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.

Onward Into Aquaponics

I know this blog has been silent for many months. It is certainly not because there is little going on here in Mad Bioneer world. Life has been full of changes and I have been working very hard on some very interesting projects that have come together very, very well. The picture shows my current setup, which I now have fully assembled and functional. Over the next several posts I will explain my intermediate steps, of which there have been plenty, and how I got to where I am, including my successes and failures.

But first of all, I want to start with the hypothesis I was testing. After all, that is where all good science starts. As I have mentioned before, I am not a big fan of hydroponics. My passion is the understanding of each of the roles that living organisms play in the overall health and functionality of a living system and making sure that those roles are filled by something in my system. Any system that removes all of the life except the plant and requires the operator (and expensive machinery) to do their work is pretty much the opposite of what I want to do.

However, with some great conversations with the very knowledgeable guys at Home Grown Hydroponics in Tempe, AZ, I have come to understand that that is just one version of hydroponics. As I dug farther into this on my way to eventually designing and building my very own aquaculture greenhouse, I settled on some version of aquaponics. For those of you not familiar, this is a system where a fish tank is connected up to some grow beds. The water from the tank is regularly pumped through the grow beds, where the plants filter the fish waste out of the water. It filters the water for the fish and fertilizes the plants all in one ingenious system.

However, being at my core a soils guy, I was just not content to toss the soil out the window. After all, that is where the magic happens. I have said it before and I have said it again: A gardener doesn't take care of his plants. He takes care of his soil. The soil takes care of the plants. So I wanted to see if I could manage an aquaponics system using soil instead of media.

I did some amount of digging and most of what I found used media with aquaponics, not soil. The one book I had not only discouraged its use, but actually said some stunningly inaccurate things about the role soil plays in a plant's health. But aside from saying that the soil essentially is just holding the plant up, the only reason it gave for not using soil is that it will color the water, making it harder to check on your fish. I can tell you from experience that this is true, but that the colored water is in no way harmful to the fish. While it would be neat to watch my fish closely every day, I have other ways of determining how healthy they are.

So here I am, with a fully functional test system that incorporates not only soil into aquaponics, but also hugelkultur. And, boy oh boy am I having fun. Stay tuned, as I will be going into great detail about how I got here. It will probably be way more detail than you wanted, but hey, I find that everyone else leaves out all the details I want, so I may as well be different.

An Unexpected Benefit of Container Gardening

A little over a year ago, we switched from a stable existence in a house with a large back yard to one in transition, with no appreciable back yard. It'll still be a year or so before I can move back to a real house and start gardening in earnest again. The problem is, I just can't go that long without gardening. Last summer I set myself up with a container garden on the back of the apartment I am renting. Despite getting a really late start, it was a wonderfully productive garden that provided much produce. As is usually my habit, I grew a fall garden. I typically plant a little lettuce and a bunch of spinach. Combined with the swiss chard I usually grow all summer, I get fresh greens until things get really cold and shut everything down for the season.

One benefit of growing spinach as a late season crop is that it survives the winter. Even in my Zone 5 garden up in Colorado, it survived all winter one year, perhaps because it had a nice bed of snow almost the whole time. But here in my Zone 7 garden in Arizona, it consistently survives the winter. (FYI, I have also had cilantro and snapdragons survive all winter, perking up in the spring). The spinach just turns a little pathetic looking after Thanksgiving or so and shuts down for the season. After that, you don't really get any more produce. However, once things warm up in the spring, it is ready to explode into life. It already has a root system in place and will grow rapidly and produce huge amounts at the first hint of spring. In my garden in Colorado, I found myself trying to find a way to eat spinach at every single meal.

Since my garden is in a container this year, I found a new benefit. The soil is up out of the ground and sitting in full sun with a lovely southern exposure. It is next to the house so the heat from the house helps as well. This year my spinach never shut down. It isn't as if it hasn't been a cold winter. Morning temps have been mostly in the 20s for a month and a half or so. We have gotten a total of about 2 feet of snow. Of course, this being the high desert, daytime temps do get over freezing nearly every day. I am sure that helps. I have just been surprised that not only is it still big and healthy looking, but it is still growing. I still harvest a little spinach when I have tacos or a burger. What I take grows back in a week or so.

And it isn't just the spinach. Swiss chard is a biennial. It shuts down even more than the spinach. When it comes back the next year, it is putting energy towards the production of seeds, so the greens are of low quality, usually small and tough. So, typically, swiss chard isn't worth having after winter really sets in. Today (January 31) I decided to clean up my containers and get them ready for spring planting. That involved pulling out the rest of the swiss chard. Once I sorted it and washed what was still worth eating, I filled a gallon bag with beautiful, healthy swiss chard.

I think next year I'll have to plan my winter garden a little better.

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.

A Bioneered Container Garden

Two years ago I decided that an outdoor mushroom log just wasn't going to work in Arizona without serious irrigation, so I decided to try to grow them in pots indoors. I filled the pots around the logs with wood chips, which gave more nutrients for the mushrooms to consume. I put plants in the pots to pull the water out of the bottom of those pots before it stagnated. The plants also utilized the carbon dioxide the logs gave off as they decomposed. I put worms in the pot to help the mushrooms break the wood chips down into a rich compost for the plants. The experiment worked beautifully. I got many mushrooms off of the logs, one or two of which have completed their life cycles. The wood chips have long since been turned into black soil and the worms continue to thrive. The plants were a mixed bag. One died, but that was more the cat’s fault. The rest thrived, one so much that it got way too big for the space and had to be thrown out.

Recently my family and I moved to an apartment that doesn't have room outside for a garden. What's a bioneer to do? Improvise, of course. In addition to the four pots with logs in them, I also had a large metal tub that I had filled with the plants I intended to take with me from the old house and a whiskey barrel that I bought to be a rain barrel before we decided to sell the house and move. Cut in half, it made two big pots for planting. The metal tub was completely overgrown with irises, who apparently love the rich compost created from yet another batch of decomposed wood chips, and needed to be transplanted.

It seemed to me that I had a perfect opportunity. Not only did I have work that needed to be done, but I also had the necessary components needed for a container and a perfect chance to take my living soil to the next stage in its life cycle.

Wood decomposing mushrooms are called primary decomposers. Those that decompose partially decomposed wood and compost are called secondary decomposers. Mushrooms that live in the soil, finishing off the decomposition process are called tertiary decomposers. Shaggy mane mushrooms lie somewhere between secondary and tertiary decomposers, preferring to live in rich soils. They are a favorite of mushroom hunters, being easy to recognize and quite tasty. They are also relatively easy to grow, but will never be found in your grocery store due to a shelf life of only about 24 hours. They seemed a good choice for my container garden.

The first task was to move the irises into the ground (I do have a little land behind the current apartment, but not enough for a real garden) and all of the plants that were in the four pots into one pot. The largest pot with the largest log was the obvious recipient. It was a tight fit, but they all fit nicely. Then I had to re-mix the soil. The black, sticky compost was great for plants, but wouldn't offer long term nutrition for the mushrooms. I also didn't have anywhere enough to fill all my pots. So I added some fresh wood chips, some compost from the hardware store, and, begrudgingly, some potting soil. Then I built a varmint screen for each pot to try to keep the critters out.

Finally, I seeded the pots. I actually seeded them very heavily because my seeds were old. As seeds age, they lose viability, so a larger percentage of them will fail to sprout. So with seeds over three years old or so, you seed heavily and then thin as needed.

So now the wait is on. Will the seeds sprout? Will the shaggy manes take hold and find enough nutrition to produce mushrooms? Will the mushrooms also eat my wooden pots? Did I start too late in the season? Will the varmint screens work, or will my plants pay the ultimate price?

Only time will tell.