My Chicago Garden

…Composting Part One - Black Gold…

We are starting a three part series on composting, that black gold that every gardener dreams about…or should dream about. If you’ve never worked with really good compost you don’t know what you are missing. If you listened to episode 4 on the square foot gardening technique, you’ll remember that there is no soil amendments or fertilizer used at all. The only thing you add each year is fresh compost. Compost, properly done, can bring all the nutrients a healthy plant needs to grow. In our last podcast on organic gardening you heard me mention that using compost is a requirement of having a truly organic garden.

For part one of this series well dip our toe into the pile and get familiar with some history and the benefits of composting. And we’ll dig a little into the science of composting and compost itself.

For part two we’ll deal with the mechanics of building and managing a compost pile.

Part three will have to wait until it’s no longer below freezing outside. This last part will be a special video podcast on actually building and starting a compost pile, so you can get a sense of the effort and cost involved.

But until then, let’s get started on the part of the series we can do in the freezing cold, some learning!

It might help a little to understand what compost is and where it came from. Composting is simply the biological reduction of organic material into a dirt like substance known as humus.  This finished compost, or humus, is the black gold that gardeners treasure so much. The entire composting process is too difficult to explain in a single podcast, or even a series of podcasts, but suffice it to say compost is simply organic matter that has been converted into dirt. The act of composting is an intentional replication of the natural process of birth and death that occurs in nature. We do not have a clear picture of where composting began in history, but the best we can surmise is that early cultivators of food crops discovered the benefits of composts, probably in the form of animal manure.  Probably noting that their crops grew better in areas that had held domesticated animals or large herds. The oldest written record of composting is found on a set of clay tablets from a civilization that flourished 1000 years before the birth of Moses.

Compost was known the Romans, Greeks and the tribes of Israel. The Bible makes several references to the cultivation of soil and the use of dung or dunghills. Much of the agricultural wisdom of the ancient civilizations disappeared during the Dark Ages, but then reappeared during the rise of the Arab cultures. One of the first extensive writings on the topic is from an Arab scholar of the 10th or 11th century entitled "Book of Agriculture". The medieval church also kept a repository of knowledge thanks to the efforts of a few devoted monks. Monks were the primary source of agricultural knowledge when Europe began to claw it’s way out of the Dark Ages. In North America compost was known to the native tribes and used by the early settlers. There are numerous accounts of using compost and manures in the colonies that date back to the 18th century. Several of the founding fathers were accomplished farmers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom wrote or spoke on this topic. American farmers knew the benefits of manure, but few used the composting of plant material due to the ready access to animal manure. As American’s moved west they found rich and fertile land and little thought was given to composting, except for the few who were familiar with farming poorer soil in the east. For the next 100 years agricultural practices became increasingly chemical in nature and composting fell by the wayside. However, since the turn of the century organic methods of farming and gardening are more popular than ever and more and more people are finding the value in composting again.

So what are the benefits of compost?
In the Rodale book on composting, which is being heavily utilized for this podcast, they list 11 or 12 benefits of compost. Of primary interest for my way of thinking are the following.

Recycling. No I don’t mean the paper and plastic you put out in a blue bin on your curb for trash pickup day.  By the way, I’m not sure that kind of recycling actually helps the environment but that’s another topic for a different podcast. Recycling, as it pertains to composting, is taking all those food scraps, grass clippings, leaves and other organic material you would have put in the trash for the trash truck…you know put in your compost pile. Now you don’t go throwing it in the pile all willy nilly, well I guess you could but it’s not optimal, but whatever…we’ll get into that in the next podcast.

Next is building soil structure
For those utilizing a growing method that uses actual soil, you did listen to podcast 3 about not using soil right?, compost is what you would be using to amend your bad soil into a more useful soil. With time compost can turn even the worst of soils into product land.

Thirdly, compost provides nutrients When plants need them.
Think of compost like those camel packs you see hikers or bikers wearing on their backs.  The water, let’s call it nutrients, just sits there waiting for them to use it. 
Compost acts the same way for plants.  Chemical fertilizers however, do exactly the opposite. They are like the hydration stations during a marathon. They are staggered through out the race and the runner looses the opportunity to use one of the stations once they have passed it. Chemical fertilizers are designed to release their nutrients at a specific period of time. You may hear terms like slow release when discussing chemical fertilizers. If the plant is not ready for the nutrients the chemical fertilizer is wasted and the plant does not get what it needs to grow. Compost just sits there waiting to be used.

Another benefit is that compost also acts as a neutralizing agent for toxins.
Compost is full of living organism that feed on various toxins and convert them to something less toxic.  Maybe the soil is too acidic and your plants don’t like acidic soil.
The addition of a neutral compost will lower the acidic nature of the pre-existing soil, and over time bring a more balanced profile to the soil.

And lastly, the wriggly guys. Worms
Worms love compost. In fact you can compost WITH worms. You want to encourage as many worms in your garden soil as possible. Providing them food and a home in the way of compost is exactly what they want.  No worm wants to chew his way through clay to find himself drenched in nitrogen rich liquid fertilizer.

So what goes on in the compost pile?

Basically, it cooks. No seriously. All that organic material goes into a sort of spontaneous combustion. The compost pile is turning all the organic material into sludge for all the little guys in the garden to eat. It’s doing this by raising the temperature to a level that encourages organic life to eat and multiply.  This repeated eating and replication breaks down the larger organic material.  A compost pile actually goes through various stages of life, but we’ll cover that in the next episode as it pertains to proper maintenance.

I mentioned some little guys in the compost pile. They are mainly made up of Microscopic Decomposers and Physical Decomposers. Let’s deal with the physical decomposers first. This are your worms, beetles, slugs, mites, spiders, flies..the true creepy crawlers. The microscopic ones are the bacteria and fungi and the like.
They all work together to feast on the organic material. It’s sorta like the food chain in reverse. The big guys eat the organic material thus creating smaller pieces. The next biggest guys eat the smaller pieces and create even smaller pieces. and so on and so on, until you end up with a big pile of little, which we call Humus….Black Gold

 

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