Just Getting Started in Gardening? Begin With Compost

By ANDY BEHLEN

The Fayette County Record

Folks getting started in organic gardening too often worry themselves with what kind of products they should buy for their garden. If you’re getting started in gardening, you don’t really need to buy anything to start out. I would start by making compost.

You should have started two or three years ago. If you did, by now you would have some really nice compost to use in your garden. But you have to start sometime.You might as well start today.

Making compost can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be.

The easiest method involves dumping all of your kitchen scraps into a pile. You can also add grass clippings, leaves and small woody branches to the pile. Of course, you should add all the weeds you pull from the garden along with plants that have died back and any rotten produce. Keep heaping stuff on the pile until you form a small mountain. You should aim for a ratio of 30 parts brown materials (such as woody trimmings and leaves) to one part green materials (such as grass clippings and kitches scraps). Over time, microorganisms will move into the pile and begin to break down the organic matter. In a year or so, dig inside the pile. What does it look like? It should be dark, almost black, and fluffy, slightly moist, the particles should be small, and it should smell like the forest floor.

At that point, you can dig the dark compost out of the center of the pile and begin using it in your garden (more on that later).

That’s called the “static pile” method. It just sits there for a really long time until the center turns into compost. The material on the outside has not decomposed. Once you harvest the finished compost from the inside, push all of the outside material together and repeat the process. In another year or so, you’ll have some more compost.

But that takes a really long time. You can speed up the process by occasionally mixing up the pile. If you have a big pile, you can use a tractor and front end loader. If you have a smaller pile, a pitchfork will do. Every time you mix it, spray the pile with water. This is called “aerated compost” or the “windrow” method. You can make finished compost in six months or less using this method.

Some folks claim that compost from a static pile is superior to aerated compost. I tend to agree. Aerated compost grows lots of beneficial bacteria but hardly any fungi. Beneficial fungi, especially the kind known as mycorrhizal fungi, are greatly important for plant roots. Mycorrhizal fungi grow in a sheath around plant roots, forming a symbiotic relationship with plants. Plants supply the fungi with carbon and sugars, and the fungi helps plants reach water and nutrients.

Fungi grows from white, rootlike threads known as mycelium. Mycelium needs an undisturbed substrate to grow and spread. Everytime you aerate a compost pile, you break up the network of mycelium in the compost substrate. If you aerate the pile often in order to quickly produce finished compost, the fungi never gets a chance to establish itself.

Regardless of which method you chose, you will need a big pile, at least one cubic yard, or the material will decompose too slowly. Bigger is better when it comes to making compost, but you shouldn’t build a pile so large that it’s hard to manage. You can construct a neat compost bin out of old wooden pallets. Covering the compost pile with a tarp will help it to decompose faster, but it’s not necessary.

A lot of folks recommend against adding meat or dairy products to the compost pile. Such scraps produce foul smells and attract flies and wild animals. But they will turn into compost just like anything else that was once alive. You can also add livestock manure to the compost pile, as long as the animals were not fed any hay or grass treated with pesticides. Residual pesticides can remain active for several years in animal manure. If you’re not sure whether the manure has pesticides in it, I would avoid it.

I think one of the best tools for a beginner is the compost tumbler. These devices consist of a spinning drum mounted to a frame. Every time you add some scraps to the drum, give it a spin or two. Some products claim to produce finished compost in as little as two weeks.