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Re: Compost!

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


O'Brien, obviously living the life o' Riley at Pablo's, raucously wrote:

>
>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.

So they say. But, I have found that if you keep it moist and sic worms on
it, leaves and paper even, will get all dark and humusy fast enough, and the
stuff that really takes time is big chunks of lignin, like large wood
chips.....so while other composters say 1 part greens to one part browns, by
volume, I say two bags of leaves to one bag of grass clippings, will do just
fine---and you can do without the grass clippings if you keep them moist and
fold them leaves into an active bin.

>Adding a fertilizer can
>help in this case.

Generally adding fertilizer  to compost is a waste of money, if you had to
buy it. It may also leave your finished product with less N than you started
with, due to acceleration of losses in various ways. Alfalfa meal is the
only fertilizer I would consider nowadays for firing up a pile,  although I
prefer to add it to finished compost for fertilizing lawns and other greedy
crops....


> 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).

Layering is really only there to help you measure, and if you have buckets
or tubs to measure as you go, it is best to mix the greens and browns
together in the right proportions.....
>
>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.

This is important if you need to control weed seeds or other, often more
serious, pathogens; or if you want to keep the temperature _down_ to avoid
losing some of colder composts disease suppressing qualities.

But, if you will simply age your compost for a good long while, you can also
have these things, just not as quickly....


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.

Tom Tallardy used to call this the 'Heap it and Leave it' method. Obviously,
it works...:-)
>
>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.

I don't buy angle brackets for my pallets, since a bit of rope top and
bottom makes it easy to open and close, or even move, the whole bin.
However, I am considering lining the inside of my pallets with compost
fleece, to keep stuff from the inbetween zones of the pallets and to allow
the material to stay moist all the way up to the fleece...
>
>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.

Thorny materials can be used in hugelkultur mounds, where they sit for four
or five years, along with a bunch of other compostables, discouraging moles
and gophers while plants grow above them.....about the only sort of
composting they are good for, IMO....


Frank Teuton, talking compost....is now officially a pallet palace
vermicomposter....:-)


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