Sunday, April 9, 2006
Composting Primer
Composting Primer 4/9/06
Composting and organic mulching are the keys to gardening without poisons and chemicals.
Mulching is easy. Just take grass clippings, leaves, or wood chips and put them around your plants. Grass clippings are friendliest to most vegetables, and my neighbors' landscapers are glad to give them to me because otherwise they have to pay for their disposal. An organic mulch will decay and add nutrients to the soil. Meanwhile, it keeps the weeds out and the moisture in. My mulch is a major reason I so rarely water my garden. Ruth Stout advocates using ONLY mulch for your garden's fertilizer. I don't feel I have enough space to completely abstain from compost, but I do love her book GARDENING WITHOUT WORK -- FOR THE BUSY, THE AGING, AND THE INDOLENT. I normally keep my vegetable garden mulched with others' grass clippings, which I pile no more than 4" high when they are fresh.
Composting is more subtle, but it's comforting to remember, "Compost happens." It's hard to go wrong. Leave organic matter alone for long enough, and it composts. There are caveats, of course.
Plastics take centuries, but you wouldn't think of putting them into your compost heap anyway. Styrofoam takes 80 years, the books say. I haven't checked it. Some people do worm composting in their kitchen, and that works well in Montclair, even in apartments. I haven't done that because outdoors is easier and always available to me. In the winter I cover the unsightly stuff with leaves, which I keep nearby.
My compost heap is primarily leaves, kitchen waste, and garden left-overs, both welcome (used plants) and unwelcome (weeds). The ideal compost heap integrates carbon and nitrogen as well as possible. I try to alternate at about 4" thick layers, but I never measure and don't worry if they are thinner or thicker.
Carbon-rich matter is dead, like autumn leaves. Fred brings me 100 bags of leaves each fall that others wastefully leave on their curbs. Silly Americans! Leaves alone take a long time to compost. My daughter in MA used to compost leaves from a condo property with eleven homes in a wire container and found that by the following July she could use use the partially decayed leaves as mulch under the shrubs. So the container was again available the following fall when she wanted to use it again. I call the carbon-rich matter "brown."
Nitrogen-rich matter composts fast and can stink if there isn't enough brown in with it. I use stuff from the kitchen and garden, and sometimes grass clippings that are too far gone to use as a mulch when Fred (or some other donor) brings them to me.
Alternating green and brown is the trick. It typically yields compost in this climate after a few summer months. Once I borrowed a barrel on its side strung up for easy turning (you may have see them, at least in advertisements) and filled it about equally with leaves and grass clipping on Memorial Day. Each day I turned the barrel once, and I had beautiful compost in 3 weeks.
I use the three-pile method of composting. I pile a heap as the material accumulates to 4-5 feet. Meanwhile, I'm taking from a second pile, and the third pile is sitting still, "cooking," as the jargon goes. When the second pile is gone and/or the first is too high for comfort, I change piles. I begin taking from the one that has cooked, leave the high pile to cook, and pile new stuff on the empty spot from which I have just taken finished compost. Commercial compost containers are available and look prettier.
You can use manure for the nitrogen-rich contribution ("green"). I did for a few years, but then it lost its charm. It helps compost heaps go fast, but it should NOT be used in your garden until it is composted.
Composting kills pathogens (in manure, etc.) and weed seeds. It gets quite hot. Some people have long thermometers to stick into the heap and see how hot it gets, but that never entertained me. Someone brought one to an Open Garden, asked permission to stick it into my "cooking" heap, and was pleased with the results. The thermometer rose as it should.
The ideal place for compost heaps is under trees, which is the least ideal place for gardening. The trees keep it cooler in the summer and minimizes evaporation. Some people water their compost heaps to keep them moist, but I've never done that and my compost heaps compost. Compost happens.
Some people buy "compost starters," but if you put some weeds and used plants in your heap, the bacteria on the roots serve as starters. That works fine for me.
Commercial compost is available, but home-compost is much cheaper. It also recycles, as we should all be doing. It saves your municipality lots of tax money in waste they are not picking up. Dick and Jean Roy put out only one garbage pail of garbage a year (two a year when they were raising their three children), and composting is crucial for that.
Happy composting!
Pat
Photography by Lesley Cecchi
Labels: Composting Primer
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