Organic Gardening: Compost

On the farm, Compost Day came twice a year and was an event unto itself. No matter the weather we dressed for the occasion in gumboots and little else. On that day we would turn out the main cow byre and create new 5 metre high compost heaps. Right next to them we would de-construct the old ones and cart them off to the growing fields to be lined up ready for use. It was our May Day and hazing all rolled into one, because no matter how careful you were come sun down, even the dogs would have a hard time smelling who you were. But with rounds of cold fresh cider to quench the days toil and a hearty meal, we laughed and sang and stank together, happy with our achievement and relieved that only in six months would we do it all over again.

This was the compost day for the specific cow byre compost creation, and was implicitly efficient. The compost was only straw and cow manure tossed into huge great piles that towered above you, we heavily watered them down for two days after, and that was it for six months. This is great if you happen to be living on a working farm, but for the average gardener it is a little more complex but certainly no less enjoyable and useful.

The wonderful world of decomposition, nature’s waste transformational system can be yours too, with a little healthy effort. I have been lucky enough to create and enjoy the benefits of composting in a wide range of locations; from the small compost heap in an urban backyard, to a single heap bigger than that entire backyard on a commercial organic farm.

There is one main reason to create and maintain a compost heap and that is humus or biomass content addition to your soil. You can never have too much biomass it engenders life in the most degraded of soils. I have seen good compost turn a literal desert into a healthy rich and productive garden. It is nature who makes the compost, we just put the right ingredients together, and nature does the rest. This makes it easy with a few simple guidelines to have your own compost heap down and decaying in as little as a day.

It is not essential to make a compost container, but in a small garden it can help, if only with efficient use of space and ease of use in making and maintenance of your compost. Of the many one can buy or build my favourite is a loose or gaped, four walled wooden slat box with a soil base. One side of the box is made with removable slats for entry and exit, there are large gaps that allow plenty of air flow and the soil below helps get things going to begin with. It is advisable to have at least two of these, one that is full and becoming ready for use, and one to constantly build on or add to.

Whilst you can add almost anything organic to your compost there are a few things to avoid; cooked food or scraps which generally putrefy removing nutrients in the process and attract vermin; any wild plants that have gone to seed or you’ll be weeding considerably more; anything that is diseased or infested will spread or even lie dormant and end up back in your garden; the roots of any wild plants that are invasive or underground creepers. Keep these things out of your compost and I guarantee you will be the happier for doing so.

Many would add wooden cuttings or branches to this list, why? Well because bark contains lignin and is mainly decomposed by fungal means rather than bacterial. This means it takes longer than all the other materials in the heap to breakdown into something useful. I roughly sift all my compost when it’s ready, so this does not worry me and I like branches and twigs in base layers to give more air to the heap. Aeration is an important part of maintaining a productive heap, without enough air the heap turns predominantly into an anaerobic process rather than aerobic. Ever piled on the grass clippings too thick? That resultant sludge is the work of anaerobic bacteria and is so low in nutrients it is virtually useless and a bit toxic for the garden. Branches, when they finally do decompose are very rich in nutrients; combined with the slatted wood box they tend to give all the aeration necessary. So I have a pile of branches and cuttings collected on the side for when I add to, or turn the heap.

There are five main elements that need to be present for efficient healthy decomposition, to achieve the end result we are looking for, nutrient full compost that will bolster biomass in a fertile manner.

The first I have mentioned already, Aeration, the Second Element is Nitrogen. One of the reasons the cow byre compost was so easy, or maintenance free is because cow dung is rich in nitrogen, and nitrogen is one of the primary fuels that aerobic bacteria run on. So you need nitrogen to make nitrogen essentially, one of the prime nutrients in good compost. Although aerobic bacteria need nitrogen to live when they die it is released back into the compost.

One can add this nitrogen in a number of ways the most obvious being cow and especially chicken manure, which has super concentrations of nitrogen, so much so you must be careful or sparing in its use. This is great if you have free access to either but if you don’t there are other ways. I primarily use two plants called Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) and Clover (Trifolium sp.) to serve as a green manure. Comfrey grows a very deep tap root and is very rich in potassium, minerals and other trace elements, and Clover if you harvest it before flowering is very rich in nitrogen.

Alternatively one of the cheapest and possibly most nitrogen rich is dried blood, but if this is not for you try seaweed powder, when using either only very small quantities are needed to activate the heap. This is what the nitrogen essentially does it gives the aerobic bacteria a kick start in the decomposition process.

I have gone on and on about Bacteria and that is the Third Element essential in any heap. Bacterium is not hard to come by, there are billions in every grain of soil and that’s how you get them into the heap, in the soil. You could add thin layers of soil but generally I find what soil sticks to the roots of plants is more than ample. Composting is basically bacterial empire building, you want to nurture an empire of bacteria to steadily munch away and convert your compost into humus, and like rabbits they do not need much encouragement to get going. Though remember the preference is with aerobic more than anaerobic and their companions the great fungal horde.

We all want sweetness and your heap is no different. The sweetness is the pH balance which generally you want as neutral as possible, 7.0 is absolute neutral. Most of what you add to your compost will tend to lower your overall heap pH into acidity. This can be easily sorted out with the Fourth Element, a bag of Lime kept nearby to give the occasional light dusting to your layers as you add to the heap. Whilst this is not essential, keeping your heap sweet will enable a faster decomposition than by not doing so, Lime is a common favourite with serial murderers for this very reason. There are occasion however when you have a very alkaline soil present in your garden and might actually want the extra acidity from your compost. In this case spend the time in not using Lime to address this on a large free scale with your end compost.

The Fifth Element, I mentioned earlier when we watered down the cow byre heaps. Water is another of the bacterial fuels and essential to rapid good decomposition. Now the amount needed will greatly vary, depending on where you are, what time of year it is and what you are adding to the heap. It is a balance that needs to be achieved, too much or too little can both adversely affect your heap. In the cow byre heaps, admittedly, two days only and no maintenance afterward until next Compost Day, meant that we did loose a fair amount of nutrients, in the outsides of the heaps. But owing to their immense combined size, it was an acceptable loss over effort and time required.

Not so with a small heap, which is the fertilising powerhouse of any garden and every last crumb is needed. Straw is always a good addition, and if you keep a bale on hand and soak a loose armful in a barrel of water for an hour or so, you can then add it to the odd layer. In addition put a sprinkler on top the pile for a while every four weeks or so, though again this is completely dependant on your own home weather conditions etc. Keep in mind too much water is also a killer, so you might want to cover them in extended rains or snow. You can cover them with anything porous to the air, canvas, old carpet, etc. Heat is also a factor so covering them in snow or winter will prevent total slow down or even death of the empire in exceptionally cold or wet conditions.

Now you are ready to go, so let’s go and start building a heap. Make sure your container is level and firmly constructed, there’s nothing like your beautiful heap collapsing to one side and having to be rebuilt mid decomposition to brighten up your day.

I start with a nice thick layer of branches, twigs and woody cuttings first as my base, for aeration and their slow gradual decomposition. Next a thick layer of wet straw or a straw and animal manure mix if I can get it free. Then come those big wild plants that you missed and suddenly attacked your tomatoes, revenge is a dish best served in a heap. If you have a lawn then bring on a thin layer of grass cuttings after that, and that’s one of the tricks with grass cuttings, layer them thinly in your heap and no sludge will ye have. Add a nice thick layer of all those smaller wild plants, or anything else organic, I add my host of newspapers even with the ink problems because I just want to get rid of them, but in a useful manner. Though no thick glossy magazines and the like, they are truly poisonous with lead and other hard chemicals. I tear them up into strips and lightly crumple to get more aeration out of them. Activation, nitrogen time with wet comfrey leaves one single layer and the clover directly on top of them, or a dusting of blood powder, seaweed etc. Repeat the last layer except instead of nitrogen we now add a dusting of lime. Now you repeat this alternate nitrogen, Lime layering, excepting the big woody stuff, branches etc. until you reach the top or have run out of materials. Give the whole heap a good soaking with water and cover the top with you canvas or lid and you are set to go.

You now have a bonafide compost heap, wait three to five days and it should begin to generate decomposition heat inside the heap. This does vary according to temperature humidity etc. but in general, by seven to ten days you should be feeling some heat inside the heap. Don’t panic if this is the case, just leave the heap alone and try to think where you might have gone wrong. One way or another that compost will break down even without giving off a noticeable heat, it will just take longer. The farm cow byre heaps used to send great plumes of steam into the winters morning air that collected into their own personal fog banks around them.

If you have got the combination right, keep an eye, it will shrink down fast and be ready for more before you know it. You will find that there is a cycle of time particular to you and you garden, and this will organically create a compost routine that you may follow. Especially in terms of when to perform major weeding sessions, harvests or lawn mowing. Always be patient with you heaps let them breakdown fully before adding them to a pile for garden use, this is why having two or more heaps is a good idea. When I think they are done I add them to my garden pile and let them sit for two weeks or so further, before rough sifting and adding to the garden. I take all the bigger pieces of woody stuff left over and they go back down as part of the first layer of the next heap. This brings me to leaves.

Leaves like branches contain lignin and are slow to breakdown, but when they do the result is fantastic. I normally create a long term layered heaps just for leaves and woody stuff, small and out of the way, giving them the time they need to breakdown. The rich humus that comes of them I keep for special plants, herb pots and a few indoor ornamentals.

Another way to compost is directly onto the garden, sometimes called sheet mulching or direct green manuring. This is when you add thick layers of compost material directly to the top of the soil, either from elsewhere or grown in place for this purpose, I do the latter in fallow beds with clover. You can additionally sprinkle a bit of lime, blood, seaweed, bone dust etc. on top of the layers. The same guides of what not to add to your compost applies here to, and that’s it, you wait for it to breakdown and turn the bed over mixing the new compost into the top layer. This can also be done around fruit trees or along garden pathways, to give indirect nutrition and general garden soil health.

In line with the fertility of composting I think that liquid manures deserve a mention. With liquid manures you can push for higher nutrition levels at specific times like marrow or pumpkin time. Comfrey leaves in water allowed to fully breakdown is one; another is a bag of chicken manure suspended in water for a week or so. You can use these liquid manures when the plants really need a great amount of nutrition during fruit or vegetable production. If you filter them well and have a sprinkler system then you can jack the manure into the main line and big bob Broccoli is your Uncle. Though you must be real sure that the solution is both, well filtered, or try cleaning 300 sprinkler heads every time you water, and is weak enough to not burn the plants. That weak enough is also very important, test you solutions out on a similar single wild plants first. I really have learnt most of this the hard way in the case of the latter I nearly wiped out my entire above ground garden in two weeks, with my blundering enthusiasm for a new technique.

There you have it, though like much of gardening what actually works for you in your particular situation will be somewhat unique. For me gardening not only about the joy of working the earth, and feeding my family by doing so. It is about throwing yourself whole heartedly into the deep end of nature, and being commonsensical combined with a dynamic overview of what has, does and will work for you. Nature is by definition bountiful, it thrives on diversity and struggle, over producing wherever possible. Listen, look, taste, touch and learn from the ancient master.

In this series: ∙ Weed Control ∙ Compost ∙ Pest Control ∙ Companion Planting ∙ System Design ∙ Crop Rotation ∙