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Zone 3 Garden Life: On compost and composting

Compost is an essential ingredient to a healthy garden
leaves
One of Jenny Wren's two composting bins, tucked behind a fence in the maintenance part of the garden.

Compost is an essential ingredient to a healthy garden. Whether you make it, let nature make it, have a worm bin to do it, or buy it, once seriously into gardening, you will know something about it. Compost is decomposed organic matter, nature’s way of recycling nutrients and fiber to grow more plants. It is known has humus, not hummus! It is essential to keep plant life growing. Nature makes its own and all soil has some naturally composted matter but when we talk about it, we are usually referring to the compost we make to improve our garden soil.

Commercial compost is slightly different. In my early days of horticultural classes, we had to learn all about the John Innes formulations for the best composts. We had to make them and do the sterilization. John Innes was a horticulturist who bequeathed substantial amounts of money to an institute to benefit horticultural practices and that included use of compost. He formulated the best compositions of soil compost mixes for different growing conditions. The commercial mixes we use today are still based on those formula. The composts we buy contain different ratios of sterilized loam, sand or similar, peat or substitute and fertilizer. They have been sterilized to provide a weed and pest free optimal growing medium, mostly for starting seeds and container gardening but not for generalized garden soil. Imagine the expense.

The compost we and nature makes is decomposed plant material, black gold. It is the equivalent of the peat or substitute and fertilizer component of an artificial mix. It does not contain an agent for drainage such as sand and the loam will be our own garden soil. Adding compost to the soil is the best way to improve its quality. If your natural soil is a heavy clay it will also benefit also from sand, for drainage. Clay is high in nutrients and adding compost makes the nutrients more readily available as they are not so bound to the clay particles.

Making your own compost is one of the cheapest and best ways to optimize the life of plants in your garden. It is not difficult and it does not need to be sterilized! In fact for garden use you want it to have as many beneficial natural organisms as possible. You need:

• Dead plant material, leaves, previous years perennial tops, vegetable garden waste, pea plants, potato tops, prunings clipped into small pieces, kitchen waste such us veggie peelings, apple cores, rotten fruit and grass clippings. NO MEAT or FAT but egg shells are okay, not the contents.

• A place to put it

• Water

• Air

• A fork

The place to put it all can be as simple as a circle of wrapped square wire supported with some stakes or a just a pile if you have lots of space. It can be a top of the line as three bins, usually 4’x4’x4’ wood construction or a black plastic tumbling contraption. If you are an avid gardener and you know you have a lot of ‘garden waste’ (poor description because it makes gold) two to three bins are more ideal. It enables compost to be collected one year and then turned into the next bin, where it continues to decompose even more. The empty bin collects the current year’s vegetable matter. If you have three bins the compost gets turned for one more year and the resulting compost will be even finer. The black gold that results from this process can be distributed in either late fall or early spring. The trouble with spring is that is usually frozen solid until quite late.

There are some things to keep in mind while the decomposing materials do their work. The compost needs water to keep the process working – not a lot but an occasional drench to maintain a damp environment. The decomposing material also needs oxygen. Best to use a fork to lift some of the material and let air in.

Green and Brown: For the microbial decomposition to occur, carbon is essential as the energy source and that is the mass of brown material put into your compost. Nitrogen is the other crucial component for protein and cell growth and that comes from the green materials placed in the compost. Compost scientists have worked out the ratio of carbon to nitrogen ideally should be 30:1. DON’T worry!  If your compost gets smelly it has too much nitrogen and ammonia gases are being produced.  Just fork it over a bit and add brown material.  The chemical reaction going on in your pile will create warmth, a great sign that things are going well. Too cold and not much goes on and too hot will kill organisms. Again DON'T worry! The compost pile generally looks after itself. In winter there is not a lot you can do to help it along, except maintain a healthy mix in the fall. If the pile gets too hot fork it over a bit to cool it down. My compost has never caught on fire but I have found black ash in the center on one a two occasions, usually in the grass clippings. It is frequently possible to observe steam and I have a sneaking suspicion that my toad hibernates very close to this source of warmth.  

It saddens me to think of all the kitchen waste that is not composted, when composting is such an easy habit to get in to. I keep a bucket with a lid under my sink for all the potato peelings, banana peels, pumpkins etc. and when full a quick walk up to the compost pile sees it go to good use. I am so looking forward to the day when all communities have a composting facility for the apartment dwellers and those who don’t have a compost pile in their garden.  In the meantime save your valuable source of garden gold and know good will come from it.  

There are alternative ways of composting but the principles are similar. Worm composting uses a bin with a concentrated population of small composting worms who do the work in less time by putting the vegetable matter through their digestive systems. This system works well especially for kitchen waste but the scale is simply not large enough for those with a large amount of material. I find the same with tumbling systems or static black bins.  Although they work, the capacity is not large enough for many gardeners.

This Wayfair site has a good display of the many types of devices you can use for composting from the simplest to most complex. Just remember it does not have to be complicated to work.