COMPOST
Composting is one of the most important things you can do to improve your crops, including where, in what, kosher and nonkosher materials, how to build a deluxe composter, six essentials.
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The gardener delights in good harvests; the garden delights in good compost.
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by Susan Glaese
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VACUUM AND NITROGEN PACKING
August/September 1999
Issue # 175 - August/September 1999
Free ...
Readers' tips to live by....
Making and using are the most important things you can
do to improve your garden.
Rural author Wendell Berry once wrote of the farmer, "He
has seen the light lie down in the dung heap and rise again
in the corn." These words have sharply clarified for me the
agricultural life cycle — or, even better, light
cycle . Plants convert solar energy into food for
animals (ourselves included). Then the wastes from those
animals, along with dead plant and animal bodies, "lie down
in the dung heap," are composted, and "rise again in the
corn."
This cycle of light is the central reason that composting
is such an important link in organic food production: It
returns solar energy to the soil. In this context, such
common compost ingredients as onion skins, hair trimmings,
eggshells, vegetable parings, and even burnt toast are no
longer seen as garbage, but rather as sunlight on the move
from one form to another.
By making use of such substances, composting enables us to
have large amounts of "dung" for our gardens without
necessarily passing most of the ingredients through an
animal first. It also greatly speeds up the earth's own
soil-building processes so we can get the results in months
instead of centuries.
The benefits of using compost are so legion that it's no
exaggeration to say that it is the key to soil
fertility. The end product of composting is humus
, the broken-down organic matter that is the basis of soil
life. And the billions of microorganisms that are in a
single teaspoon of fertile soil perform numerous
functions. They change nutrients into a form that your
plants ran use . . . provide a sustained, ongoing flow of
that food . . . and bind earthen particles into small
aggregates, helping to build a friable soil.
There are other benefits of composting:
Control of pH . Acid or alkaline soil can lock up
many nutrients so that they're unavailable to plants. The
regular addition of compost rounds off such sharp edges,
helping to bring soil to the crop-favoring pH range of
between 6.5 and 7.5.
Heat absorption . Finished compost will help
darken most soils, helping them to better absorb heat from
sunlight. This can actually extend your spring and fall
growing seasons.
Drainage, water retention, and aeration . Imagine
the life of a root for a moment, ever tunneling in search
of water and food. If the soil is clayey, the roots will
have trouble making headway. They become shallow, never
reaching the food and water reserves deeper down. And their
oxygen supply is easily cut off in the tightly packed soil.
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