composting
I’ve been reading about gardening stuff all week this week, so i thought i’d share a few things that i saw. This might all be old news to the experienced gardeners out there, but hopefully helpful to the newbies. My reading has focussed on composting lately, since i want to make some nice dirt at my new place. I’m moving next month with some friends and we’re hoping to find a place with some nice backyard space for gardening. It’s likely that we’ll have to pull up some grass to start a garden area, so that’s fueled my compost research.
It seems that a lot of people tend to just make a compost pile that decays over the next year or two. I also saw a lot of posts on forums asking how to speed up the compost process. The common answer is stirring the pile to aerate it. The bacteria involved in decomposition need an air supply to do their job, and the process will come to a halt if they don’t get enough air. So, the 1 year process can be brought down to 3-6 months by turning the pile over with a pitch fork every once in a while. Whenever more air is mixed into the system then the bacteria will get more active and the whole pile will get hotter.
The best situation is when you can mix everything really frequently to keep the temperature up. if the pile reaches 50C or 60C then it will kill any weed seeds present, and the compost will decay extremely fast. Apparently some people have a setup where their compost bin is cylindrical and mounted on wheels, and they spin it every day. This highly aerates the mix and they can go from kitchen scraps to ready-for-gardening in as little as 3 weeks. To go this fast you also need the right mix of N and C, so the addition of something green like grass clippings will bring up the amount of nitrogen.
I also read some interesting stuff about worm composting (vermicompost). Plants that have been fed worm compost are significantly more resistant to pests and disease, according to some studies. As with regular compost, they also grow higher and have better root structure. I’ve got a worm compost setup going already, in a rubbermaid container in my closet. My sister thinks i’m a weirdo, but it doesn’t smell at all. Actually, it smells like fresh dirt when i open the container, but otherwise no scent. A good way to get some nutrients out of it is to collect any water that drains out the bottom, and use this “worm tea” to feed your plants.
In the next little while, i’m going to plan out how to construct my own rotating compost bin. I could buy one, but they cost like $180 at one of the hardware stores i checked. I think i’ll just go find a big barrel and rig some kind of wheel system underneath it so that it can spin freely, and then i can spin it every day for aeration. I should be able to do that for super cheap, so no need to drop big money on it…plus i can probably make one that’s bigger in volume than the $180 one from the store. If i can rig this up properly, then hopefully i can quickly reuse all the material from the sod that i dig up and put it right back into the garden. The heat from the composting should destroy all the grass seeds and roots to prevent it from coming back, and without spending months waiting for a “lasagna” style layered compost on the ground.
I found some more good links while i was searching around. One was the forums hosted by the UBC botanical gardens forums. A lot of people post on there from all over the continent, so it seems like a good place to go for information. And here’s a blog i found through the blogroll on Bifurcated Carrots, called Veggie Gardening Tips. I’ve got a few more, but i realized that they’re at home on my laptop. That’s it for now :)
Ride hard, ride free
March 28th, 2008 at 23:18 pm
I used to have a rotating bin that we made from a wine barrel. We cut a hole in it for a door and put the door on hinges, with a latch. This whole rotating bin thing is OK but you really need to fill it up pretty quickly - its no good having little bits of stuff flying around inside! Overfilling it, though, means that nothing moves much, but just spins around. You want it to turn around like folding in flour to a cake. This is quite hard to achieve, I found.I wrote something about another thing I do, on Patrick’s post, for you. Good luck! Sometimes quick is not so good. Also, if you turn 1 cubic metre of well-made compost ingredients every week for the first 4 weeks, keeping it damp but not soggy, then after another 6 weeks it should be pretty good.There is a great book called “Recycle your garden” by Tim Marshall that explains it all really well. Garden hard, garden free!
March 29th, 2008 at 03:57 am
Kate: You beat me! See it just comes down to times zones…
60C is the magic temperature for composting piles, and it’s hard to do. What’s critical is having a large pile, because otherwise all the heat is just given off into the air. I doubt you would be able to get 60C in a rotating composter. There are special, very long, composting thermometers for measuring deep into compost piles.
Also, once you dig up the grass from the garden, killing it is not hard. Except sometimes for seeds, all plant material is always destroyed when it’s composted. If you put dug up sod in a pile, it will just rot in place. Perhaps a little bit on the outside will keep growing, but you can just turn this in. This is no big deal.
The problem is anytime you dig weeds, grass or do any mechanical or hand cultivation is you always leave pieces of roots behind. The grass itself is not hard to kill, but hidden inside it can be dozens of weeds including things like dandelions, thistles, crab grass, bermuda grass, stinging nettles and so on. Many of these plants have roots that can go down a foot or more, and sometimes these roots are very fragile and hard to see. These plants have all had centuries to evolve genetically, and become very persistant. That’s what makes them weeds! Also the seeds for many of these weeds can survive decades in the ground, and become activated when exposed to light. Therefore, disturbing the ground in any way can trigger a weed problem in multiple ways.
Maybe if you dug up the top 1′ of topsoil, hauled it away and replaced it with something known weed free, you might get rid of the weed roots. There would still probably be a problem with the seeds in the ground, and you would probably need a tractor to do this anyway.
This is part of the problems with modern agriculture. Modern agriculture systems require the ground be plowed, you then need to plow even more to get rid of the resulting weeds and/or use chemical weed killers which cause different problems. If you can avoid disturbing the ground at all, you prevent a lot of potentially compounding problems.
Okay, having said all this, weeds are not an insurmountable problem in the garden. If you need to dig, you need to dig. Certainly you will need to dig in order to harvest root vegetables. There will be other reasons you need to dig, and it’s impossible to have a garden without disturbing the ground a little bit. It’s all about doing it sensibly, and avoiding it when possible.
As you start meeting other gardeners, you’ll probably notice to some extent there are two kinds. There are the dig people and the no-dig people. Often there are loud ideological arguments between them, and they walk away not speaking to each other anymore. Some people feel very strongly one way or another. If you decide to go the all or mostly digging route, you will spend a lot more of your time fighting compounding weed problems.
Some of the dig people space their crop rows so you can run a garden tiller between them during the growing season, just like a farmer would use a tractor. I find this a little wasteful and unnecessary. Garden tillers use a surprising amount of gas, often more than a car! I read somewhere that 15% of the urban area smog in the US comes from gas powered garden tools. Dan Jason of SSS is very much a dig person, and he does this with a tiller. If you don’t have a tiller and don’t have some other way of controlling weeds like mulch, you will have to do this by hand in some way.
Besides the compounding weed problems, digging takes work! For many people the intention is to expand their garden to the largest size possible, and get the largest harvest possible, while keeping it to a manageable amount of work for one person. Since this may be your goal in a few years, and no-dig methods might be useful in this, you might still consider using no-dig methods on at least part of your garden now.
The best part of it all is Kate made a great suggestion on my post for both using the lasagna/no-dig method and starting to plant now! I’m going to expand on this in a comment on my post. I have to do some other things now, so if you don’t see a comment there right away, check back in a few days.
March 29th, 2008 at 06:29 am
wow, thanks for all the tips. Ya, i’d like to avoid any kind of fossil fuel inputs. I want to figure out how i can do it all without having a car or a rototiller or a chipper or any of that stuff.
I guess all my rush is because i want to learn as much as i can this year, and it seems that i’ve been bouncing around from house to house a lot in the past few years. I want to get something done in the first year in case something weird comes up and i have to move, although the plan would be to find a place that i can stay in for a couple years sequentially at least.
March 29th, 2008 at 09:44 am
Hi Doviende,
Maybe you’ve seen already, but I added a comment to my post about this. In particular, have a look at the end of the comment where I suggest putting down some newspaper or cardboard or similar material, then a layer of compost from the city, then planting seeds directly into the compost without waiting. Consider growing at least some beans, because they will fix nitrogen and make the soil richer. I have a couple of nice bean varieties I could send you if you are interested (send me an email with your address).
In the end it’s your garden, and you have to decide what to do. Whatever happens I hope you will post about it and let us all know how it goes and what you decided to do. Also if you have any more questions or want feedback on any ideas, don’t be afraid to post those too.
I’m with you. I generally avoid fossil fuel inputs, in fact I avoid all inputs possible. Once you get a garden going, it shouldn’t need anything. Just recycling your waste by composting is enough, together with planting some nitrogen fixing crops like beans from time to time.
I’m also with you on wanting to stay in the same place for a while. I just had to move my garden, and it’s always so frustrating to have to start over.
Good Luck!
March 29th, 2008 at 23:13 pm
Last year I spent a lot of time fixing the existing soil, building some boxes, dealing a neurotic dog, and sighing a lot as other backyard projects took priority over mine.
Wherever you end up make sure it’s a quiet, low traffic area that you have complete control over. It is so demoralizing and frustrating to have months of work destroyed. I started my garden entirely from seed last year and coming home to find the dog had torn apart my plants is enough to make a grown man weep.
April 1st, 2008 at 13:33 pm
You have all the info you need now. I reckon its time to make a start. No-dig is quicker and you can start straight away, today. Throw a whole heap of stuff on a patch of ground chosen for sunlight, few tree roots, ease of maintaining. Get some bean seeds and put them in. Stand back.
April 5th, 2008 at 01:44 am
I recommend magic beans.