Lazy gardeners argue about compost. Some insist nothing can take the place of a shovelful of compost mixed in planting holes for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and members of the cabbage family. Melons, cucumbers, and squash need its richness to send out strong, healthy vines. Use compost to side-dress hungry crops, mix it into the seedbed, or cover fine seeds with it as you plant, they say. Feed your vegetables and flowers with compost, and sit back and watch them grow
Read too much about compost, and you’ll be scared off completely. Carbon-nitrogen ratios, aeration, exact proportions of ingredients, activators, psychrophiles, mesophiles, termophiles — help!
Despite all the hocus-pocus, compost is basically decomposed plant material; it looks like black, fluffy soil. Whether you make it in place as year-round mulch or in a separate bin doesn’t matter. Once you’ve tried compost, never again will you be able to stand looking at crusty, dried-out soil of little tilth.
No-Nonsense Composting
If you’re a purist, you’ll follow Sir Albert Howard’s lead. He invented the ‘adore method, which calls for building a series of layers with a three-to-one ratio of green matter to manure: first: six inches of green matter (weeds, leaves, etc.) second: two inches of manure, garbage, or other high-nitrogen source third: a sprinkling of soil (plus ground limestone and ground phosphate rock)
Repeat layers until the pile is four or five feet high. Moisten each layer as you build the pile so it is about as wet as a squeezed-out sponge. Poke holes in it with a rod to hid aeration. Turn the pile in six weeks and use it after three months.
Most of us aren’t that organized. We want to recycle biodegradable waste, but we want to do it lazily.
Keep a half-gallon milk carton or similar container next to the kitchen sink. Form the habit of filling it with the kitchen’s vegetable waste: parings, eggshells, fruit pits and rinds, coffee grounds, tea leaves, carrot tops, cabbage cores, etc. When it is full, toss its contents on the compost pile.
“We have a great pile of compost, more than we’ll ever use, ” says my neighbor. “What’s the use of going through all that fuss — layering, porportioning, turning? Just throw all your weeds, leaves, clippings, and kitchen-vegetable waste in a pile and let time do it all.”
Another advocate of time is organic gardener Sam Ogden, author of Organic Vegetable Growing, who used three side-by-side bins for compost, each about five feet by twelve feet. One bin holds finished compost, one holds last year’s slowly rotting compost pile, and the third is for this season’s accumulation of kitchen garbage, weeds, spent pea vines, and other garden trash. He covers each layer of green matter (thin layers for better aeration) with a thin layer of soil. Rain provides moisture, and in two years the finished compost is fine, dark, and crumbly. Once this system is working, you’ll always have one bin to draw from, so it’s rather like an asparagus bed — two years of expectation and from then on the harvest keeps coming.
If you can’t wait that long, here are three ways to speed up ti decomposition of compost:
- Increase the ratio of nitrogen to carbon in the compost pile. Materials high in carbon include wood shavings, sawdust, dry leaves, and straw. Materials high in nitrogen are fresh grass clippings, fresh manure, vegetable wastes, green vegetation, and fertilizers such as blood meal, fish meal, or alfalfa meal. Don’t get too much nitrogen or you’ll end up with slime.
- Increase the amount of air in the pile by laying perforated pipe at intervals as you build the pile. Every foot or so in height lay a few pipes horizontally a foot or two apart.
- Increase the surface area of ingredients by shredding them with a shredder or rotary mower before heaping. (If you want to bother moistening and turning the pile after four, seven, and ten days, you can have finished compost in two weeks.)
The French Intensive Method does not advocate the use of manures or rock powders in compost. It’s simpler, they think, to make compost with three layers:
The minimum size for proper heating up of a compost pile is three feet by three feet by three feet. Heat speeds decomposition and kills disease-causing organisms and weed seeds.
Composters Beware!
Sewage sludge may contain heavy metals.
Don’t put bones and other animal wastes in the compost pile. They do not decompose quickly and may invite animals to raid the pile.
Chicken manure is so strong we are warned about the danger of its burning crops. Sawdust has such a high carbon content we are told to add it sparingly to compost piles and never to put it on the gardenplants a “booster” feeding of nitrogen. Sawdust and chicken manure are an ideal combination. The acidity of the sawdust also offsets the alkalinity of the chicken manure. without first giving
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