The Life Cycle and Compost

 

Every living thing will die sooner or later. After its life energy leaves, it soon decays, which is a most necessary process. The decaying process returns the dead plants and animals back to earth, back towards the raw elements from which they were made. These elements become the nutrition and vitality to feed the next generation of plants and then animals.

The decaying-or better called disassembling process is performed by billions of little creatures we call microorganisms. They will do their job with or without our help. In fact, it is almost impossible to stop them. The microorganisms can turn our organic (once alive) waste back into fertilizer for our farms and gardens, but in big cities where most waste is generated, it is usually dumped in a landfill where these life-sustaining nutrients are locked away from the natural life-death-decay cycle. Few people realize this great loss to our well-being and prosperity.

The microorganisms can be helped and managed in this return cycle. Composting is our term for helping and managing them.

 

Home Garden Composting

 

No yard waste should ever be sent to the landfill. If you like the clean, manicured look and think grass clippings must be caught and leaves raked, then do that, but be sure you make use of those clippings and leaves when you are done. Compost them to be used as a soil conditioner/fertilizer in the garden or as a mulch around shrubs and trees to retain moisture, control soil temperatures, and supply dozens of nutritional needs.

The compost pile can be free-standing or in an enclosure of some type. Concrete blocks or lumber are used for enclosures, but I think the most practical is close mesh wire 1/2 to 1/4 inches between strands, 3 to 4 feet wide, and 9 feet or longer, fenced together in a circle. A nine-foot length will make about a three-foot circle. I like a larger circle myself because a larger pile can retain the heat and moisture better. The circle can be placed anywhere convenient except where water could run off a roof onto it.

To make compost, the microbes need air, water, carbon material for an energy source, and protein (nitrogen) material to build their bodies from. Even though most materials contain carbon and nitrogen, high carbon materials are sawdust, dried leaves, bark, wood chips, dried grass, or any organic material that you can put on a pile and moisten and nothing happens. It doesn't smell, draw flies or seem to ever rot. High protein or nitrogen materials are manure, kitchen waste, green vegetable matter, animal matter such as blood meal, fish meal, or any organic material that quickly rots, smells, and draws flies when wet.

To build the compost pile, start adding organic materials as they become available. Use all kitchen and yard organic waste except meat unless you have a pile large enough for burying the meat very deep. Grinding the larger twigs and leaves will make them compost faster, or you can just throw them in and later pick or screen them out and put them back to inoculate the next piles until they are completely broken down. I prefer the picking out or screening; it takes less energy and the large twigs help hold the materials apart to aerate better. Adding horse or cow manure up to 25% or chicken manure up to 10% makes a good rich compost. Too much manure could cause it to get smelly if it is not aerated enough or if it gets too wet. Green grass clippings and kitchen waste have ample nitrogen if manure isn't readily available. To inoculate-or get those microorganisms working-in the beginning, a commercial inoculator can be purchased or a few shovels full of garden soil will do the job. Don't use too much dirt because it adds weight and compresses the pile and makes it harder to turn.

It is always better to start the compost pile with the carbon materials and add the nitrogen materials a little at a time until the microbes are really working, creating heat without a smell or flies. Then you will know you have the correct carbon to nitrogen (C/N) ratio and can continue building the compost pile successfully. Like any other plant or animal, the microbes need air and water, but they don't like to be drowned. Just keep the pile moist - much like a squeezed-out sponge. And turn or mix it for aeration.

After the first pile is ready, use some of it-such as the larger twigs to inoculate the next. The compost pile should be aerated. Loose light piles need aeration about once a month. A tight heavier pile will require more aeration, but more than every third day is unnecessary. The pile can be turned with a garden fork or shovel, but the easiest is with a compost turning probe. This is a tool about the size and shape of a walking cane with two wings that fold into a point when pushed into the pile but spread open when pulled up. This doesn't require a lot of strength. On the up stroke, the pile is torn open and some of the bottom is brought toward the top. It is a quick, easy way to aerate a home-garden size pile.

Another easy way to turn the pile is to unpin the wire cage; take it from around the pile; pin it back together next to it, then put the material back in. Each pile should be turned at least once like this to be sure the outside ends up in the middle so it can go through the heating process.

If you have a large garden and enjoy making compost, a number of these wire circle cages can be used. You can keep building them until the first pile is ready, then you empty it and start over. The compost is ready to use when the materials have turned brown and most of them have lost their identity. The material should have an earthy smell.

If your soil is lacking in certain elements, the best way to add them is through the compost pile. Add rock phosphate for phosphorous, granite sand or wood ashes for potash; you can even add minerals like iron sulfate, zinc sulfate, and magnesium sulfate. I know these are chemical, and against organic gardeners' principals, but when the microorganisms get through with them in the compost pile, they will be naturally chelated into an organic form that will remain available to plant-use even in alkaline soils.

I like to wet the pile, if needed, with a fish emulsion solution-6 to 12 tablespoons per gallon of water. This adds nitrogen but never too much at one time, plus it contains all the nutrients for the microbes and later on your plants.

Unwanted insects such as pill bugs and ants will get into the compost pile. Turning often and keeping the moisture just right so the pile heats up to 140 to 160 degrees will discourage them. Heat, however, isn't absolutely necessary to make compost. I have never seen a forest floor heat up.

Making compost is as much an art as it is a science. The best way to learn to make good compost is by doing it and not giving up. Most home garden compost failures are caused by simply keeping the pile too wet. In a rainy season you may cover the top with plastic, but not for too long because you might smother it and cause it to smell, I like to heap up the center of the pile so it sheds water like a thatch roof.

Composting is not only practicing good ecology. You are making plant foods and soil conditioner Nature's own way, with little or no expense to your pocketbook.

 

Large Scale Composting

 

Composting is the art of working with the decay or rotting processes in an economical way. Nature takes care of the science, so we must think economics. A measure of compost contains only so much energy, and if we expend more than that amount to make that measure of compost, we gain nothing.

For some mysterious reason, when industrial and municipal authorities approach composting as a method of disposing of their waste, they always look toward sophisticated, highly technical equipment that takes months, even years, to build and costs big bucks-just to perform a process Mother Nature has been doing simply since the beginning.

At Garden-Ville's composting plant near San Antonio, we compost over a 150,000 cubic yards annually with only one piece of equipment-an articulated loader that cost $60,000. A vibrating screen is used for cosmetic reasons only after the compost is ready but before it is sold. The screen removes plastic, trash, rocks, and bottles, which seem always to find their way into the compostable materials. It also makes the product pretty and uniform.

We make compost in static piles; we sell by volume, so we have to watch for shrinkage. If we have time to wait, we only turn four times. If we need to speed up the process before the spring market demand, then we turn more often-five to six times. Besides manure from many sources, we compost slaughterhouse waste, vegetable waste, and brewery waste. For carbon and bulking materials we use sawdust, rice hulls, peanut hulls, wood shavings, and reground tree trimmings.

We build piles from five to ten thousand cubic yards each, depending on how fast the raw materials become available. The material is piled as high as the loader can reach, up to twelve feet. In a real dry season we may have to water the pile, but if we get our average annual rainfall, the material comes in with ample moisture to start the composting process and the rainfall replenishes evaporation.

Composting microorganisms need carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and moisture, and any one of the four can be jiggled around to prevent smelly conditions. The one you have least control of is water because of the unpredictable weather. After a few years of operation, we got a feel for the correct carbon-nitrogen ratio and learned to make huge piles with the least amount of aerating.

We use an area of about nine acres. We start the piles a distance from the screen, and with each turning we move the pile closer. When the compost is ready, it is nearest the screen. This process-start to finish--takes from four to seven months.

With normal rainfall, the large piles absorb the water without too much leaching; however, during a heavy rainy season we have leaching and it is drained off into a grassy field, which filters it pretty well. We have close neighbors, and so far none have complained about run-off or smell. We have also been inspected by the health department, E.P.A., air quality control, and the water district in charge of our aquifer. None of them had any complaints.

We are in our thirtieth year of operation and, of course; we started small and had fly problems, but as we grew the fly problem got less and less until there are almost none. I am not sure what to attribute it to-either better material handling or fly parasites, probably a combination of both. I have watched two different compost plants go into business in my area. Both used fancy, sophisticated equipment or buildings, much too expensive. They tried to over-manage Nature, and neither survived. They both visited us before starting up and said they were going to make a better product. One bragged he would make compost in seven days when it took me four to six months. I asked him, "How long will it take to build your plant?" "Five months," he said. If I started production the same day he started construction, I could have a product to sell before he even finished his building. In reality, the open air, slow process is just as fast or faster. A digester or any type in vessel facility is also limited in capacity. Open air   composting has no limit.

We composted sludge (solid waste from a municipal sewage system) on two different occasions, but learned it had to be composted at a separate location because the home gardeners were always worried we would load them from the wrong pile. Sludge needs to be handled a little differently. We made the piles much smaller; we used the row method: piles ten feet high and about twenty feet wide at the base and the length was determined by convenience. We composted it for twelve months or longer, and we used our largest particle-bulking agent, which was tree trimmings. Two parts trimmings and one part sludge was a good blend, and we turned it only after each rain. A sludge compost operation ideally should be built on a slight grade starting at the low end and each turning moves the piles up hill, so the leaching during heavy rains will always run from the oldest, ready-to-sell pile, into a freshly-made pile. It would also be good to catch the leachings in a lagoon and aerate it until a dry season, then spray it back on unfinished piles.

We found the longer sludge was composted, the safer it was and the less sludge odor it had. Also, we could screen through three screen sizes to make three different products: one for lawns, one for bed preparation, and one for mulch. I believe any local horticultural, landscaping industry could use up the total supply of sludge from their town or city and not even have enough once they learned its value.

There is no hard-to-master scientific knowledge or expensive building or equipment needed to make compost, only an understanding of eighth-grade biology, time, space, and a desire to work with Nature.

I have consulted with many cities, garbage hauling companies, dairies, and feedlots and their reasons for composting are always to save land-fill space or get rid of a waste product. Few people really understand why Nature decays dead things and where man fits into this cycle.

 

The Garden-Ville Method - Lessons in Nature