Why I compost

If you think about it, all of my recipes begin with the recipe for compost. Every fruit, vegetable, herb, and leaf relies upon compost to transform from seed to food. Without it, there is only sand. When we bought the farm, it was like real estate on Mars. There was no chance of growing anything I’d like to eat on it. The animal stalls were packed three feet deep in horse manure, so we mined this with picks and shovels to hand build the first compost heaps, in winter. The tractor didn’t get moved from our previous place (at 8,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies) until the spring thaw. Once it was here, I turned and moved piles in an effort to produce enough soil to plant a garden. That first years produce was rugged, but edible. After another season of composting and gardening, things started to look up. (See my previous post for comparison pictures.) So, I compost in order to have arable soil, and to keep control of what goes into my food. I do not use store bought bags of this or that, in the garden. I add only compost, mulch, water and brews and teas I make on farm, from things that live here. Sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of this page for notification of future posts about all of that.

My approach

Main piles

The recipe for almost all of my compost is heaped hay leavings with animal urine and manure. Water well and turn every 4-6 days for one month. Let rest over winter. Use as needed. This has been more than adequate, but my system is evolving. This year, I’ve begun increasing the carbon to the mix by adding wood chips brought to the farm by my arborist buddy. I am trying to increase the fungal content of the finished compost to further mimic a forest soil ecology. So far, it seems to be working. I have a surplus of compost that will allow these new piles to cook for two years, so the results should be glorious. Technically, you can make a finished batch of compost in 18 days, with proper ingredients, aeration, mixing and moisture. What I’m doing is more of a long play approach, however. It may not be the “perfect” compost, but it is more than suitable for my needs, and fits into the farm schedule.

Offal pile

In addition to the primary piles, I run un-turned piles in cattle panel cylinders. For these, I tie a sixteen foot cattle panel, with bailing twine, into a round pen for the sort of things you never want to see again, until they are soil. A two foot organic sponge of wood chips goes on the bottom, and is layered up with pig guts, dead chickens, feathers, hides, skulls, and anything else that stinks. Between every addition, ample wood chips supply the carbon required to transmute the nitrogen. This carbon layering keeps the smell undetectable, and creates an environment perfect for disposing of body parts. These piles never get turned. I build them over the course of a year, then let them sit for another to finish, before applying them to trees in the food forest. The end result is as innocuous as the other compost, but the occasional jaw bone is better placed in the forest, than the garden. The stuff is super powerful.

Humanure

A similar composting style is used for the buckets that come out of the composting outhouse. We employ the Jenkins style Humanure method. His book is great, and linked below this article. Buckets are layered with donations and fine wood shavings, then piled in the center of a nest of cover material (old hay, mostly). That builds for a year, sits for a year, then is feed to trees. In this way, nutrients continue to cycle through the system, rather than being hauled away, or entombed below the root line. We use this primarily for gatherings. One thing to think about before committing to such a system is OPP. That’s right, Other Peoples Poo. The environment is totally contaminated with pharmaceuticals. The average American is on five prescriptions. Do you want that in your garden soil? Its one thing if we are talking about trusted poopers, but guests may be passing unwanted chemicals into your food system.

Levels of composting

If you do not live on a farm, with a front end loader, compost scales are different, but the methods are the same. Mix “greens” (high nitrogen material like fresh cut grass, manure, and green leaves) with “browns” (high carbon materials such as dry leaves, paper, straw, and wood chips) in a carbon heavy ratio (up to 30:1), until you have a cubic yard. This size mass is the minimum to inspire the “compost reaction” and create the right environment for the thermophilic bacteria that cause the internal temperatures to reach as high as 165F. Keep it moist enough that you can almost squeeze a droplet out of a handful, as the microbes live in water and dry compost will cause them to go dormant, and turn every four days until it starts to cool down, and everything looks uniform. Turning provides oxygen, moves edge material to the center, and ensures weed seeds and any pathogens get pasteurized.

Even if you live in an apartment, you can convert your food scraps into valuable, fertile soil. All you need is a few thousand red wriggler earth worms, and some rubber totes. Vermacomposting is doable at small or large scales. I also run worm farms to produce worm tea, and castings. I’ll write more on that, another time.

Composting is something that is most appropriate in an individual context. Municipal scale operations allow for way too many variables. Who knows what feed stocks end up in municipal compost. The number of say, used needles that is permissible in compost is pretty close to zero, for me, anyway. Yard waste can be full of all manner of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, and other garden killing potions. It’s far better to make your own, or obtain from a trusted source.

What I do not compost

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention kitchen scraps in the recipe for the compost I make, on farm. That is because they are too valuable as fodder for pigs, chickens, and worms to end up in the compost with out a slippery voyage through some body, first. I also don’t compost newspaper (BPA and toxins in the ink), cardboard (formaldehyde in the glue), pepper or tomato plants (risk or spreading blight) or those stupid “compostable” corn cups and utensils. Those things are a joke. They do not actually compost. They burn alright, but I have never seen one become soil. Also, the primary manufacturer of these thing is one of the Big Ag multinationals, so they are made from GMO corn, soaked in pesticides, and will poison your compost. Probably not the best thing to eat out of, either.

Recycling is greenwash

As many cities are quickly discovering, recycling is not what people think it is. I have lived through the evolution of recycling from it’s infancy in the 1970’s until the collapse of the system. The idea is golden. Get every bit of use and value out of what we take from the earth. The reality is that wide adoption of “recycling” behaviors required customer convenience and government mandate. Some municipalities even began issuing fines for “recyclables” mixed into garbage. The idea of melting and reusing plastics over burying them in a landfill is great-ish (or we could not use plastic), but that’s not what was happening. Bales of dirty mixed “recyclables” were instead transported to the ports, loaded on container ships, shipped to China, and burned over there, into the same air we all share. So rather than bury it in our backyard, we’ve been burning petroleum to have it burned in another country. Now China wont take anymore, and all of these cities are scrambling to deal with mountains of garbage. Recycling programs are being suspended, and waste companies are suing for special dispensation to dump it in landfills. Again, at municipal scales, things get funky.

Ways to effect real change

So, what’s a concerned person to do? Composting is great for dealing with kitchen and animal “waste”, but what about everything else? My motto is “reject, refuse, and reuse”. We try to limit packaging, in our lives. I’m no purist, but try to not bring plastic on to the farm. Things we do buy mostly come in bulk, and we steer toward reusable packaging. We store things in mason jars, work 5 gallon buckets until they crumble, and use paper products to heat our home, in winter. If you want to have real plastic recycling, build a forge that will melt plastic and extrude it into 3D printer filament. This can be done at the garage level, or in a mobile trailer. Mandated, city-wide recycling programs are just “feel good” pandering. If we want to solve the plastic problem, it must be on a much more personal level. Reject it, refuse it, and find a way to reuse it, yourself.

Outgrowing waste streams

In truth, there is no waste. There is also no “away”, as shown by this issue with China. As with all things, the answer is to fully understand the origin, nature, and next phase of the things we touch. Garbage is a huge by product of our convenience culture. The more of us who provide our needs ourselves, the less packaging, cardboard, plastic, and Styrofoam there will be, in the world. Transitions take time, but as long as we are moving that way, things will get better!