Compost

Compost

Regardless of your soil type or how poor your soil is currently, you can work wonders with making your own home-made compost and it's easier than you think. Good, healthy compost, perfect for all the right biology to thrive in, can be made in as little as three weeks.

We have of course been told that we can buy and add more, different, "helpful" brown muck to our own in the form of compost or manure and this somehow, magically helps the plants to grow. But this may lead us to think that our soil without this addition of highly priced, plastic wrapped, commercially produced muck is not good enough for growing vegetables. What is compost anyway and how is it different to soil?

Compost is the result of the decomposition of previously living substances. We usually think of it as of plant origin because having rotting meat sitting in a heap in your garden isn't appealing to anyone except rats. (And that's where I'm choosing to leave composting animal matter. Personal choice, and safer in case those essential pathogen destroying temperatures aren't reached and for long enough.) Due to all this decomposition, compost, when freshly made, is full of beneficial organisms. It is different to soil as "soil" is your overall make-up of the "brown muck", which includes what degree of clay/silt/sand it has and which natural elements. It is always beneficial to add more life to your soil regardless of it's make-up as it is the life that makes the nutrients available and which help the plants grow by looking after it's roots and providing food and protection where the plant needs it.

You can by all means buy commercially produced compost. But do you know how alive it is? What ingredients were used? Whether it was made in an oxygen rich environment to encourage the good beasties to survive? Whether it got hot enough to kill the pathogens or if it got too hot so everything is killed? How long has it been sat there? It's very much like making your own fermented veggies if you do that. If you make it yourself you know you're going to get the freshest and most diverse results.

Functions of Home-Made Compost

Compost has several functions; it needs to provide food for all the inhabitants, it needs to be oxygenated to provide oxygen for the beneficial organisms and it needs to hold the right moisture content for the right living conditions for bacteria to survive and other creatures, and plant roots to be able to move easily.

We know already (possibly) that you have to get a mix of woody material eg cardboard, paper or woodchips and green material eg grass and green plant trimmings. But do we know why?

• The woody material mainly provides carbon which is to make the proteins and carbohydrates of the organisms.

• The green material contains nitrogen which is used to make DNA and is used in metabolism and most importantly for plants, photosynthesis.

Some materials such as manure and used coffee grounds have much higher levels of nitrogen in and these are also important in our compost. Although everything has to be broken down/decomposted sufficiently so the nutrients become available for other soil life including our plants, to use.

Collecting Ingredients for you Home-Made Compost

Over the past year or so I have been watching some free and wonderfully informative webinars by Dr Elaine Ingham. You can read about her here. Her website has an extensive library of videos about composting and soil. I am not affiliated in any way I just thought they were fantastic and love that she made her teachings free to anyone all over the world As I have learnt a lot from her I wanted to acknowledge her. If you want to know a lot more on the subject of soil I would highly recommend you start there. (Other sources of online composty information are available.) An important thing Dr Ingham teaches is the ratio of different types of ingredients you put in your compost. She recommends:

• 10-20% High Nitrogen - eg. fresh manure, Legume (pea family) hay, used coffee grounds.

• 20-30% Green - eg. grass, green leaves, household veggies scraps.

• 60% Woody/brown - eg. woodchips, straw, dried brown leaves, paper/cardboard.

If you have just a small allotment plot like me, (and haven't figured out yet how to orchestrate a municipal compost session) ingredients for composting build up slowly. But that's ok.

*** No longer think of composting as something you just bung in a bin or heap and leave for a year or two and eventually you may be able to use it if if hasn't rotted down so much at the bottom with the fresh waste on top that there's practically nothing usable there. ***

Keep your ingredients separate, in a cool, dry, static place until it's time to use them. For example, I keep a plastic compost bin in the shade in my garden for green/veggie waste only. I store dried leaves in another bin and/or black bin bags, wood chips in a pile and cardboard in the shed. The manure sits at the allotment until needed and the coffee grounds will be collected gratefully from friendly cafe when they're needed too.

It's Composting Time!

I'd like to make a video about this, maybe I'll pluck up the guts to this year so I can show you. Until then, reading's a good habit isn't it! As is looking at pictures.. and you can click here to see photos of my differing ingredients attempts and the results. But please also read on as Temperature and Turning are very important if you want to be able to use your compost regularly.

Bring all your ingredients together in the proportions mentioned above. (You can be as rigorous with this as you like, I just eyeball it) Make a heap preferable no smaller than 1m cubed as anything smaller will struggle to get up to temperature. You can layer your ingredients like a lasagna or mix them all up. Cover with a plastic sheet if it rains a lot or is going to be freezing and leave this for 24 hours. Get yourself a soil thermometer and after 24 hours go and stick it into the centre of the pile. Leave your pile alone until the temperature reaches about 60 degrees centigrade. This may take a few days.

Once it's at that temperature, you need to make sure it stays like that for at least a day. It is possible it could get much higher than that though, so if it starts getting hotter than 70 degrees C you need to turn it. After 3 days of being at 60 degrees (or less if it's hotter) you need to turn it anyway.

Turning your pile.

To turn, we don't want to go mixing the whole thing up again as we will lose a lot of heat and also some of the fungal structure that has already started to form. What we want to do is move the hot centre down to the bottom so the heat can continue to rise and warm the top, and we want the cold top to now sit in the middle to heat up. So bring the bottom of the heap to the top, kind of fold it like bread dough, just the once. Then leave it again and monitor the temperature over the next few days. Again, we are looking for 60 degrees for 3 days. If it gets too hot we can sprinkle water on it or remove the plastic if using.

The pile may only need turning 3-5 times over the next 3 weeks and it should quickly start to look and smell beautiful like a rich dark brown compost.