Spreading Compost (Black Gold) on Front Porch Beds - Amending the Soil - September 2022

On my 2022 to-do list were a few items related to compost that I've begun to address in the past week or so since the weather has started to cool down.  If you go back and look at this year's list, you'll see that #13 focused on MAKING compost and using what I have while #19 talked about improving the soil conditions in the front of our house.  This post is about how I've combined those two things by using the compost - or Black Gold - that is in our compost tumbler and applied it to our font porch beds. 

First, have a look (below) at the makeup of the compost that is currently in our tumbler.  Do I turn this thing regularly?  No.  Is it in the sun?  No.  Do we still get a pot of black gold compost at the end of the Summer?  Yes.  Here's proof:

I wanted to take it a little bit at a time (to start), so I began to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets with the compost.  See below:

And, brought it up front to the beds where I'm dealing with a mix of hydrophobic mulch and a root mat from the Norway Maple.   See below for a few photos showing how I've spread it around in various places.  This shows 15 gallons of compost (so far) with more to come:

My hope is that this soil amendment will continue to improve the soil here as it works it way down through the mulch layer and into the clay that is below.  

What's next for compost?  After I empty the tumbler, I'll begin to turn the remaining compost bins and fill the tumbler with material that has already begun to break down.  Then, I'll use the alfalfa cube trick to layer in some nitrogen as I re-pile the compost back in the bins.  All in preparation for October when the bins will become overfilled with leaf debris.  Here's what the bins looked like in March of this year. 

The way it looks right now back there, I'm not going to have enough room, but we'll know for sure once I fill the tumbler.  I'll grab some photos of the before-and-after and determine if I really do, indeed, need that 3rd bin that I've talked about (#13 here).