Phoenix ASH & Regrowth

For the last several months, I have been hinting at this grand project I have been working on. I have felt it more important thus far to lay the foundation to talk about some of the concepts being implemented onsite. But I think I am in pretty good shape right now in terms of concepts being out there, and before I jump into my next series of posts, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the project I am currently working on.

The site is called Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. It is a half acre site in the Sunnyslope area a little north of downtown Phoenix. The project is an attempt to achieve as high a level of self-sufficiency as possible while simultaneously repairing the ecosystem onsite. The project site will also serve as a demonstration site to help promote these ideas and make significant improvements on a wide variety of fronts including food production, nutrition, flood prevention, urban heat island effect, air pollution, economic resiliency, erosion control, biodiversity, and much more. To achieve this, nearly everything we do onsite is to achieve one of  two goals: 1) Restore soil carbon, and 2) Promote biodiversity. While this may sound a little overly simplistic, these two things, when working in conjunction, cause a cascade of healthy biological functions that achieve everything else.

Let me take a moment to describe how this cascade works. Increasing the amount of carbon in the soil does two things primarily. The first is that it increases absorption of rainwater. This increases biological activity and helps mitigate flooding. The second is that it increases the fertility of the soil. As I have explained previously, carbon in the soil feeds the soil biome and increases the fertility of the soil and the availability of nutrients in the soil. By increasing the available moisture in the soil and fertility of the soil, plant growth is encouraged. Remember, as a gardener, my job is not to take care of the plants. My job is to take care of the soil and the soil takes care of the plants.

Once we have widespread growth of plants, we move to the next level. As I have already mentioned, the driver of ecosystem processes is the cycling of living matter from one organism to the next. This is where diversity comes in. Different organisms make use of different food sources and bring different benefits to the system. Rather than trying to dig through the science of biological systems, most of which doesn’t really exist yet (don’t even get me started on the faults with reductionist thinking employed by modern science), it is best to let the ecosystem find its own healthy equilibrium. We do that by including everything in the whole. There really are no weeds. The only caveat is that they must provide more benefit than they detract. So a pine tree was removed from the site because all it provided was shade. Oleanders were removed because they are highly toxic. And there are a couple of weeds we remove because of toxicity. Otherwise, everything is welcome.

Once the plants are growing, each one is valued for the benefits it brings. Edibles are harvested for human consumption. Grass and forbs are used for forage for the animals. Dead leaves and grass are harvested for compost. Trees are pollarded to provide wood to build more soil. At each level, the plant material runs through its cycle and is returned to the soil, increasing soil carbon and helping plant growth and diversity.

So let me talk for a moment about the various methods we employ onsite to achieve all of this:

Holistic Management

Holistic Management, as taught by the Savory Institute, is more of a guiding principle. Everything we do is viewed through the lens of Holistic Management and its principles. It is through Holistic Management that we can make the best decisions for how to weave the myriad methods together into one cohesive structure. The site also serves as the Arizona Savory Hub (ASH) and the first urban demonstration site for the Savory Institute. We are very excited to demonstrate that Holistic Range Management, which is typically managed on large tracts of land in rural areas, can be applied in an urban setting.

Permaculture

Permaculture is another guiding principle. The permaculture core principles are also core values and guide what we do and how we rebuild a complete ecosystem onsite.

Animal Impact

Animal Impact, as described in Holistic Management is an important part of how nutrients are cycled through plants and back into soil. Right now, we just have chickens and are using them to process forage and create compost. However, long term plans include goats and sheep, and maybe even miniature cows or rabbits. Each animal will have its own impact on the ecosystem, improving diversity and nutrient cycling.

Organic Gardening

Organic gardening, in its ideal form, builds soil carbon, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. By not using chemistry to manage a biological system, the biological system is allowed to flourish, encouraging diversity and growing topsoil. Everything we do onsite at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth is organic.

Composting

While some of the organic matter is either processed in place (as in animal impact) or allowed to lie where it falls, much of the organic matter produced onsite is processed through the composting facility onsite. This turns decaying organic matter into high quality topsoil more rapidly so it can be spread back out where it is needed most. In addition, we use the chickens (Animal Impact) to process the compost. This allows the chickens to feed off of whatever they deem edible in the compost, including insects that are attracted to the rotting material. It also allows their droppings to be immediately incorporated into the compost. This helps the compost get hot and complete its cycle quickly. And when it is time for the compost to be turned? The chickens help with that, too.

Rainwater Harvesting

At just 9” of rain a year, Phoenix is a desert. But with careful planning and a little infrastructure, the rain can be stretched really far. To do, this, we use two primary strategies at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. The first is rainwater barrels. There are two rainwater barrels on each of the three buildings onsite. The two smaller buildings have smaller, flattened barrels that sit up against the building. These each hold a little over 500 gallons. On the largest building, there are two larger barrels, each holding about 2600 gallons. The smaller tanks are perhaps a little undersized for the areas they catch, and the larger tanks are a bit oversized. However, with a little planning and some plumbing, we are able to drain the smaller tanks into the larger as they fill up, assuring that no rain is lost. This water is used to water the gardens.

The second type of rainwater harvesting comes from offsite flow, or water that is flowing onto the property. The property has a wash flowing through it. While this was a major problem for previous owners, it is seen as an advantage at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. With a little regrading, the site was turned into a series of retention basins. As each retention basin fills, it overtops into the basin below it. By doing this, all, or nearly all, of the offsite flow can be captured and stored in the ground. This has the added benefit of reducing downstream flooding. The best part is that the first basins built are already growing lots of vegetation and thus building soil carbon. The change in water infiltration is already visible, with no water standing in these basins a mere 24 hours after a big rain. The newer basins, which haven’t had much of a chance to grow vegetation yet, take 3 or 4 days to drain, even though they get less water.

Nitrogen Producing Trees

In desert ecosystems, and in particular degraded desert ecosystems, there is often a lack of nitrogen in the soil. This can be a limiting factor for the growth of plants and thus the ecosystem as a whole. Nitrogen producing trees, such as palo verde, acacia, and mesquite can make a big difference in this area. Not only do they fix nitrogen from the air and make it into a usable form, but many are well adapted to dry climates with poor soil. They are drought tolerant and fast growing.

Pollarding/Coppicing

As the trees grow, they produce a great amount of biomass. Every two years, the trees at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth are pollarded, and a few select trees are coppiced. The branches and twigs that are cut off are used for a variety of purposes. They are used as feedstock for growing mushrooms, some are used to produce biochar. The bulk are chipped to either produce mulch for various areas around the site or as a bulk carbon source in the compost bins. The biomass produced by pollarding and coppicing becomes a large portion of the biomass we use to feed the soil.

In addition, trees typically have a root structure that mimics the size and extent of the canopy above. When the tree is trimmed back, the tree abandons roots and pulls back, adding as much carbon down in the soil as is harvested from above.

Hugelkultur

Some of the branches that are either trimmed out or are the result of random pruning throughout the year are used to create new garden beds. This use of hugelkultur adds a long-lasting source of carbon to the soil and provides a lasting source of food for the soil biome where it is needed most.

Biochar

Woody debris that is too big for the chipper, unusable for mushroom feedstock, or otherwise scrap material is processed into biochar. The biochar is added to the compost. Once there, it collects nutrients through the processing process. Then it is added to the soil with the rest of the compost where it is used to improve soil quality in perpetuity.

Mycoculture/Mycoremediation

Growing mushrooms is difficult in the desert, but it can be managed. Mushrooms are used in the intermediary process between wood chips and soil creation and provide an additional product. We are also working to find ways to use mushrooms to improve degraded areas of the site. This is a technology that has a lot of potential and we are working on finding a way around the challenges to best make it work.

Aquaponics

Phoenix ASH & Rebirth is located in a very brittle environment and the bulk of the site is being managed with this in mind. However, many of our common vegetables require quite a bit more water, thus necessitating a non-brittle microclimate. In this interest, we are looking for technologies that help use the water resources available onsite to their maximum utility. Aquaponics has some great potential in this respect, being particularly efficient with both water and nutrients. However, as a soil-less technology, it doesn’t fit as well with the goals of the site. We are exploring other options to improve the technology to be more organic.

As you can see, we have a whole lot going on for just a half acre. But combined, these techniques work closely together to make some significant changes in a degraded environment. Please help me in spreading the word. If we can turn a half acre in downtown Phoenix into a productive food forest and organic farm, it can be done anywhere. We just have to have a way to get these concepts out there and teach people to implement them. This world is fixable, and it can be done using the techniques provided to us by nature. Let’s get on this.

Composting with Chickens

Chicken compost structure

I love an elegant design. But what is an elegant design? Elegant is defined as pleasingly ingenious and simple. From an engineering standpoint, an elegant design is typically a design that achieves multiple functions through simplicity rather than complexity. This is easily accomplished with biological systems with just a little thought. Think about the process happening. Is there work you are doing that something else would happily do for you? Are there organisms that could be inserted into the process that would provide benefit without any real loss?

While I have tried to achieve this with my living systems since I was a teenager, one of the best examples I found was from Paul Stamets. He explained that if you compost wood chips, you can get compost, albeit slowly. If you grow mushrooms on the wood chips first, you get mushrooms. Then the spent mushroom blocks can be composted to still get compost, and faster. The addition of the right organism in the middle of the process makes all the difference.

Such is the way with chickens and compost. Chickens are omnivores. Their natural diet is a mixture of plants and bugs, with a healthy mixture of seeds thrown in. Commercial chicken feeds are mostly grain based. They give the chickens the basic nutritional needs, but don't really give them anything extra. Allowing the chickens to process compost on the other hand, is a natural fit that achieves multiple functions.

Chicken compost structure from the inside

For our purposes, we took an existing structure that was built for compost. It was constructed out of PVC pipe and wire and measured 11' by 14' and tall enough to stand comfortably in. We moved it into a corner that was out of the way and put an existing chicken coop inside. The coop gave the chickens a place to roost and lay and gave them protection from the rain and sun. Then we built four compost bins, one cubic yard each, using the same PVC pipe and wire techniques. The doors on the front of the bins rotate down. Then, since this is Phoenix and it is hot here, I installed a mister system over the compost bins to keep the compost wet and the chickens comfortable in the summer. 

To feed the chickens, I toss compost out into the open area. I also wander around and harvest a big bucket of weeds daily for the chickens to eat. Grain is given supplementally as needed and just to make sure they have enough food. The chickens pick through the weeds and kitchen scraps and eat what they want. The rest becomes litter under their feet and they manure on it. When the litter layer builds up enough, we scoop it up and toss it in one of the bins. Then we spread out a starter layer of straw or drier weeds and start the process over again. I hope to use wood chips soon as well. 

Once the compost is in the bins, it heats up to hot compost range within a few days. Once a week, we drop the front gate to the bin, and spread the compost out a little. The chickens dive right in and hunt for bugs. After a day or so, we scoop it up, water it a little, and mound it back up in a different bin. The process produces compost remarkably rapidly. We are actually having trouble keeping the temperature down enough on the compost bins. We don't want them so hot that they are essentially burning off the carbon we are trying to capture. 

Store bought eggs mixed with
eggs from our chickens

The best part is the change in the chickens. They have a habitat that is full of vertical relief to explore, attractive to bugs, and gives them lots of room to scratch around in. They have been much happier and engaged since moving into the compost bin. Plus, the change in the eggs has been remarkable. See, the color of the yolk is a good indicator of how healthy the chicken's diet is. Pale yellow yolks indicate a poor diet, usually of mostly grains. Darker yellow to orange means the diet is significantly improved. I hear that with attention to a great diet, the egg yolks can be almost made red. I haven't gotten there yet. 

Personally, I think that this could be done on a larger scale to take advantage of large scale food waste. Restaurants could collect food waste separately and they could be collected daily, or every few days at the least. Then the food scraps could be dumped into a chicken compost facility with several hundred chickens. They will eat what appeals to them. The remnants could be mixed with wood chips, also from municipal waste, and composted. The chickens could be brought back once a week or so to further pick through the composting material, keeping bugs down and helping it compost. At the end of the product, there is great compost produced, happy chickens, healthy eggs, and a reduction of the trash stream.

Making Humus

First I want to be clear. I am not talking about hummus, the yummy dip that comes from various cuisines around the Mediterranean. I am talking about humus (pronounced HYOO-mus). Humus is a type of soil derived from fully decomposed organic matter. It is black and rich and just about the best thing you can have for growing plants. But humus isn’t just more compost or similar. It is stable and retains itself long term in the soil.

So if it is so great for your plants, how do you get it? Well, that’s the problem. Humus is quite possibly the most valuable substance on the planet, even if nobody realizes it . Everything that supports our life on this planet, from the air we breathe, to the water we drink to the food we eat depends on humus. But nature makes it very slowly. As a kid my dad always told me that it takes nature a thousand years to make an inch of topsoil (which is mostly composed of humus). While I don’t think it takes quite that long, there is certainly not enough that it can be sustainably harvested, even on a small scale. Plus, current farming practices degrade the topsoil rapidly. Tilling in particular is very damaging to the humus.

However, we can make humus. Before we do so, there is one thing we need to understand. What is humus? Quite simply, humus is distilled from decaying organic matter. The problem is that the process of distilling the humus isn’t very efficient. You can’t take a cubic yard of fall leaves from your yard and get a cubic yard of humus. That cubic yard of leaves might give you a couple of tablespoons of finished humus. After 3 or 4 years. But it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds.

The basic formula is this:

Organic Material => Organic Matter => Humus

Organic material is just about anything that was produced by a living thing. Woody debris from plants are best. Add it to your compost bin and compost the heck out of it. The composting process removes most of the bulk that is going to go away. That cubic yard of leaves will give you a gallon or so of finished compost. Then add that to your soil. Over the next several years, that will break down further into a beautiful humus.

Now there are just three things to remember:

1) The reduction. When you realize just how much organic matter reduces to make good humus, you will join the legions of us who spend lots of time creating a huge composting operation. It really is the most important thing you can do for your garden.

2) The reason humus is so great is that it feeds the living organisms in the soil that form the ecosystem your plant is existing in. By adding compost, you are feeding the soil organisms. The fact that you are making more and more humus from the process is actually almost secondary. Feed your soil!

3) When you stop feeding your soil, the humus starts to break down and will eventually be lost. Actually, this is happening all the time anyway. It is just that regular additions of compost add humus to the soil faster than it can break down.

So go out and make more of the real black gold, the basis for our existence on this planet!

Soil as a Living Organism

Sometimes, looking at something commonplace with new eyes, new perspective, and new insight can be one of the hardest things there is to do. And sometimes there is nothing more important to do. What can be more commonplace than soil? We walk over it every day. Yet to dismiss its importance, its power, is to miss a great deal. Sylvia Bernstein, in her book Aquaponic Gardening, printed a quote from Kobus Jooste from South Africa that attempted to strip down soil into its constituents, ending in the following conclusion: “UBERFACT: Soil is an anchoring medium to plants that may or may not, over time, release some of the stuff plants need to grow.” I nearly stopped reading the book at that line, but powered on for the other wisdom the book has to offer. Still, that sentence comes back to me often. Rarely have people been more wrong.

The first thing to realize when looking at soil with new eyes is that soil is a living thing. True, it is not a single organism, but rather a complex media filled with tens of thousands of different organisms. But the organisms work so well together that they can almost be treated as one organism.  So, when a biologist studies an organism, what are the first couple of things they look for? Two of the most important aspects in understanding an organism are what it eats, and what role it fills in the ecosystem.

First let’s tackle the food source for soil. Yes, soil needs to be fed. Like any other living organism, soil breathes air, drinks water, and consumes a food source. In the absence of any of those, the soil will fail and die. As for what soil eats, it is really simple. It eats whatever organic matter falls to the soil surface. From there, through a series of digestive processes of different organisms, the particles of decaying organic matter get broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, the larger organic molecules digested into smaller ones. Mass is lost as carbon from cellulose and lignin and a host of other molecules are slowly turned into carbon dioxide. But the process is so much more complex. The cellulose and lignin were locked in what used to be the body of a plant, a plant that had metabolic processes and scent and its own DNA. All of those complex molecules that created the things that made the plant alive came with their own chemical signature. As they break down, the carbon is lost to the air, as is some of the nitrogen. However, the phosphorus and potassium and calcium and iron stay behind. They get recombined and further broken down by that wonderful process of decomposition and soil creation. What they finally create is exactly what the plants need to take up and start all over again.

The pile of mostly decomposed plants in the background
was living white clover two months earlier. The heat of
summer killed them and the soil gobbled up the readily
available food source.

 As an engineer, understanding soil isn’t just enough. What does it DO? What can I use it for? In order to tackle that question, I need to answer the other question: what role does soil play in its ecosystem? You probably learned in grade school science class, as I did, that soil provides nutrition and structure for plants. While this is true, it is a tiny portion of what is really going on. Soil plays an incredibly important role in the ecosystem. To work that out, let’s look again at soil’s food source. It needs decaying plant matter to feed on. Where does it get decaying plant matter? Well, it first needs healthy plants to grow, so they can drop leaves and eventually die. What produces more decaying plant matter, a lush growth of plants, or a few spindly plants that are already dying? Anyone with a lush landscape in their yard can tell you the answer to that one. The more plants there are, the more waste they drop.

So now we know that the soil organisms have a vested interest in growing a lush stand of plants. How do they do this? Again, we will answer a question with a new question. What is the biggest problem facing the plants? Plants need sun, water, air, and a good source of all the minerals and micronutrients they need to grow. The first three are outside the control of the soil organisms, but the last is fully within their control. There are two primary sources for the nutrients the plants need: decaying plant and animal material and the minerals in the soil around them. The soil needs to be effective at releasing those nutrients from both sources and getting them to the plants.

That brings up the next problem. How does the soil retain the nutrients long enough for the plants to get them? Have you ever performed a soil test? You put soil in a jar with water and shake it really well, then test the water for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Why is that? Well, the shaking is because the soil is working really hard to hold onto those nutrients. You test the water and not the soil because those nutrients are soluble in water. The soil has to find a way to lock those nutrients in, and where they fail, filter them back out of the water before they are lost to the water cycle.

It turns out that soil is remarkably good at doing just that. The bacteria produce polysaccharide glues that hold soil particles together. Fungal strands also serve to bind soil particles together. Fungal networks are shaped like a tight net, and have proven to be very good at filtering water.

There is another function of soil that is often overlooked. There is an old gardening addage: If you want to raise the pH of your soil, add compost. If you want to lower the pH of your soil, add compost. Plants are only able to absorb nutrients within a certain pH range. The problem is, different compounds work best at different ranges. Since the organisms in the soil have a vested interest in getting those nutrients into the plants, they also want to make sure the plants can absorb the nutrients. So they also take on the task of balancing the soil chemistry.

Naturally, all this is a gross oversimplification, but it has to be. There have been volumes written on tiny portions of this process. There are whole fields of science that study nothing but soil chemistry and biology. But when you think of the problems you have, think of what soil needs to do and how a healthy, living soil can help you and your plants. Then go out and feed your soil.

Creating a Circular Economy with Mushrooms

Palm fronds from my back yard

Modern life poses an increasing number of complex problems, necessitating our coming up with ever better solutions. We know that our typical linear economy, that of manufacture, consumption, and waste, cannot be a long term solution. It is wasteful and inefficient. Mushrooms provide one very simple service that, with a little thought and planning, becomes a very powerful tool. Mushrooms use our waste materials as inputs, giving food and, with a little extra work, soil as an output.

I recently went to a presentation on creating a circular economy, where a city official talked about difficulties with palm fronds in the waste stream. Most green waste gets chipped, shredded, and composted. Palm fronds pose a unique problem, though. They are very fibrous and tough to cut down to a size that can be composted. Since the area in question, Phoenix, Arizona, is subtropical, there are a lot of palm trees around, providing lots of palm fronds to the waste stream. During the presentation, the city official mentioned that they have requested proposals for finding new ways to dispose of the palm debris, without much response.

After the presentation I asked him if anybody had suggested growing mushrooms on the palm debris. No one had. I told him that the palm fronds have a density somewhere between straw and wood and aren't particularly aromatic. They should break down pretty well with the right mushroom. When I got home, I did a little research. Pink oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus djamor) are a tropical mushroom that grows best in warm climates. Like most mushrooms, the pink oyster mushroom has certain preferences on what sorts of organic matter it prefers to grow on. It prefers to grow on tropical woody debris like palm wood and palm debris. Also, being a hot weather mushroom, it grows fast in hot weather. I wasn't able to answer detailed questions, like how long will it take to break down the palm fronds, but I am currently working on an experiment growing pink oysters on some palm fronds from my own back yard.

The whole interaction was actually weird for me. Normally, when I mention that mushrooms might be used to solve a problem, get a LOT of eye-rolling. People hear the word "mushroom" and mentally add the word "psychedelic." I didn't get that in this crowd. The talk was about creating a circular economy. It was a very receptive crowd.

When looking to create a circular economy for most sorts of green waste, mushrooms are a natural fit. In natural systems, the inputs come in the form of good soil, fertilizer (sometimes the soil and the fertilizer are one and the same) and sunlight. Progressing through the system, the plant grows, produces whatever product is desired, then dies. The end result is slightly depleted soils and dead plant matter. In order to create this into a circular economy, all you have to do is find a way to turn the plant waste back into fertile soil. Compost is the simplest way to achieve this, but it is labor intensive and doesn't add any value other than closing the loop to improve the soil. Adding mushrooms to the process helps considerably. By adding the production of another saleable output, the whole process gets improved. It becomes more profitable to close that loop and provides incentive.

Mature garden bed with mushrooms growing between plants

The problem is, this is still short-sighted. There are many more opportunities here. It isn't as simple as "just grow mushrooms on the waste product." Mushroom growing as a business is very equipment intensive, labor intensive, and knowledge intensive. But it doesn't have to be. Just as seed production is a separate business that helps farmers, mushroom spawn production could be centralized. Mushroom production involves several levels of spawn production before the final inoculation to produce the flush of mushrooms. Most mushroom businesses today create their own spawn, but that doesn't have to be the norm. A business could be created that helps farmers set up an outbuilding on their properties for mushroom production. Rather than each farmer creating their own biology lab, they would just buy the final run of spawn and use it to inoculate their waste. That process is pretty simple and easily learned.

But what about yard waste? What about those palm fronds, not to mention the logs, leaves, and other yard debris? Again, a business could be built out of it. They could be local, community centric organizations that somehow collect yard waste and turn it into mushrooms. It could provide for community employment. Again, the spawn production could be done elsewhere and just sold or distributed as needed.

Garden bed pictured above, before planting

Let's look again at that circular economy. What if you could contract that circle a bit, and overlap functions? In my last post I mentioned a different way of gardening. It just so happens that this type of garden allows you to decompose organic matter WHILE growing plants in it. I will get to how all that works soon, but trust me, it can be done. I have been doing just that for a couple of years. Through the addition of mushrooms to the living ecosystem that you are recirculating water through, you can increase the production of the whole system. As the mushrooms decompose the plant matter, they produce quite a bit of carbon dioxide. Might as well put plants right there to gobble it up as a food source, right? As the mushrooms decompose the organic matter, they release nutrients. Might as well sink some plant roots in it to take advantage, right? Mushrooms also function as a really effective water filter. They will help catch even more of the nutrients you are cycling through the system in the water. All of a sudden that little community mushroom growing business is also pumping out fresh produce as well.

So what do we need to get all this going? First of all, we need research. I only know of two experiments that have been done that test plant-mushroom pairings. Certainly some mushrooms are going to be harmful to plants and others will be beneficial. We need to find out which is which. What about climate differences? Paul Stamets, who has done a lot of the mushroom growing research to date, lives in the Pacific Northwest. One of my favorite lines is when he calls king stropharia mushrooms a summer mushroom, preferring to fruit at temperatures up to 90 degrees. Where I live, that is a winter mushroom. But there are others, actual heat loving mushrooms, that would probably thrive here. Pink oysters (Pleurotus djamor), king oysters (Pleurotus eryngii), black poplars (Arocybe aegerita), milkies (Calocybe indica) and paddy straws (Volvariela volvacela) are all native to warmer regions and could do well in southern settings. We just need to work out how best to grow them.

There is one more thing, though. It isn't just the science we need to work on. We need to also work on the marketing side of things. If we all of a sudden start flooding the market with mushrooms, we need to create a market for them. We live in a society that has a lot of phobias around mushrooms. We need to teach people about the new kinds of mushrooms hitting the market. We need to teach them how to cook them. We need to teach them how healthy they are. Most of all, we need to rebrand mushrooms as the food that helps the environment. 

Indoor Composting

So, you are thinking about creating an indoor garden. What is the first thing to get figured out? As I have mentioned before, the most important thing to remember about gardening is that you don't take care of your plants. You take care of your soil, and the soil takes care of the plants. As with most people, you are probably going to want to start with a nice high-quality bag of potting soil. Don't. Just don't. I mean, sure, if you really can't wait and just have to get started now, go ahead. But making quality soil doesn't take all that long, and it is the cornerstone of a good organic garden.

The question is, how do you avoid the mess, smell, and bugs that come along with indoor composting? Well, it isn't going to be easy. Sure, there are plenty of units out there to buy, but where is the fun in that? So let me tell you about the one I built.

The first thing to keep in mind is the challenges. That is the start of any engineering project, after all. Start with your challenges and your constraints. The challenges are keeping the smell to a minimum and not attracting pests while still getting some serious rot going on. The constraints are that it is going to happen in a living space in a small container.

First of all, I started with a nice, big pot with no drain. You really don't want the leachate sitting in a tray, and you REALLY don't want it overflowing and puddling on your floor. Plus, it will attract pets and pests and that is to be avoided. So let's contain that mess. However, you need to deal with it somehow. Otherwise the nutrients will puddle at the bottom and stagnate in the water that isn't going anywhere.

Or is it? As with my mushroom projects, I want the moisture to stay around long enough to do some good, but I still need it cycled out. So what is going to pull that moisture out of there for me and dispose of it? In case you are unfamiliar with this blog, I am going to use biological action. In this case, a plant will do nicely. I need something that will be tolerant of lots of water and a very, very fertile soil. It also needs to use a lot of water, as you want that water cycled out of there. Food production is also a nice byproduct. I used lemongrass. As one nursery employee described it to me, it is a pig of a plant. It will take all the water and fertilizer you can give it.

However, the plant needs to be separated from the compost. If you don't do that, you have no way to collect or add your compost. For that, a smaller container nested inside your pot would be perfect. Terra cotta with a lid would be ideal, but finding the right size might be tricky. I used a tall, fairly narrow plastic container I bought dried mushrooms in. A few small holes in the top gave it a little ventilation and a few large holes in the side allowed water and nutrient exchange. I just dropped it in the pot and filled the outside with soil. On hindsight, I think I might have filled it with wood chips. It will make the plant struggle a little at first, but the wood chips would have helped moderate some of the smell and absorb some of the excess nitrogen if you got your green/brown mixture wrong.

Okay, so you have your plant in place and are ready to start filling in your compost. How do you proceed next? Well, first of all, remember your green to brown ratios for compost. Those are important here. If you dump a ton of green in there, it is going to smell and there is nothing you can do about it. So make sure you put enough paper towels and stuff like that in there. And keep that lid on. It keeps out the fruit flies and keeps most of the smell contained.

What about worms? Can you put worms in there? I did. The thing to remember about worms in containers is that if they run out of food or get bored, they sometimes go for an adventure and you will come across their little desiccated corpses laying on the floor. To me, it is worth it. They process the compost faster than bacteria alone and really help keep the smell down.

The biggest problem I ran into was impatience. I made myself a nice fruit salad one day and couldn't bear to part with the compost. So I stuck it in the blender and made a nice slurry and poured it in. Don't do that. It filled all the little holes normally occupied by air and made the whole thing smell like dirty diapers inside of two days.

For maintenance, just add stuff as the level drops and water regularly. The water pushes out the bad air as it passes through and allows fresh air to enter when it is past. When it gets close to being finished, just stop adding stuff for a while and let it finish. Then scoop out the black gold and start filling again.

Hugelkultur

I have grown many mushroom logs over the years and, like any good composter, hate to throw them away when they are spent. It is still a good source of carbon and minerals and not to be wasted. I usually chop them up roughly and throw them in the compost bin, where they tumble for some time, very slowly getting smaller. When I redo one of the containers in my garden, I find I am often short on soil (due in large part to my dislike of store-bought potting soil), so I throw a chunk or two of the decomposing log into the bottom of the pot to fill space. I figure the log will slowly decompose over several years time. During that time, it will feed the soil and provide a reservoir of nutrients.

Recently, I came upon a method of soil-building called hugelkultur. The basic premise is that decaying wood harbors a great diversity of life. If you see a fallen log in the forest, it is covered with different organisms. The older the wood, the more life there is. So, according to hugelkultur, when building soil, you bury wood in the soil. The wood provides both shelter and food source for a wide variety of life. Over the course of several years, the wood will break down into a rich soil that is full of organic matter and many nutrients.

When a mushroom log is good and spent, the interior is spongy and soft. They are easily chopped up into smaller chunks with a large knife. When putting together a new pot full of soil, I like to put a layer of well-draining material on the bottom, like sand or rocks, and then a layer of roughly chopped spent mushroom logs on top of that. I mix it in well with some good compost and then make sure I have three to six inches of dirt on top of the wood. This gives new plants plenty of room to spread their roots without running into wood immediately. While a plant can push its roots through mostly rotted wood, it may have difficulty with some of the harder portions or if you use fresher wood.

Thus far, I have only found two difficulties with hugelkultur. The first is that rotting wood is low in nitrogen. This means that your soil will most likely be low in nitrogen, too, so other sources, such as blood meal, compost, and nitrogen-fixing plants are a good idea as your soil matures, especially if you are going to be growing plants that need lots of nitrogen, like fruits and vegetables.

The second problem is that wood is high in carbon, which mostly gets converted to carbon dioxide as it decomposes. This is good for your plants, providing a slow, steady supply right where they need it. However, that carbon all takes up space. This means that the level of your soil will slowly drop as time passes, sometimes by several inches. This is great for annual plants, as it gives you lots of room to add compost. However, it can be bad for perennials as they slowly get buried in the compost you have to add.

Overall, though, I really like it as a method for bulking up soil in a new bed or container. I especially recommend it for mushroom growers, like me, who have lots of spent logs laying around that they don’t want to throw away.

A Compost Project

In addition to a trash dumpster and an oversized recycling bin, my neighborhood has a compost bin. It has two large bins that are big enough that one can be composting while the other handles waste from the entire neighborhood. It also has a central section with a roof that is used to store bales of straw that are to be mixed in with the kitchen waste to achieve the right mixture. It has slats on the front for easy extraction of finished compost and a sturdy wire mesh all the way around to keep the varmints out. All in all, it is a fantastic addition to the neighborhood. But it lacks one thing: maintenance. The neighbor who built it also takes care of it. The problem is that he lives elsewhere all summer, not arriving in town until mid-fall and leaving again mid-spring. That means that all summer, when the compost should be cooking like crazy, it never gets turned and rarely gets watered. In addition, the straw, which should get added when the compost gets smelly, gets added liberally with almost every addition of compost. So in addition to not getting enough oxygen or water, it has too much brown material. It seems to me that this is a problem I can fix. Since this is a blog about engineering with biology, we will tackle this as an engineering problem.

Problem Definition

The first step is to clearly define your problem. In this case, we will define it thusly: The compost bin only gets watered in the winter, has too much brown material and never gets turned.

Parameters

The next thing you look at are the parameters of your problem. Cost is nearly always one of the parameters. For example, those 14’ long giant worms from Australia might be just the thing for this problem (but probably not), but it wouldn’t be reasonable (or legal for that matter) to import a few of them. We need to spend little to no money and use local materials as much as possible. The second parameter has already been mentioned: we will be using biological organisms to solve this problem. The third parameter is a request from the person who built the bins: “I’d rather not modify them any more than I have to; I like them the way they are.” And I agree with him.

Options

The next thing we want to consider is our options. The usual composting organisms sound like a good place to start.

Thermophilic bacteria are the biggest composters out there. They work quickly and could turn that entire pile into black gold in about two months. There is a big problem though, they need a steady supply of oxygen (usually supplied by turning the pile), lots of moisture (only available during the winter), and warm temperatures (not available during the winter).

Redworms are the second biggest composters out there. They also work quickly and would turn that pile into black gold in about 2 or 3 months, if added in sufficient quantities. If worms are added to a dry pile, they will seek moisture deeper in the soil, even if it means leaving a huge source of food behind. They are also slow to eat brown material and they tend to go dormant in the winter, retreating to the bottom of the pile and slowing down their metabolism. Now the pile is in a sunny location, so it will probably not freeze solid during the winter and it probably will thaw all the way out most days, but it will still be too cold to keep worms active.

Mushrooms are another organism that can be used in compost bins, but isn’t used frequently. The problem with mushrooms in compost is that they don’t like to be turned frequently, they prefer a mixture that is heavier on the brown material and lighter on the green material, and they are damaged by high heat. See where I am going with this? Mushrooms will work slower than bacteria or worms, but will do an excellent job of breaking down the brown material. They also have limited ability to transport things like oxygen and can continue to grow a little deeper in the pile than the aerobic bacteria. In addition, they are typically better adapted to cool conditions and can continue to grow in just about anything above freezing. In fact, many mushrooms use winter as an opportunity to get a leg up on the competition, expanding their range and collecting nutrients while the bacteria are dormant.

Choosing a Specific Material

Engineering is all about specifics. Saying mushrooms will work is not good enough. You need to select a mushroom. As I mentioned, cost is certainly an issue, so I will work with the mushrooms I already have access to and see if any of those will be acceptable.

It turns out that I have access to four different kinds of mushrooms: 3 that I am growing and one that I harvested wild from nearby recently.

The first candidate is the elm oyster mushroom (Hypsizygus ulmarius) which I am cultivating on a couple of logs. It might be a suitable mushroom, but neither log has fruited recently, so I have no access to stem butts to make spawn.

The second candidate is the black poplar mushroom (Agrocybe aegerita), which I am also growing on logs and fruited recently. I am attempting to propagate this mushroom currently. However, this mushroom has proven difficult for me to grow. It is a primary decomposer, so it prefers raw wood (not so available in the compost bin) and it has had some difficulty with my dry Arizona climate. I don’t think this is a suitable candidate.

The third candidate is the pearl oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus). I also have this growing on logs, and it also fruited recently. The pearl oyster mushroom is a primary decomposer, but it is also an aggressive decomposer of all things that used to be plants. It grows well on paper, straw, cloth, wood chips, and much more, including compost. It would rapidly decompose much of the compost, but wouldn’t break it down very far. It would also die out when it ran out of nutrients.

The fourth candidate is the shaggy mane mushroom (Coprinus comatus) I recently found a fresh wild fruiting of this mushroom and harvested both dried mushrooms (they dry quickly in our dry air) and stem butts, which I am currently trying to grow on cardboard. Shaggy manes are tertiary decomposers, meaning they live in dirt. They are also great restorers of disturbed land. They are adapted to decompose anything from sawdust and straw to manure and yes, they do well in compost. They will probably work more slowly on the compost than the oyster mushrooms, but they have the added benefit that they are native to this area. They are also a great addition to garden soil and would get added to the soil with the compost.

At this point, I am trying to decide between the oyster mushrooms and the shaggy mane mushrooms. I think that a sequencing of both mushrooms would probably be best in the long run, with oyster mushrooms added first, followed by shaggy manes a month or two later.. Also, adding worms in the spring would help the compost finish quickly, especially if the mushrooms have pre-digested much of the compost.

Over the next month, I will be propagating and expanding the mushrooms I have before putting them in the compost bin. I will be posting several articles on the different propagation methods I use for the mushrooms. I will also keep you all up to date on further details of my compost remediation project. Also, sometime in January I will be teaching an informal class on how to propagate mushrooms, using the mushrooms I have, so if you live in the Prescott, Arizona area and are interested, let me know.

Wood Pellet Fuel

A wood pellet stove is a kind of heater that burns small amounts of wood pellets at a time with excellent air flow to produce a lot of heat without nearly as much smoke and pollution as a wood burning fireplace. It is also one of the cheaper ways to heat your home in the winter. Every winter, I stock up on several bags of wood pellet fuel, even though I don’t own a wood pellet stove. I also hold on to it until summer. So, what do I do with it, you ask?

Well, first of all, it is worth noting that I am always careful to buy the bags that say 100% organic, which means that they are composed completely of sawdust. Wood pellet fuel is made of sawdust that is dried and pressed into little pellets. When you add water to them, they swell and fall apart into sawdust. It is also worth noting that a 40 pound bag of wood pellet fuel costs about $4.

Where else are you going to get such a wonderful garden supplement for so cheap? I use wood pellet fuel as a mulch, I mix it in to soil to build organic content, and I use it as a compost amendment. For mulch, you scatter a little on the ground and then water. Be careful about how much you put down. A solid layer one pellet thick will give you about 2 inches of mulch once it has been watered, so they do swell up quite a lot. I have smothered many seedlings because I mulched too heavily with wood pellet fuel. For mixing into soil, add a few handfuls here and there to the soil as you are working it. It will add to the organic content of the soil and give the organisms in the soil something to feed off of. Again, too much is bad as large concentrations of sawdust will rob nitrogen from your soil, which isn’t good for your plants. For a compost amendment, you just throw a couple of good handfuls in the compost as needed, usually when the compost starts getting smelly. I added a small bucket of wood pellet fuel to my tumble composter this summer and almost immediately, it started to heat up, finally achieving the mix it needed to really cook. Three weeks later, it cooled off and a week after that, the compost was done and ready to use.

Consider checking out your local supply of wood pellet fuel and maybe you can put some of that precious carbon in your soil instead of putting it in the air.

Oh, and it is worth mentioning that wood pellet fuel doesn't work very well as a medium for growing mushrooms. Most mushrooms are pretty specific about whether they prefer to grow on hardwoods or softwoods. I have yet to find any wood pellet fuel that tells you what its composition is. This means that it could be 100% hardwood, 100% softwood, or, more likely, some combination of the two.

A Little Compost Math

I have been noticing lately that my homemade tumble composter has been getting harder and harder to turn, even though it has remained about the same level of full since I made it. One of the constants of compost is reduction. Assuming you do it right, it will continue to shrink in volume. Part of this is because the raw materials have so much space in them and they pack down as they decompose. However, a bigger part is that a very large amount of the mass, around 50% is converted to carbon dioxide or other gasses as a part of the decomposition process. As the carbon is lost, the minerals and nutrients get distilled down to a concentrated, nutritious form.

It occurred to me that I have been constantly filling this single 55 gallon drum since January. I started it with enough dry leaves to fill it one and a half times. I actually had to fill it and then wait to cram the rest in. I have added at least three baskets full of weeds, each a third to a half the volume of the compost bin. I added the remains of a previous compost pile that weren’t quite done cooking. Then there is the constant supply of kitchen waste. So I decided to do a little math to see just how much kitchen waste I have generated.

First of all, there is my kitchen compost bin. It is 11”x6.5”x10”, which gives me a total volume of about 0.41 cubic feet. I assume it was an average of about ¾ full when I took it out, so three trips would be a cubic foot. I figure I took it out about three times a week on average, so I generated about one cubic foot of compost a week. My compost bin is 55 gallons, which converts to about 7.5 cubic feet. That means I generated enough kitchen waste to fill it completely every 2 months or so, and have done so since January, so the kitchen waste alone has been enough to fill it about 3.5 times. Add to that the one and a half full worth of dry leaves and another filling or so for weeds and other materials, and I have filled it with enough material to fill it completely about 6 times. Yet it remains only about three quarters full, just as it has almost constantly since I put the first load of leaves in and wetted them down.

My compost is now getting heavy, which means it is getting dense. Perhaps it is time to stop filling it and let it finish cooking so my garden can have an infusion of nutrients and biological activity. I know I am itching to make some compost tea for sure.

And yes, I do this for fun. Did I mention I am a garden geek?

A Tumble Composter

Several months ago, I saw a smallish tumble composter at the local Costco for just under $100. For those of you who haven’t priced one, that is a pretty good deal. However, with times being tight, I assumed it wasn’t really an option and it was over a week later before I thought to mention it to my wife. To my surprise, she actually thought it was a fantastic idea. I really needed a place nearby to put kitchen scraps and my garden, small though it is, needs a good supply of quality compost, but my attempts to date have not proven the match of the javelinas and my dog. The neighborhood has a wonderful compost bin, but all the proceeds go to the community garden. A tumble composter seemed like the perfect solution. So I rushed out to the store. To my chagrin, they were no longer available.

Over the next week or so, I mourned the missed opportunity and realized just how perfect it would actually be for my situation. Then I started researching other inexpensive compost tumbler options. I happened across one that was made from a 55 gallon plastic barrel. It just so happens that my local Coca-Cola bottler gives those things out when they are done with them, and I had two just sitting there waiting to be made into a pair of rain barrels. I hadn’t really worked out the best way to install them in series, so I hadn’t built the barrels. A few days of planning out the best way to do it and I was off to the store.

I thought of all kinds of complicated, awesome ways to do it, but opted instead for simple. I bought a 1” galvanized steel pipe, a kit to make a clamp-style sawhorse and 2x4s for the legs, a pair of hinges and a pair of latches. I drilled a 1” hole (1 ¼”, actually, I couldn’t find the 1” bit) in the center of the top and the bottom of the barrel and then used a jigsaw to cut a panel out of the side for the door. I installed the hinges and latches and threaded the pipe through the holes. Then I installed the legs to the saw horses and put it all together. The whole project cost me about $50 in materials (the barrel itself was free, after all) and took me about 2 hours start to finish.

Last fall I raked up the leaves at my old house and bagged them up. Not wanting to throw them away, they had been sitting on my back patio waiting for a big enough compost bin. I had to stuff and moisten and stuff some more, but I got them all in, along with the compost from my little previous bin. That was late winter, and the volume has been slowly decreasing, despite a steady stream of kitchen waste and weeds. I have a number of worms that came with the original compost and they have been working diligently on the pile. I’ve been pulling them out as much as I can since the compost will eventually heat up and kill what’s left. So far I have probably harvested a pound or two of worms from the bin and there’s still no shortage.

The point of a tumble composter is to make hot composting easier. A hot compost pile needs to get up to about 150 degrees F to really do its work. In order to do that, it needs a steady supply of oxygen. That is a tall order in a stationary bin. It involves a lot of work turning it. There are all kinds of tricks and tools, but they each have their own limitations and many still require lots of work. With a tumble composter, you just give it a few spins and the pile is fully aerated. The only problem with mine was that between the cold weather this spring and the high carbon content of the pile, it wasn’t heating at all. This weekend that finally changed. I did a little maintenance on the bin last Saturday and found a pocket of heat. Sunday nearly the whole bin was warm. From here on out, all I need to do is spin it every couple of days to keep it oxygenated. In another month or two, I’ll be ready to start using compost. I can’t wait.

Note: The composter currently lacks lateral stability. There is really nothing keeping the pipe in the sawhorse clamps but gravity. A good shove on the side will send it right over. I bought a chain to install in an X pattern between the legs. That will provide the support it needs to not fall over should something happen. I just haven’t gotten it done yet.

Harvesting the Weeds

Most composting instructions tell you not to put weeds in the compost bin, and for good reason. Weeds often have seed heads that won't break down during the composting process unless you are doing some serious hot composting. The resulting compost will inoculate your garden with a lovely infusion of weeds. To make matters worse, the weeds are guaranteed to show up right where you applied the compost, meaning that they have lots of good nutrition to help them grow big and strong.

However, with careful observation and judicious selection, you can select weeds that get quite large before going to seed. As long as you get them before they go to seed, you can collect a nice infusion of green material for your compost.

Here in Arizona we had a really wet winter and early spring. Right now the weeds are plentiful and growing quickly. I particularly favor tumbleweeds for compost fodder as they can get a foot or two tall and nearly as big around before they go to seed. Yes, the cute little critters pictured above will grow up to be tumbleweeds. So around this time of year, and for the next month or so, I like to travel the neighborhood and harvest the weeds, using them to bulk up my compost. In just a few weeks, they break down and really make some lovely black gold for my garden.

Myceliating the Compost

A month or so ago, I built myself a compost tumbler out of a 55 gallon plastic barrel. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how in an upcoming post. The new composter gave me a place to put the bags of fall leaves that had not yet found a home. It took some doing, but I managed to get them all in there and there was just enough room to keep putting in kitchen scraps. However, spring has just barely sprung here and we are still in the grip of cold nights. So after a month of being full and being turned every few days, I have thoroughly moistened leaves that are a little more crumbled. No noticeable decomposition has occurred. Even the kitchen scraps are still green and mostly undecomposed. They actually look like they would if they were slowly going bad in the refrigerator.

I decided I didn’t want to wait that long for finished compost, so I decided something needed to be done. But how do you get it moving? A very high carbon content and negligible nitrogen content combined with low temperatures means that I have no chance of getting the thermophilic bacteria to start doing some serious cooking for me. I ended up with some worms in there due to transferring other compost in, but it is even too cold for them to do much work. However, there is another organism that can and will thrive in such conditions. Mushrooms make a living by competing in environments that other organisms cannot. They eat what few else can. Their main competitor is bacteria, so many of them evolved the ability to keep growing and digesting even when the temperatures are so low that the bacteria are all dormant. In doing so, they use the winter to gain a competitive edge. The enoki mushroom, also called the winter mushroom, is particularly good at this. You can grow them outdoors in the cold of winter and even fruit them (get them to produce mushrooms) in your refrigerator. I didn’t happen to have any enoki mushrooms growing, and even if I did, I am not sure they can survive on leaves in the compost bin. However, I did have oyster mushrooms growing on a roll of toilet paper as an experiment I did with the kids. Oyster mushrooms are relatively cold tolerant. More importantly, they will decompose just about anything with a high carbon content and do really well in compost bins.

So I decided to make a mycelial bomb for the compost bin. The most important consideration in this was protecting the mushrooms from the bacteria and earthworms already in the compost bin. Once disturbed, the mushrooms will take a few days to recover and begin growth. When they do begin growing, they will do so vigorously, but during that recovery period, they are vulnerable to bacterial competition and especially vulnerable to the worms. I have dumped mushroom spawn directly into soil or compost where worms are present only to have them disappear in a day or two because the worms ate them. So I decided to give the mushrooms a protective casing. I had saved an old worn out pair of 100% cotton pants for just such an occasion. I cut one of the legs off of the pants and tied one end of the leg shut with cotton string. Then I took some of the drier leaves from the compost and made sure there weren’t any worms in them and stuffed them in first. I followed that with the myceliated toilet paper roll, cut in half to increase surface area. Finally, I stuffed in more leaves and tied the other end shut. The fabric of the pants will keep the worms out long enough for the mushrooms to get a foothold inside the pant leg and then use it as a platform to leap off into the compost. The mycelium will have no trouble growing right through the fabric and out into the compost. In the process it will digest the pants and string, which will just become part of the compost.

Now I just have one little problem. Since last year, fruit flies and fungus gnats have been a major problem in my compost. They take up residence and swarm when I come by, making it unpleasant to work around the compost. They also get in the house and drive my wife nuts. I was going to get me some beneficial nematodes and let them take care of the fruit flies and gnats for me. The problem is, oyster mushrooms eat nematodes. So I guess I need to find some and get them and let them do their job before the mushrooms completely take over.

In-Situ Composting

I am nearing the end of my first season of gardening in my biologically active container garden and that means it is time to assess successes and failures. Successes are pretty simple. The swiss chard and turnip pot was wildly successful and still is. The varmint protection systems had to be upgraded a few times, but ultimately held against some pretty determined varmints. Finally, my multi-layered pot, with beets in front, dill and cilantro in the middle and okra in the back, fared very well and provided a solid wall of green all summer long.

Failures were pretty easy to assess as well. I tried to grow marigolds and nasturtium as companion plants and both grew quicker than the plants they were supposed to help and took over. So next year the flowers go in the ground, not the pots. Eggplants, beets, tomatoes, beans, chervil, onions and gourds all failed to reach their potential, though of those the beets fared the best.

The biggest issue, though, was the soil. My starter soil was the leftovers from a myco-vermicomposting experiment I had done several years before. The soil was black, fine and a little sticky. My plants absolutely loved it. The problem was, there wasn't enough to go around. So I spread it out and thinned it out with composted and partially composted remnants I had around. Then I bought some composted wood chips from the local nursery. A few pots had several inches of this stuff on top. To all of this I added blood meal, bone meal, and an organic mixed fertilizer containing rock phosphate and greensand, among other things. A few plants seemed to lack nitrogen, but otherwise nutrients seemed to be fine. The plants in the pots that were primarily my homemade soil did just fine. The store-bought compost, however, was problematic. It was too chunky and made for excellent drainage. So excellent, in fact, that the plants couldn't manage to collect the water before it drained away. Seedlings would sprout and then dry out, despite being watered twice a day. The plants that made it floundered and failed to grow much.

In an attempt to get some well-needed soil amendment, I am going to be trying something a little new. I have previously tried composting at my house, but without some draconian measures, it has proven difficult to keep the javelinas out of my compost. They break into my container, break the container, and either eat or make a mess of the contents. For the last several months I have been giving my compost to the neighborhood bins. However, this weekend I was able to fully put one of the pots to bed for the winter, harvesting what remained of the beets and pulling up everything else. Since this bin has already proven itself javelina-proof, I pulled the soil out from the middle and pushed it up the sides, giving me a good place to put all of my scraps and trimmings. I also encountered a number of worms while digging, which means that they are there and ready to do my composting for me. With any luck, some or even most of it will be composted and ready to use by spring. Then I can use it to boost my soil for better nutrients, better biological activity, more worms, and better water-holding capability.

Compost Tea

Compost is wonderful stuff. It increases the health and vitality of your soil, thereby increasing the health of your plants. It does this primarily by feeding the beneficial microbes in the soil. When they become active, they make all kinds of good things. Add to this all of the major and minor nutrients that compost contains and it is practically the perfect supplement for your plants. There’s just one problem. Compost takes a long time to make. Okay, two problems. For every pound of raw material you put in, you only get a few ounces of finished compost. So you work hard all summer collecting table scraps, lawn clippings, and garden trimmings and you work hard all fall collecting all those fallen leaves. You fill the compost bin several times over, yet somehow by spring you only have enough to provide a sparse top dressing to your garden. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to make some sort of “compost concentrate” that you could apply or even get something that you can apply weekly? Well, it turns out that you can. It’s called compost tea.

Compost tea is a liquid version of compost that you spray on your plants as a foliar spray as well as pour on the soil around the plants. It is full of both beneficial nutrients and beneficial bacteria. Compost tea increases overall health of the plant and increases the thickness of the cuticle of the leaf, helping the plant better resist fungal and bacterial diseases. It also helps the plant better fend off insect predators. Best of all, it’s easier to make than you might think. There are many recipes out there, but after some research and experimentation, I have come up with my version that seems to work quite well for me.

First of all, you need materials:

Hardware
5 Gallon Bucket
Aquarium air pump with hose and diffuser
Filter (I use knee-high nylons)

Software
Water (Rainwater or filtered tap water. Chlorine=Bad)
Finished Compost
A few tablespoons of molasses

Procedure
Fill the bucket with the water. Fill the nylon with compost. I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule about how much, but a cup of compost per gallon of water is probably a good rule of thumb. Put the compost filled sock in the bucket and add the molasses. Hook up your pump, put the diffuser in the bucket and turn it on. After a half hour or so, you will start getting some foam on the top. This is a good thing. Soil-borne bacteria produce all kinds of by-products that act as a glue to hold the soil together. My guess is that these compounds are what is causing the foam. At any rate, it is a sign that you have good microbial action going on. Let it sit and brew for about 24 hours. A little more or a little less is fine, but I would let it brew at least 12 hours and probably no more than 48 hours. When it is done, spray it on your happy plants. The used compost can go back in the compost bin or straight on the soil.

There is one very important thing to remember about compost tea, though. It’s alive! If you let it sit around more than about 24 hours, the good bacteria might die and the bad ones might take over, so use it quickly.

For the sufficiently advanced bioneer, compost tea seems like an ideal medium for applying other supplements, like maybe a little garlic to help fend off herbivores. I haven’t begun experimentation of this yet, but it is on the docket. Stay tuned!

A Tip on Using Compost in Containers

It occurred to me that in my previous post I suggested using living, active soil in containers. I failed to mention that those containers are outside.

If finished compost is the most wonderful soil there is, why not use it to fill the pots for your houseplants, or at least amend the soil in the pots? Well, one simple reason: bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Big ones, little ones, benign ones and biting ones. Compost is home to lots and lots of bugs, which is only natural. After all, they do a lot of the breaking down of the material. They even become part of the material after they die. But you don't want them in your house. So if you are going to use the compost, you need to process it.

Now, you can bake, steam or boil it, but that kills ALL the life in the compost, not just the bugs. Part of the reason compost is so great is that it is so very alive. Plants thrive in a living soil. So how do you kill the bugs without harming all the beneficial fungus and bacteria? Use the metabolic rate of animals against them. Bacteria and fungus can survive in extremely low oxygen environments for extended periods of time without any serious detrimental side-effects. Bugs cannot. So put your compost in a ziploc-type (sorry, don't know the non-name brand term for those bags) bag or some other container that you know will be ABSOLUTELY air-tight and put it in a warm, dark place and make sure it is moist, but not soggy. Let it sit for a minimum of 3 days. A full week without air would be better. The active compost in the container will quickly use up the little oxygen that is there and kill off almost all of the bugs.

What to Compost

Ah, the age-old quandary: What can you put in the compost bin?

Well, for starters, let's throw out the stuff that should never be put in your compost bin. Remember what your compost bin is for. It is a place to dispose of organic matter (things that were once living) where it will decompose rapidly via natural processes to produce a soil amendment that you can then add to your garden or other plantings to increase the health and nutrient content of the soil. So that sentence should give you some pretty good clues as to what you can't put in the compost bin. Here are some basic criteria:

1) Don't put anything in the compost bin that won't decompose. For example, don't put metal, plastic, ceramic, small cars, etc. into the compost because it will still be there when you try to use the compost.

2) Don't put any chemical contaminants in the compost. One problem is that they may disturb the natural processes that you are relying on for decomposition. Things like gasoline, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, motor oil, wet concrete, etc. are not good for compost. Also remember that if you are trying to garden organically, it means compost and not using pesticides and herbicides and such. So contaminating your compost with that stuff, is kind of shooting yourself in the foot.

3) Don't put any natural contaminants in the compost. There are other, biological contaminants that you also want to avoid putting in your compost. Examples include weeds that have gone to seed and contain seed heads, plants that died of a disease, and plants that were killed by herbicides, and pet waste. Generally waste from carnivorous pets, like cats and dogs, can carry a number of parasites that can also be infectious to people. Waste from herbivorous pets, such as rabbits, is pretty safe and can usually be added to compost.

Okay, so what SHOULD you put in the compost bin? Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Yard debris, lawn clippings, fallen leaves and kitchen scraps are what compost bins were made for. But don't forget that if it has plant origins, it just might be compostable. That includes paper towels, tissues, 100% cotton clothing, cardboard, newspaper, paper plates, and many more things. Just look at what made it. If it is 100% plant-based, there is a good chance it is safe. I personally shy away from glossy printed materials, be they cardboard, paper plates, or newspaper. I have heard that kaolinite, which is a kind of clay, which is a kind of dirt, is used to make things glossy, but I don't know enough about the process to trust that there isn't something else in there I don't want in my compost. I also compost some clothing, but stay away from zippers, iron-on decals, and the like. Every now and then I pull a strip of elastic out of my compost.

That leaves us with the controversial items. I'll list them here along with my opinions on the matter:

1) Wood - I tend to throw it in. It can take years to break down, but eventually it does. Especially if there is good fungus involved and lots of moisture. Smaller pieces break down faster.

2) Meat - One of the cardinal rules of composting is don't put meat in the compost. I have yet to read a compelling reason for this. All they say is "it attracts pests." It has been my experience that COMPOST attracts pests, whether or not there is meat in it. Meat is obviously organic material. Also, two of the most common organic fertilizers are blood meal and bone meal, both of which are by-products of the meat packing industry. So I do actually put meat in my compost, with a few guidelines. I only put small amounts in. I prefer scraps from cooked meat. I steer clear of raw chicken because of salmonella issues. I also avoid bones because they take longer than wood to fully decompose.

3) Dairy - The same reasons are given for not putting dairy in the compost as for meat. I think they apply even less to dairy than meat and compost it freely.

4) Vegetable Oil - Large quantities of this are produced as a by-product of deep frying, and are often difficult to dispose of. The popularity of vehicles run on biofuels have made this process easier, it is still not terribly convenient. So, can you just dump the oil in the compost bin? Well, first of all, it is VEGETABLE oil, so I would say you can. In fact, I have done just that more times than I can mention without any ill effects to my precious compost. The trick is to do it with care. The main factor to be aware of is what percentage of your compost has become pure oil. Too much oil will smother the very life that you are trying to culture. I have always had a large compost bin and have dumped in less than a gallon less than once a month. If you fry a lot and generate huge amounts of fry oil or have a tiny, kitchen compost bin, you might want to find another disposal method for your fry oil.

Just remember, compost is like your own personal recycling operation. It takes items out of the trash stream and converts them into the best soil amendment you can get.