Compost Made Easy
(Page 4 of 7)
October/November 2006, Issue #218
By Barbara Pleasant
8. With a worm bin, you can even compost indoors. Composting with captive earthworms, called vermicomposting, is a great way to compost paper products and food waste from your kitchen. Vermicompost bins can be kept indoors or outside, but they work great indoors in winter, when outdoor heaps often freeze. Add vermicompost to planting holes, mix it into potting soil, or use it to top dress container-grown plants. Vermicomposting is great fun, and not at all messy. You’ll need to buy or build a special worm bin and fill it with bedding and food for the worms. Worm bins are also a great place to put any compost you’ve cooked in a solar cooker, because the worms and their entourage of springtails and mites quickly replenish the compost with fungi and bacteria. For more about how to get started, see “Start a Simple Compost Pile or Worm Bin.”
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9. You can safely compost livestock manure. This biologically active material is a terrific soil amendment, and composting livestock manure makes it safe to use in the garden. You should use caution with animal manures because many do contain diarrhea-inducing E. coli bacteria, but making and using manure-enriched compost won’t make you sick unless you’re careless or impatient.
The E. coli present in most types of animal manure is slowly eliminated by more competitive microorganisms as compost matures. Using fresh, uncomposted manure near growing food plants is risky, as is consuming unwashed vegetables that grow within mud-splashing range of recently manured soil. But if you allow the compost to mature before applying it to your garden and always wash your produce before you eat it, you need not worry about this problem.
Many folks think that “teas” brewed from compost do good things when sprayed on plants, but nature’s version of compost tea — rainwater filtered through composting mulch — is much simpler and safer. Any tiny traces of E. coli are quarantined in the soil, where they meet their destiny with death. In contrast, brewing manure-based compost and spraying it on your food just doesn’t seem like a good idea.
10. There are good uses for immature compost. Beyond composting in aboveground heaps and containers, you can make compost in excavated holes or pile up stuff in layered beds, and then plant right into the compost-in-progress. Peas, beans, potatoes and squash are especially well suited to growing in compost-filled trenches. In my garden, I use edible legumes as the first plants in new garden space, which may or may not get dug up before I layer up half-done compost with soil and whatever else I can find — grass clippings, weathered sawdust or horse manure from a friend’s barn. Some people call this lasagna compost. If you top off the layers with burlap or some other water-permeable cloth, you can call it Interbay compost, named after the innovative gardeners at Interbay Community Garden in Seattle, who reuse burlap coffee bags to cover layered compost. I call it comforter compost because it’s such a good way to tuck in soil for winter, or begin the healing process for soil that’s been neglected or abused.
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