Compost

Compost – warning, grab a cuppa.

Better than sliced bread, simply the food of life – very nearly everything on earth lives in it or survives because of it. Yogurt for the soil. It is tempting to think of compost as the base of the food chain, but that implies it is part of a linear system. Compost is as important as the food itself in life’s beautiful circular economy.

The new garden bed, christened by Lou this week as ‘The Galaxy Garden’, is going to require ongoing nourishment. I’ve turned over a new leaf and decided to get serious about compost. My recent composting has mainly been ‘chuck it in the chicken run, they’ll sort it out.’ However I throw everything in the chicken run, noxious weeds and all, nothing survives in there but there are a lot of bad seeds I’ve learned, so it isn’t the best place to source veggie patch fodder.

When I say compost, this article is mainly about ‘hot’ compost. A one cubic metre pile that has enough material to heat up and at least make an attempt at neutralising the weed seeds. We have a ‘cold’ kitchen scraps black compost bin which our neighbours help to fill up – thank you Dave & Lyndall! When I make a hot compost I empty the cold compost bin and add it in layers to bulk out that one cubic metre. I also compost with worms, humanure, chopping and dropping material in garden beds and decomposing wood chip. From now on in this post, I’m talking about the hot variety.

Compost really is about habits. How you deal with kitchen waste is only part of it. There are certain compost ingredients available at certain times of the year, think leaves in autumn, weeds in spring, grass grows prolifically in the warmer months etc etc. After noticing my habits over a couple of years I’ve learned to concentrate various jobs whose side effect is a compost pile or two. Collecting fallen leaves, weeding, tree pruning. In addition to this one of our neighbours gives us a stack of ex-guinea pig bedding once a month – thank you Jill! I always have enough brown, carbon rich layers, so when I’m mowing the lawn and collecting green, nitrogen rich layers, a compost pile is in order.

There is a lot of material in one cubic metre and as far as possible I try to source everything for free. A great tip I heard is that if it takes more than an hour to gather the materials together then work on rectifying that. I keep my ear to the ground all the time for easily foraged compost ingredients. I grow lots of plants specifically to boost the volume of my compost – comfrey, bananas, QLD Arrowroot, borage, cape gooseberry, cherry tomatoes, bana grass, nasturtiums and baby sunrose to name a few. Consider joining Sharewaste (https://sharewaste.com/) to either collect or dispose of potential compost. If you live local to me and want to get rid of kitchen scraps I’m all ears.

Some quick pointers on my methods:

• The pile always starts with brown (hay, woodshavings, fallen leaves, cardboard etc). Brown material is more likely to allow a bit of air circulation at the bottom.
• Ideally I chop up all material apart from soft green squishy stuff to two inches or less. This is where my patience is most tested. Soft green squishy leaves will break down quickly without any additional assistance. When I’m weeding the front garden, I throw all the weeds on the lawn, and just mow them up together with the grass.
• Add green, then brown layers alternating until you can finish with a brown layer. About a wheelbarrow of brown or green for each layer. The carbon is itching to break down, but it needs nitrogen to do this. To over simplify, the carbon hoovers up all available nitrogen to make plant food.
• I add manure in with the green layer if I have it. Trips to certain parts of the countryside should always be made with a trailer for bags of horse, chicken or turkey poo. Best practise is to try and find out whether the animals have been treated with chemicals (worming treatments mainly). Leave it alone if they have.
• Manure is counted as a green ingredient – an especially nitrogen rich one. Chicken, turkey and pidgeon poo are turbo charged with nitrogen. You can’t actually put it straight on the garden because it is so nitrogen rich and will burn your plants, it needs composting.
• Variety is the spice of life. I aim for different plants, poo and homemade liquid fertilisers. The target is nine different kinds of green material in the pile. I’ve made a few piles with only a couple of different materials and they usually don’t work. I just let them rot together because they were left over from a diverse pile. They end up being the start of the next more diverse pile. Each ingredient has slightly different bacterial and nutrient make up, and I want as many different kinds of both as I can, within the limits of the next tip.
• As a general rule I don’t use any poo that has passed through the gut of a carnivore. Chickens, turkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, horses, cows, sheep, goats are perfect. Dogs, cats and humans are another kettle of fish that is outside the scope of this article. Carnivore poo can contain pathogens that are best not spread around veggies.
• Weed tea is excellent to wet the pile down with at the start. The whole pile needs to be damp and then I don’t have to add water after that. Weed tea contains bacteria and a nitrogen hit.
• After a couple of days the pile will subside down, and so I usually top it up with fresh layers of ingredients to keep the volume as near to that one cubic metre as possible. I use a piece of plywood at the front of the pile so that I can build it higher.
• For really great and speedier results I turn every four days for the first 16 days. So four turnings, each one four days apart. I don’t add new material after the first turning. If I used copious amounts of manure, the first turning is when the stench should have a health warning…. After that it isn’t too bad. Turning every four days requires will power, from my experience it isn’t something most people enjoy. You don’t have to turn, it just takes longer for everything to break down, and the material at the edges might never break down.
• If the smell doesn’t calm down after two turns, then I need to add more brown ingredients. There is too much nitrogen or the pile is too wet no oxygen is getting in – it has become anerobic.
• If nothing appears to be working as it should, I add lots more green material. The woodier the brown material (twigs, wood shavings) the more squishy green material or poo required. Wood shavings especially take a long time to fully decompose.
• Air is great for a compost pile. The turning aerates as well as mixing it all up. Some ingredients like bulk sawdust can choke the process by not letting air circulate. Try and mix these materials in with chopped green leaves and soak them in weed tea before adding to the pile.
• If everything was spot on with ingredients and turning, good compost can be achieved in a month, but I’ve hardly ever managed that. Usually, two months at least for me.
• Let it brew until most of the original material is unrecognisable and worm content is very recognisable.
• I don’t use a thermometer, but from memory the optimum temperature in the middle of the pile should be between 50 and 55 degrees. If the pile is very hot, then turning will cool it down a bit. If it never gets to 50 then results will take a while.
• The liquid that oozes out of a compost pile is gold for the garden. I catch it in a tub which I spread out all over the garden – diluted with nine parts water to one part compost wee. Situating the compost system at the top of the hill means everything downhill will be enriched eventually.
• When I started the garden I made compost actually in the garden beds. I used a piece of fairly beefy mesh tied together to make a cylinder – like a massive tree guard. I didn’t turn it, but left it for a few months. It really helps to chop everything up small for these kind of piles so everything break down more easily. The ground beneath an ex-compost pile is completely cleared of weeds and enriched in nutrients. After I moved the pile on, I simply spread the compost all around that garden bed and planted trees.
• One point to keep in mind is that everything that has passed through the guts of a worm or other compost life then becomes bio-available to plants. They can use it straight away. When you buy solid powdered or pelletised fertiliser, the reason it takes a while to work is that it has to be dissolved and incorporated into the cycle of life by the soil menagerie before the nutrients are in a form the plants can take up. Liquid fertliser and worm castings (poo) are in plant friendly form immediately. Compost is chock full of plant friendly nutrients straight out of the pile – no chemicals or industrial processing required.

There are quite a few false tales around compost.

• I chuck in everything that once lived, cotton clothes, onion and citrus peel (you can see our recent harvests in the cold compost bin photos), meat, fat, brown cardboard & white paper (without excessive ink) and dead lorikeets that didn’t survive hitting the living room window. Some of these items are dodgy in cold compost, mainly because rats move in. Turning hot compost keeps the rats on their toes and out of your pile.
• Compost is heated up by bacteria working their magic. They will put on a hot show with or without sun, and with or without a ‘starter’ bit of the last compost pile. As I type I have a steaming pile of wood chip on the driveway that I’m sure didn’t come with compost starter, and it hasn’t stopped raining for over a week in the middle of winter.

I get the impression from workshops I’ve taught and attended that people get a bit too perfectionist with compost and give up because they can’t get it right. This is a process that is very forgiving and after a while the intuition kicks in and it just becomes another garden job.

There is something deeply satisfying about making a decent compost pile and getting up to your elbows in the cycle of life – it has also got me thinking about the many ways we could be embracing poo!