There are many new tricks in the home gardener’s humus-making speed-up. Making compost is no longer the tedious jolt it once was.
Eager-beaver organicists have found several time-saving methods. One of these is to make compost right in the garden by the “row” or “sheet” process, eliminating heap-making and hauling and heaving. Suppose she left to her own devices.
Nature uses this row or sheet method, but now she can be speeded up with scientific help.
Using The Row Method
In row composting, make shallow or deep trenches between rows in the vegetable garden for anywhere plants are grown in rows!
Regularly during time season, till the trenches progressively, from one end to the other, with any or all organic wastes—non-oily and fat-free garbage, leaves, sod, grass clippings, and seed-free weed, sludge, sawdust, hennery, piggery or barn manure, brewery waste, or any animal or vegetable waste available.
Treat this material with one of the activators available on the market and add some commercial fertilizer or nitrate, then cover lightly with soil. Nature’s minute soil life and earthworms do the rest.
Adding Commercial Fertilizer
The addition of commercial fertilizer or nitrate is used largely to speed up decay and serves as fuel for the bacteria. The more fuel you feed them, the faster they “burn up” the waste converting it into humus.
And, of course, the nutrient value of the fertilizer remains in the soil. This, undoubtedly, is a better way to use fertilizer than applying it directly because bacterial action converts it to a form that will not upset Nature’s balance of microorganisms on “biotic” substances providing you use it in reasonable quantities.
Manufacturers give directions for activators, and the customary way to use chemical fertilizer is to estimate the amount of waste you dig into the garden and sprinkle 2 to 4 pounds of nitrate or complete mixed fertilizer for every 100 pounds of compost material.
Sheet Composting
Sheet composting is a little different. This method broadcasts the compost over the garden or field area as mulch is spread.
Indeed, it makes a fine mulch. The depth of the material should be about 1” to 6” inches.
Please treat it with an activator and the complete fertilizer or nitrate and then disc, rototill, or dig it in by hand so that some of the topsoils are mixed with the waste.
Most composters use this method in the fall without spading it in so that the waste remains as a winter mulch or cover. Then, in early spring, turn it into the ground.
In Using Mixed Fertilizer
The lazy method composters warn that if the sheet compost is spread in the cold late fall, it’s best to hold off spreading the nitrate or mixed fertilizer until early spring to avoid leaching the “fuel” chemicals. The use of chemical fertilizer is essential unless the soil is very rich, to begin with.
This is 13 because virtually all compost contains cellulose-bearing materials and bacteria, which to split and digest the cellulose requires lots of nitrogen.
If this is not added in sufficient supply, the bacteria will rob the soil of nitrogen and reduce the yield of the first crop in which the compost is used because the nitrogen, although still there, is in a form unavailable to the plants.
After that first season, you won’t have to worry about it, for there should be more total nitrogen than ever.
Bacterial Activator
The bacterial activator is essential in sheet composting to encourage more rapid decomposition. The activator supplies more bacterial action than most soils can provide.
Essential Pulverized Limestone
In both row and sheet composting, pulverized limestone for neutralizing is usually essential. However, it may be optional if you live in an alkaline soil region.
But, if the soil is acidic, neutralizing is recommended—both to encourage the right bacterial action and to prevent further acidifying.
Suppose no pulverized dolomitic limestone or another limestone (natural rock, mainly calcium carbonate with some magnesium carbonate) is available.
In that case, you can use the faster-acting agricultural grade of hydrated lime or wood ashes (preferably from hardwoods), rock phosphate, potash rock, or gypsum.
Making Composter Cabinets
Another method of speeding compost-making is composter cabinets which, when used properly and with reasonable care, can be operated year-round — non-odorously — even in the basement or garage. I’ve seen it done.
Composter cabinets are made to give semi-automatic aeration. These specially developed contrivances have proven superior to bins or pits.
Properly operated, they prevent the souring tendency possible in poorly aerated and drained bins or pit arrangements.
The type of corn poster most commonly used has shaker grates in the bottom so that the operation is fairly continuous once decomposition starts, in three or four weeks.
Fluid Mulch Plan
One of the latest ways of composting is a fluid mulch plan (on which new horticultural process patents are pending for the Wandel Machine Company of Downington. Pennsylvania).
This method even uses newspapers in a motorized abrasive job of producing organic and mineral soil enrichment.
A mixture called FAM is made out of garbage and horse, cow, goat, and chicken bones, among others, and a thick soup is made for soil protection from all sorts of materials.
Herbal Compost Activator
Still another hurry-up method is to use a bacterial-type or so-called herbal compost activator, which greatly reduces the length of the conversion period and makes it possible to use putrefactive materials such as garbage and sludge (which make the richest humus for topsoil) without odor—if you aerate the compost properly.
The decomposition, of course, must occur not by putrefaction but by fermentation with stimulated aerobic bacteria.
A ” stunt ” is also tagged by the catchy name fertilizer stretching. This is nothing more than a very rapid shortcut heap-composting method. But this one of the newer methods will best serve, the greater number of non-professional gardeners.
Fertilizing
Most of us feel we have to use at least some chemical fertilizer to maintain yields while building up rich topsoil—so you combine organics with chemicals and come up with a shortcut to composting and plant feeding.
The procedure is to gather organic waste equal to 6 to 60 times the amount of chemical fertilizer you ordinarily use in your garden yearly.
Mix the chemical fertilizer into this with one of the bacterial activators and use some limestone as a neutralizing factor. Then pile the material up from three days to three weeks, keeping it moist.
The longer you leave it, within reason, the more it will decompose. Ordinarily, using it after three days is all right, particularly if you apply it as mulch. It heats and. decomposes very rapidly.
Suppose you start with 100 pounds of potential fertilizer. In that case, this method gives you 5,675 to 6.025 pounds of good organic type fertilizer to apply as heavily as you would animal manures or compost.
You can dig it in or mulch as you choose. And, there’s much less loss of chemical fertilizer by leaching than when chemical fertilizer is applied directly.
Activated Short-Compost Period
Moreover, there’s no danger of burning or overusing chemical fertilizer and no upsetting nature’s delicate balance of soil life. The activated short-compost period provides a blending, converting action.
And think of the cost! For 100 pounds of chemical fertilizer at $3.00 to $4.50, you need only a pint to a quart of activator (20 cents to 75 cents) and 2 cents to 75 cents worth of ground Milestone, depending on individual pII requirements.
If you use the full “stretch” —100 pounds of chemical fertilizer plus 6,000 pounds of leaves, grass clippings, kitchen waste, etc., you should come out with a cost of only about S5.35 for around three tons of good mulch fertilizer!
Believe it or not, even a small garden and lawn can profitably absorb this much fertilizer—if it’s organic.
In the event quick-on-the-pencil readers have figured and are puzzled, the method doesn’t quite yield the 6,100 pounds plus it should.
This is because there is some shrinkage in a pile from moisture loss and oxidation—running from 1% percent to 8% or 10% percent, depending on when it is left in a heap.
Garden editors and manufacturers of composting aids say the biggest wail from frustrated composters is that they want to make compost but can’t get enough green material. This is mostly an imaginary inability.
In or near almost every town or city there are, for the asking, besides the usual unwanted leaf accumulations, grass mowings, and such, quantities of wastes of industrial or institutional origin: breweries and distilleries, sawmills, cotton processors, sewage processing plants, mushroom plants, hotel and restaurant kitchens, canners and packers and the like.
Even materials like leather findings, soot, and shavings may be used in compost in minor amounts. And, of course, it’s wisest from every gardening and economic viewpoint.
Instead of putting them in the garbage can or disposal grinder, return kitchen scraps to Nature via the compost—heap—pit, cabinet, fluid much, sheet, or row.
44659 by C. A. Lovett