyone is as careful as I am and I think most community compost is probably OK and is relatively free of chemical residue if it is completely composted and doesn't contain large chunks of material that has not yet broken down.

When I saw your question, I knew I could answer it one of two ways....the quick and easy answer, which would be to say 'sure, go ahead, people use it all the time' or the longer, more complicated response that I gave. There's nothing wrong with the first answer--it is a valid one. People use it all the time and most use it with no problem as far as we can tell. I simply choose to give the longer, more complicated answer that reflects the position I've arrived at after decades of gardening and life.

If you don't garden organically, it probably won't bother you that you're getting compost that might have chemical residues from weedkillers, fertizilizers, pesticides, etc. and that's fine. The point is that you think about what might be in it and decide how comfortable you are with using it.

Having said all that, if I were obtaining/using community compost, I'd hope to get compost that had a higher content of chopped/shredded/composted or decomposed leaves than grasses, which is likely in the fall. Tree leaves are less likely to be contaminated than grass clippings.

Dawn

Do you live in Norman? I've heard that Norman gives away compost made from yard waste, and I think it's a great idea. As Dawn says, you never quite know what's in it, but after spending a lot of money on having compost, soil, and other materials delivered from professionals, i'm now trying to get most materials for free or practically free. It's much more exciting and inventive to try and find ways to get ahold of these things in an urban environment.

I just recently found a horse stable on the NE side of OKC that has a GIGANTIC pile of composted horse manure. It's free for the taking or $10 if they load it for you... There's places like this everywhere, you just have to look.

As I get further into gardening, I'm leaning more and more towards the idea the gardening should be free or pretty close to it...

-Matt

Matt, The sad thing is that unless you buy organic compost (which is very hard to find at commercial composting or soil facitilies), etc., there's no guarantee the stuff you buy is any more pure than the freebies you can scrounge up either. So, given that the purity of nothing is guaranteed, you might as well scrounge for all the freebies you can. Don't forget to check your local community's Freecycle or Craig's List websites too because you often can find all kinds of gardening-related stuff there for free or for a very low cost.

Fall is my favorite soil-building and bed-building season because the shredded/chopped leaves are so readily available and free, and (in my case) the snakes are hibernating (more or less) so I can spend days in our woodland gathering leaves.

Dawn

Dawn, I agree...As popular as organic gardening is, we're still just tiny islands in a sea of "conventional" agriculture. I don't really like to call what I'm trying to do organic gardening; it makes it sound as if it's something new. I think traditional gardening would be a better label; simply raising food and growing things in the way humans have in all but the last 100 years or so.

The main challenge for urban gardening as I see it is not just limited space but limited raw materials as well. In this regard, it seems that we urbanites are forced to relax the rules of organic agriculture slightly...or at least rethink them. We may not have abundant straw, manure, or other things found in the countryside, but we have the waste of a city... There's a certain poetic beauty in turning the dregs of city life (shredded office paper, Starbucks coffee grounds, resturant food scraps) into something beautiful and nurturing (compost).

-Matt