HOW TO MAKE COW MANURE...WITHOUT A COW!

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

It was the same with the cucumbers. We ate, canned, pickled, gave away, and filled the refrigerator with cukes. Finally, in desperation—when the vines had reached two rows over and started to strangle the sweet corn—we got out the machete and began chopping them back. For a while there I felt like a South American plantation owner fighting against the encroaching jungle.

MORE OF THE SAME

With results like that under my belt, it's easy to see why I'm putting garbage bag manure on almost my entire garden this year . . . and, once again, making this fertilizer is far easier than trying to produce an equivalent amount of compost: I just use the lawn mower to chop up grass, leaves, and other organic material . . . mix everything together . . . dump it into garbage bags . . . and leave the tied sacks lying out in the sun. There's no backbreaking turning or lifting or forking or shoveling at all.

ADDITIONAL TIPS

Although I've talked about tying shut my "airtight" black plastic bags throughout this article, I do want to point out that I never completely seal the sacks (if I did, they'd blow up and burst as the digesting material inside generates methane gas). I do tie the bags . . . but loosely enough to allow the forming gas to escape.

The importance of moisture and free solar radiation to the decomposition process outlined here should also be emphasized. It's the combination of moisture (from either the natural juices of the vegetation being composted or added water) plus the heat of the sun that those black bags soak up plus the almost complete exclusion of outside air which makes this method work so well. In short, don't expect to turn out batches of "genuine artificial cow manure" in 30 days unless you observe this simple ground rule.

And don't waste your time opening all your bags of decaying matter every three days the way that I did when my original batch of fertilizer was "cooking". Remember, I was running a methane experiment the first time that I brewed up artificial cow flops and I kept peeking in the way I did just to compare the gas production of one formulation to another.

Forget the methane. Let what little forms bleed off harmlessly into the atmosphere (the way it bubbles up out of swamps and escapes from real manure piles and real cows all the time). Just sack your shredded organic material, make sure it's moist enough, tie it loosely, throw it out in the sun, and forget it for 30 days (maybe 35 in some cases). Then open your goodies and spread'em on the garden.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print