Grateful Dirt
Composting Manure into Soil
Do you buy soil in plastic bags? We are here to help change that!
We’ll sell you locally produced, organic compost for about the same price as commercial products you can get from Walmart, Tractor Supply etc.
Our current price is $8 for 5 gallons (bucket not included).
We’re happy to deliver in and around Gila, Cliff, Buckhorn and Silver.
Free delivery for quantities of at least 10 buckets, small fee on lesser orders.
If you’re an elder or have a disability and want us to deliver a lesser quantity please talk to us. We’ll try and figure it out.
We want to help your garden, flower beds, raised beds, yard, meadow, lawn, forest or whatever you have going to thrive while also supporting local folks and eliminating the plastic bags!
Every purchase you make from Starlight Forest supports us to continue tending the thousands of trees we’ve planted in Gila, and to plant more.
Our compost is suitable to use as 100% of the soil for planting in gardens and raised beds. In pots, we mix it with a little bit of perlite to help retain water. And sometimes we’ll add some sand or peat moss too, depending on the plant.
Our compost starts with large amounts of manure. Samira interrogates the people with the animals about whether they use harmful chemicals, where they get their hay, etc. We strive to use only the cleanest manures.
We make enormous piles of the manure, 20-50 tons at a time on our organic farm in Gila. We water the pile to just the right moisture level, add goodies like biochar, deciduous leaves and shredded trees and other plants. Then we turn it weekly, checking the temperature often, to make sure we get the whole pile up to at least 120 degrees for an extended period. This should kill any pathogens in the manure and also kill any weed seeds the animals may have not have fully digested. If you’d like to see how we do it please don’t hesitate to ask for a tour or come out and get some compost here!
Is our compost perfect? No. Occasionally you could find a bit of the plastic string that people use on hay bales (wish they would go back to the old metal wires). or a rock, a stick or some other unwanted little thing. We apologize for this, we pick out every one of these things that we see.
By buying Starlight Farms compost you avoid the creation and dumping of a big plastic bag with every bucket you purchase.
Thank you!