A Compost Happening

Reader Contribution by Lee Reich
Published on July 30, 2013
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Compost happens. And it happens a lot around here. You can have your compost tea, your biochar, your mineral supplements, and any other potions; I’ll have compost, plain and simple compost.

So here’s my basic schedule for making compost: Throughout summer I build compost piles; the piles sit through winter; I turn them in spring; I spread the compost in autumn. Compost ingredients don’t have to sit that long before they’re “cooked.” I used to build piles, turn them a month later, and then spread the compost a month after that. Years ago, the University of California did a study to see how fast compost could be made. Getting everything just right — moisture, ingredients, and air — compost was ready in a mere 2 weeks!

But what’s the rush? I have almost a dozen compost piles in various degrees of decomposition. With beds dense with vegetables, right now I have nowhere to spread the compost. Most of the compost does, in fact, get slathered on vegetable beds, one inch deep, which supplies all the nutrients the plants need for a whole season, as well as feeding beneficial organisms, aerating the soil, increasing moisture holding, and releasing and making more available nutrients already in the soil. And that’s just some of the known benefits.

I build my compost pile with care, treating the bacteria, fungi, and other organisms within as my compost pet. As with my dogs and cat, my compost pet needs food, water, and air. As with my dogs and cat (and me), the major foodstuffs my compost pet needs are those high in carbon (carbohydrates for us humans) and those high in nitrogen (protein for us humans). My compost pets high carbon foods are old, dry, brown plant material such as wood shavings, autumn leaves, hay, and straw. Their nitrogen foods include young, succulent, green plant material such as old lettuce leaves and broccoli trimmings from the kitchen, young weeds, soybean and other seed meals, and manure.

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