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Re: Compost!

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

On Fri, 10 Sep 1999 14:44:40 -0700, "Kevin Henson"
<kevinh@thesocket.com> , late of Pablo Fanques Fair wrote:

>I would love to read some discussions about composting.  That is my next
>hurdle in gardening.  I am forever spending money on Amend.  I hate the
>thought of throwing all of that potential soil away.

Well, that is a topic that is always welcome, I would say.

The biggest issue with compost is that you need a balance of sorts
between the "browns" and the "greens". Browns are the dried stuff
like leaves rakes from your lawn in the fall. Stuff that is dried
out. Greens are things like fresh grass clippings, kitchen vegetable
scraps, etc. Too much brown stuff and not enough green and you don't
get the level of bacterial action you want. Adding a fertilizer can
help in this case. Too much green and not enough brown can cause bad
smelling piles that are fermenting and exhibiting anaerobic
activity. I have faced that problem and solved it by using peat moss
as a substitute "brown" material. Good compost heaps are built in
layers of a few inches thickness, alternating brown and green
material, and adding sufficient water to keep the pile moist (but
not soaking).

One can get excessively compulsive about this. For instance, some
people have very precise recipes, with various "seasonings" in the
forms of micronutrients and fertilizing agents, and measure the
temperature with thermometers, and turn the piles on a precise
schedule, and so on. Nothing wrong with that if you have the free
time and enjoy spending it that way, but I would not term it
"necessary". Paul James has said that you can do very well by just
finding an out-of-the-way corner of your yard and dumping all your
yard wastes there. It may not be "perfect" compost, and it may not
be ready in three weeks, but it is better than throwing the stuff
away, and gives you something to start with. After all, the model
for compost is the litter of a forest floor, and I don't think
nature uses a complex recipe to achieve that.

The other issue is whether you want to build a container of some
kind to hold your compost pile. I made mine out of wooden pallets,
held together with angle brackets purchased at a hardware store. The
pallets can be found free if you look around, and the hardware is
pretty cheap. Other materials that are inexpensive and simple
include chicken wire and hardware cloth. I would never spend the
money on those ready-made bins you see in some catalogs, but maybe
that is just me.

You can see descriptions of how you should turn your piles regularly
to get compost as fast as possible, but I am a lazy man. I throw
stuff into the pile throughout one growing season, and the following
spring I take it out and put it in the garden. But all of my yard
waste except for thorny material goes into the pile. Thorny
material, like old rose canes, gets put to the curbside because I
would otherwise hurt myself. Those thorns do not decompose fast
enough for me to use the compost if they were in it. 


-- 
Kevin B. O'Brien                  TANSTAAFL
kob1@ix.netcom.com
There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, 
when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it
time well spent. -- Montaigne

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