Black Gold

This was my breakthrough into organic farming.  While living in the city we had built a compost bin and then moved it with us when we came.  It was the starting point for us - from the dirt on up.  I have started and restarted this post about ten times now....not sure exactly why since it is quite possibly the best and most useful thing on the farm and one thing that I am constantly amazed by. But for whatever reason writing about it in any sort of understandable way is hard.  Most likely because it is entirely too simple.

Scraps of anything green and growing or dead and brown
Water
Air

Time

It's that simple. 

This is the recipe for dirt that Mother Earth has known for eons and we have since tried to make a science out of with no great success.  We make it entirely too complex.  You can spend a fortune buying organic compost at any garden store, or you can make it for free using all of the stuff that you throw out every day - the coffee grounds, the potato peelings, the apple cores, the old wilted flowers, the weeds that are the bane of every gardener's existence.  Just about everything that goes down the garbage disposal could be put to a better use as compost. 

Over the decades, since chemical farming came into vogue, scientists tried to figure out what the key ingredients were that plants needed to grow.  They came up with phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium as the three things that plants need to thrive and have since marketed it every possible way.  Nitrogen is the stuff that you see farmers carting around in the spring and spraying all over their fields and a mix of the three chemicals is what you will find in any bag of lawn fertilizer.  The thing they didn't realize is that even though they are supplying the three main ingredients, they are leaving out the micro ingredients that plants also need to survive. Micro nutrients are those small amounts of nutrients that plants (and animals) utilize to put the main nutrients to their best use.  We have slowly been depleting the soil of the micro nutrients for about 60 years now. 

It is similar to saying that all people really need to survive is fat, protein and carbohydrates without any thought at all to vitamins and minerals.  Without these micro nutrients none of the main nutrients get absorbed and utilized properly.  If you want an interesting and eye-opening breakdown of what I mean by all of this, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is a good place to start or even just typing in the words - "whole food supplements" in any search bar is likely to get you some interesting reads.  We humans try to break everything down to it lowest form, we look for the exact chemical that is responsible for preventing scurvy or rickets, for instance, and once found (Vitamin C and Vitamin D) we take those chemicals in excess to help ward off these terrible diseases without really understanding how they work or what other smaller chemicals might be there to help the system along.   It is like putting only gasoline into a car without any understanding of what oil and antifreeze are there to do.  Whole foods - like a whole orange- has many chemicals in it and many chemical interactions that take place that we have absolutely no understanding of that make it the perfect packet of Vitamin C known and yet we take out the Vitamin C to put into tablets and throw the rest of the orange away.

The same thing has happened to our dirt over time.  We kept the Potassium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus and threw the rest of the beneficial stuff out with the trash.....literally.

Composting is perhaps one of the easiest things to do and one of the most beneficial.  It is the crux of sustainable farming - we pull nutrients, in the form of plants, out of the soil....we need to put nutrients back into the soil.  What better way to do this than to use the used up plants themselves?

Any, and I mean any vegetation or things that were previously vegetation are fair game for a compost pile.  The only rule that I stick to is that you can't put anything meat based in the pile - no meat scraps and no droppings from animals that have been eating meat.  The main reason behind this is that it sometimes takes on a bit of a foul odor and it can definitely start to attract the local vermin to the area.

You need to have a pile of some size to get the whole thing going.  3 square feet is generally considered to be about the right size.  You can hold it all together with a ring of woven wire, or a fancy compost bin....or you can just pile it up in a heap of at least 3 square feet and let it go.

Wet it down until it is about as wet as a well wrung out sponge.  In the early spring, or when it is dry in the middle of summer, I will add about 5 gallons to the pile periodically during a dry spell to keep it going.

Turn the pile every three weeks or so to allow air to mix with the pile and voila!  Dirt!

There are a few things that I have learned to do over the course of several years of producing the best black dirt imaginable. 

• The water is really important.  It may sound crazy to water your compost bin, but it definitely speeds up the breakdown process.  
•  A metal stake through the center of the pile will let you know if it is getting hot enough.  When a compost pile really gets going, the internal temperatures will be around 150 degrees and even weed seeds will get cooked beyond the pont where they will germinate.  My method, using the metal stake, is rather primitive but it works well.  I know that when I pull out the stake and it is too hot to touch, the pile is cooking. 
•  If your pile isn't taking off and getting hot - add dirt!  You will read that you need to go to the garden store and pick up bone meal or compost starter, blah, blah, blah.  Everything you need to get it going is already in the ground - all the enzymes, all the beneficial bugs, everything - just add a few shovelfuls to the mix and it will help to get it going.
• You don't need to mix it into the soil - this is what worms are for and they are good at it!  They will make short work of incorporating any compost that you put around flowers or vegetables into the soil.
• You know when it is done and ready to be used when you can no longer identify any of the stuff that you threw into it.  If you can identify a few things, simply take those out and throw them back on the pile for a little more time.

Over the winter, I let it sit and by spring the bottom stuff of the compost bin is gorgeous and ready to be spread around the flowers.  Then I add in leaves left over from the fall, grass clippings, vegetable scraps from the kitchen, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells and any weeds that have made an appearance in the garden.  Mix it all up and add water.  By the time the potatoes are peeking up in early spring I have another batch of the black gold to be spread around them.  And so it goes all summer long - using left overs to make more soil to make more vegetables which leads to more left overs.  Whole food nutrition for the garden- and not one chemical needed.