Where Are The Wise Men?

As Gina said yesterday, I have been studying compost. Quite in depth, I may add. I won’t tell you the results of my findings yet, I will say that what I have found has been both confusing and enlightening.

I get confused because people say different things about it — “don’t make your pile too large”, “don’t make it too small or it won’t get hot enough”. “Grass clippings are bad.” “Grass clippings are great, if handled properly.” “You must have a compost bin!”, “Using a bin is optional - it will become compost either way.”

So I’m just trying different things that I have found and see if they work for me. That is why I’m not telling you my findings — I don’t know what works yet! Some things are just plain too much work for me, and others won’t work in my environment. In reality it all started because I’m too lazy to rake leaves.

But I will tell you a few things that I am doing or have learned:

• The Internet is a bad, bad place to research this topic. The basics are all there, but past that, everyone has different suggestions and some outright contradict each other. Visit your local library and get a couple books on the subject. The fact that the author had to go through all the pain of getting published probably means they aren’t totally out there on this subject.
• I did put a “bin” together — it’s actually about two dozen bricks I picked up on FreeCycle. I need at least that many more. I put half the bricks on one side and the other half on the other. Our chain link fence is the back. I needed to move the compost from our garden because we didn’t have room to plant things there! The bin does make it look better and it gets more compost up in the air, which is actually a good thing.
  
• You may think that composting is a natural process. And it is — to a certain extent. A better way to think about it is that it’s about controlling a natural process. Your compost pile is a delicate balance of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and water. If you get a good ratio and keep it there, you will have great success. Too much nitrogen and your pile will just stink to high heaven. Too much carbon and your pile will just, well, do nothing. Too much water is just like having too much nitrogen. If you have too much oxygen in your pile it may start on fire. Seriously — it would probably burn up.
  
• I’ve read both good and bad things about earthworms in your compost pile. To me, they are a wonderful sign. I was moving lots of compost around on Saturday and found tons and tons of worms in the pile itself — not just in the ground underneath it. I didn’t put them there, so they were attracted to what was going on in the pile. They should help the breakdown process tremendously. Most web sites say earthworms are bad or do nothing while all the books I’ve read say they are wonderful. I’m siding with the books.

I’m not sure where the greenish thumbs have come from this year. Neither Gina nor I have had a lot of success gardening in the past. We had some mild success in our garden last year, and Gina enjoyed working in the front flower bed last year. Maybe we also have the gardening bug because it’s been such a long, cold winter that we want to help everything grow. Whatever start it, I will say that I was very excited last night to see the radishes start coming up (no sign of the onions or carrots yet). I’ve also been daydreaming of planting tomatoes, peppers, and pan squash this weekend. And I also scheduled Backyard Farmer in our DVR — but don’t tell Gina!!

All this was started by a pile of rotting leaves. .
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.