3.4.7. Composting

Compost

Compost is soil made up fully of organic materials. The main use we have for a compost pile is to renew veggie beds yearly or to build new veggie beds. We tend to use the other methods to build soil in our permanent systems. Veggies take a lot of nutrition and don’t give back, so veggie beds need to be regularly fed.

There are many ways to build a compost pile. We’re going to share one a simple approach. Compost should have approximately equal parts of brown (carbon) and green material (nitrogen). Brown material would include woody or brown organic material such as wood chips, straw, brown leaves, dried grass - that’s the carbon.

Green material includes food waste, fresh manure, fresh grass clippings or leaves - that’s the nitrogen. The green material provides the fire, or microorganisms that help break things down. The brown provides the fuel and helps moderate temperatures. If you have too little or too much of either one, the compost won't reach the temperatures needed to break down well.

We’ve found that a good ratio is 1-2 parts brown material to 1 part green. We’re actually looking for a 30 carbon to 1 part nitrogen ratio, but all materials that contain nitrogen also contain carbon, so that’s why we have those ratios.

Compost breaks down optimally between 120 and 140 degrees F. A compost thermometer is a useful thing to have, to get it right and it’s inexpensive. It’s a great tool to help you learn how to manage your pile. If the pile isn’t hot enough, add more green.

If too hot, or if your compost smells, add more brown. We collect oak leaves yearly from neighbors and use those almost exclusively for brown material. They are a fabulous addition to compost on many levels - many beneficial elements in them. Old grass, leaves, wood chips, dried weeds, all work well as brown material.

You need a sufficient mass of compost to heat it up as well. This is generally 4’X4’. We use pallets to create our compost boxes, and have three of them - one for starter compost, one to turn the compost into, and one for the finished compost.

We turn the compost pile regularly between the first and second boxes, but this is not necessary - it just takes longer to break down without turning.

Compost needs two additional things to process quickly - air and water. Air is gotten by turning the compost once in a while or sticking a fork in it and fluffing it. If you are willing to turn it every two days, you can have composted soil within 3 weeks or less. Water it when you turn it, if any layers have dried out.

If you turn it once a week or once a month, it will take longer but will still work. Turning helps the entire pile compost more evenly and ensures that it’s aerated and evenly moist.

Moisture is created by watering the pile as you stack it so that all portions are moist. This will greatly speed the process. A compost pile with the right moisture will give off a few drops when squeezed. If too soggy or if the pile dries out, beneficial bacteria can’t survive in sufficient volume to break the pile down.

We recommend covering the compost pile with a tarp or with mulch or leaves to protect it from the sun and from drying out. This reduces your workload and retains more nutrition.

One of our favorite compost recipes:

We have a diversity of biology (the manure, compost, food and worms all have different microbes), lots of nutrition, and a balanced pile that should “cook” evenly and quickly. This recipe has made us some really beautiful compost!

But keep in mind - anything you put together is better than nothing. So don’t hesitate to pile up your food scraps in some backyard corner and throw some leaves over it. It is still going to end up being worth it - your plants will love you for it.

Troubleshooting your compost pile

Do you have the right ratio of carbon to nitrogen? If it’s smelly or slimy you have too much nitrogen in that section - mix some carbon in. If it’s just sitting there and not heating up, you have too much carbon and you need to add some hot material.

Another reason it might not heat up is if the pile is too small. The best and fastest way to make great compost is to get enough material together to make a 4X4 foot pile all at once. There is enough mass there to break it down.

You could be using the wrong ingredients as well. If the wood chips are big, they won’t break down. If you have a lot of large chunks of food, citrus peels, avocado seeds, that won’t break down as fast either, in cooler climates especially.

In cold climates, winter can shut down the compost process if it gets cold enough, by freezing some or all of the pile.

Is it moist? If not, ensure the entire pile is moist throughout. If it’s dripping wet, let it dry out a bit, turn it little by little if needed, to let it dry out. It should be only moist, not dripping or soggy wet. If it’s drying out - do you have enough of a cover on it? Tarps work, but so do banana leaves or palm leaves or grasses or whatever material is handy.

We prefer organic covering because the plastic from tarps can degrade and end up in your compost. 🙁 Some people build a shelter over their compost to keep it protected.

Is it too cool or too warm? Too cool, add fresh nitrogen. Too warm, you’re probably ok (you will kill many weed seeds and pathogens above 145F, but it also kills off beneficial microbes that operate in that sweet spot of 120-140. It will take them a bit to repopulate.

Your pile will start cooling off after a while, that’s natural. As long as it’s still breaking down and it got hot initially, it should be fine.

What about creatures? We haven’t had severe animal problems because we cover the “green” material, especially food, really well. If you let your pile sit instead of turning, you may get rats nesting in it - that’s the one thing we’ve experienced but we were ok with that.

Turning it once a week or once every two weeks will make that impossible for them. You will have plenty of insects in the pile and you want those!

Can you put meat, fat, bones, and oil in the compost pile? Yes, you can put anything organic in there. Meat and bones will break down more slowly and tend to attract more wild animals, but they have some great probiotics and nutrition in them that you could return to the garden.

In the past, when we’ve lost a chicken or pet, we typically bury it and plant a tree over it. At one point, we had foxes and we wanted to keep them away from the main area so we would bury meat in the far corner of the farm. It seemed to work, we didn't lose any chickens.

Informal composting

We do a lot of informal composting - we pile up weeds or grasses that we chopped down, we throw food scraps in a pit in a banana circle and cover them with wood chips or leaves, we rake up leaves on pathways and throw them over chicken manure or food scraps or seaweed we throw down to create a new garden bed from scratch, or pile up any other organic material we come up with.

Using the principles of sheet mulching or composting, you can design all kinds of informal, easy to implement “composting in place” around your site. I think my favorite is the banana circle compost pile as bananas are notoriously hungry for nitrogen and nutrients in general - why not put them right where they’re needed?

In Florida and all subtropics/tropics except drylands to some degree, organic matter breaks down very fast, especially during hot, rainy summers. We have routinely sheet mulched beds in May with wood chips that have totally broken down into compost by Oct.

A good thing to remember about composting and soil building in general is that it can take some time to get comfortable with it, and observing your system is a big part of getting there faster.

Vermicomposting

Worms eat leaves and other organic matter, and turn it into a magical substance through worm alchemy, or worm castings. Worm castings are the poo of worms. It has many exceptional qualities to offer to soil and to your plants. The mucus from the worms helps build beautiful soil aggregates that are packed with nutrients that become a sort of slow release fertilizer, and they create aeration in the soil.

You can get castings from different types of worms.

Red wigglers are the usual “composting” worms. You can buy these in a lot of places including online. Sometimes people sell some other kind of worm as a red wiggler. I’ve personally found that whatever it is, it does ok. They usually don’t last in your garden; they prefer to live in a contained environment.

Native worms are different in every system. Some areas don’t have native worms. Don’t import them or try to establish them - you may damage the system. There is some evidence that worms that ended up in forests they aren’t native in are imbalancing the system by processing leaf litter too efficiently, removing both food and shelter from other creatures important to the system.

If your system is appropriate for native worms, chances are they’ll show up on their own or are already there and you need do nothing. If you want to accelerate the process, bring some in and see if they like it.

Red wigglers are the traditional compost worms. They like nitrogen rich food waste and manure. I find that native worms usually do great in manure especially, and often just use that. They also tend to do well with carbon heavy material like leaves.

Red wigglers - the compost worm

Worms are surprisingly picky about their environment. We’ll spend time on discussing their needs as you’re much more likely to be successful if you meet them. Here are the basics:

Bedding, they must have it. It’s a place to go if it gets too wet or hot or dry. Bedding is brown material that isn’t too rough. Could be paper, cardboard, wood shavings, leaves. All should be in small pieces.

Wood chips don’t work as well; too many rough edges and they struggle to eat it. They will eat and process the bedding eventually, so it will need to be replaced. I put a couple of inches at the bottom of the bin and the top.

Moisture, like compost, shouldn't be too wet or too dry. Worms can drown if there is too much moisture, and will die if it dries out too much too. You can often find them piled up on the top of the bin underneath the lid if it’s too wet. They may even find a way out of the box. If it’s too dry, they’re probably at the bottom where the most moisture is. Material should be moist, but not dripping, similar to a good compost pile.

Mild temperatures, worms will slow way down in severe heat or cold, or may try to escape it by finding their way out of their bin. They like temperatures we’re comfortable in, 65-82F or so.

I used to keep worm bins behind my couch inside my house so they would produce more efficiently. No one was the wiser. I now keep them in shallow pits that we line and cover with billboard or pond liner, under a shade tree to protect them from both cold and heat. They will die if it gets too hot or cold, somewhere in the range of over 100 or freezing.

Friends have kept worms inside old refrigerators through the winter in very cold regions (well below zero temperatures).

If you do kill off your worms, there are almost always worm eggs in there that will rehatch once you create the right conditions.

Food, this can be tricky or simple, depending on your batch of worms and some of the above factors. Most worms like manure, chopped up or blended food waste, fiber from juicing, coffee grounds, or compost.

Different batches of red wigglers like different things. They actually have a sort of group personality. I had a batch once that just loved coffee grounds. They’d go through a tub of grounds in a month or less.

Another batch I had, hated coffee grounds and would only process manure which they loved. Another batch I had didn’t like anything - they were constantly finding ways to escape the box and run for the hills (or in my case, various places on my porch).

That was a very unique batch that I finally just threw into my humanure pits; I still find some in there sometimes, along with the native worms that moved in too. Most batches like a variety of things and aren’t quite that picky.

One of the most successful vermicomposting operations I’ve ever seen is Growing Power in Milwaukee, an urban gardening/farming teaching and demonstration site. They processed lots of food waste from restaurants mixed with yard waste in giant windrows (compost piles). Once it was fully composted they fed it to their worms. Those worms LOVED the compost. If you want success with worms with minimal issues, feed them compost. https://en.wikipedia/org/wiki/Growing_Power

Food waste is tricky for worms without processing it. If chunks are big, they may not finish them. It can heat up (too much nitrogen), or get slimy (anaerobic, lack of oxygen) and cause a hostile environment for the worms.

Some people blend or process their food waste and their worms love that. Some people only use the fiber from juicing - worms love that too! But it can’t be too wet. It’s important to ensure they have sufficient “bedding” if you feed them food waste with no processing, and it will tend to be a less smooth operation.

Their home, a worm bin can be made from a simple rectangular tub with a lid on it. The fancy ones you buy don’t necessarily work any better than a simple homemade version in our experience. Make sure you include very small drainage holes on the bottom, and air holes on the top. Baby worms may crawl out of those holes if they’re anything but tiny.

I put one bin inside the other to catch the water draining. This is called leachate. Some people swear by it as “Worm compost tea.” That is an incorrect label. It doesn’t have the same positive qualities as compost tea because compost tea is oxygenated, thus having different types of bacteria in it. Leachate can have disease vectors in it so don’t expect uniform results from it though it does have nutrients in it.

Their home should have a covering on it. They have lots of predators and competitors for their food supply. One competitor that can quickly wipe out your worms are black soldier flies. They prefer meat but will lay eggs in food.

The maggots very aggressively go through food and leave very little behind for the worms. Those maggots BTW, are some of the most favorite food for chickens, ever. They will be your fast friend if you feed them some.

We’ve used these inexpensive bins with great results to make lots of worm castings. Easy to move around and store in a variety of locations.

Harvest the worm compost, so, your worms are done - what we do is to let the top part dry out and then harvest it. The worms have all moved into the bottom half.

We now shove all the lovely worm compost over to one side, and fill up the other side with new material. Almost all the worms will migrate over to the new material within 48 hours or so, and you now can harvest the remaining beautiful castings, without having to pick worms out of it or end up with a bunch in your garden bed that don’t survive.

Manure

Manure is one of the best sources of fertilizer for plants and is mainly valued for its nitrogen content, but it has many supportive elements beyond nitrogen. Different manures have different amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients. Manure also has a complex biology of beneficial bacteria and other microscopic creatures that helps build live soils. We like using different types of manures in our system to increase the biological diversity.

Chicken manure is very nitrogen rich, therefore “hot.” A little goes a long way. It’s best to break this down into compost or age it a bit before using it in your system. Mix it with “brown” material as well like leaves. A good way to do that is with stacked bedding. See the course section on animals for more info on that.

Horse manure has the least nitrogen in it - it’s generally safe to add that to tree systems right away.

Cow, goat, pig, and sheep manure are all excellent manures that have mid-range amounts of nitrogen.

See our section on human manure for how to handle that safely.

There are risks of e. Coli and other pathogens with every manure so use basic safety procedures. Don’t apply fresh manure to lettuce or other low lying greens. This is the #1 reason for lettuce recall by the FDA.

The safest way to avoid this is to use compost in your garden beds rather than fresh manure. We have used fresh manure to build sheet mulch in many gardens and have never had an issue, but we always cover it with wood chips and/or a compost layer. This keeps it from directly contacting lettuce leaves, for instance.

Avoiding toxins when gathering manure and other organic materials

It is hard to avoid toxins completely when using organic materials from the waste stream or even from organic certified sources (though your chances of safety are much greater if certified). We live in a world where multiple toxins are found in almost every substance, everywhere.

But you can minimize them in a number of ways. Lets take a look at how.

Wood chips

The vast majority of the time, wood chips from oak trees or other large landscape trees are quite safe. They are rarely sprayed with herbicides or pesticides. I tell tree companies that we do not want wood that has been sprayed, but they dont’ always know themselves.

We have used hundreds of truck loads of mulch, and have never gotten a load we felt was sprayed (sprayed foliage often has a distinct odor, greasiness and other indicators). Overall, I am not worried about it, as the composting process with good, live bacteria, does break down or neutralize many chemicals.

Manure

There is one type of manure that can be a problem for your garden. Manure should be from animals who have not been fed GMO or pesticide/herbicide laden feed, are not on antibiotics (or on them recently), and if wormed, get manure from them right before they were wormed if possible. If not, compost the manure before giving it to worms. We don’t want to bring manure into the worm beds that will kill them!

If the animal is pasture fed and owned by a family or a small operation, chances are the pasture hasn’t been sprayed or the animal fed some poison. But you have to ask. Most people with small farm animals are honest and will be straight with you.

There is a family of herbicides that kill any broadleaf herbaceous plants, but don’t kill grass. The names of these chemicals are not important and change sometimes, or end up in various brand name products that change names.

The thing to understand is that they are broadly used to solve this problem. These herbicides are used on pasture grasses because there are some broadleaf weeds, like creeping indigo, that can be deadly toxic to grazing animals. If grazing, animals will usually avoid them but when made into hay, it’s a lot harder.

What makes these such a problem for us is that these specific herbicides persist in their ability to kill broadleaf plants, which include most vegetables and herbs, through the animal’s digestive system and even after composting the manure!

Most “cides'' break down to some degree through this process, but these particular chemicals do not. In fact, it takes a lot of years or spreading manure in the direct sun (which pretty much destroys its value to us) or other extreme measures to get rid of these pesticides so they don’t kill your plants.

So manure created from animals eating this hay, cannot be used on vegetables or herbs or it will kill or stunt them.

How can you tell? Two methods:

1. Use only manure from animals fed organic hay or alfalfa hay. Alfalfa, a broad leaf plant, is killed by these herbicides, thus they can’t be used in alfalfa fields, so it is safe. But it must be pure alfalfa. There are many horse people in most areas and there are always some that feed only organic. They are usually happy to let you pick up some manure. I find them by asking for it on Facebook sites for homesteaders, farmers, or horse people.
2. When you get manure, test it by planting a number of bean seeds in various places on the pile of manure. Wait until the bean plants put out a second leaf. If they look normal, the manure is fine. Beans are the “canary in the cage.” They grow fast so you don’t have to wait a long time, they are sensitive to this herbicide, and will be obviously impacted by it if it is present.

Food Waste

If food is certified organic or from a source you know doesn’t use chemicals you are doing great! If it is regular grocery store food, know this: The compost process does break down a lot of herbicides and pesticides into less harmful substances. Beneficial fungi and bacteria in the system continue that work.

Nutrition supplements for plants/animals

You need to know what the source of the supplement is, and what else they put in it. Use companies with proven reputations, where possible. The OMRI label on a project indicates that it has been tested by an independent company that certifies it is what it says it is, and is organic. We buy only products with that label, or local products where we know the supplier.

Example, kelp is a very popular supplement. Was it harvested on the NE coast? It better be in an unusually pristine location like Canada perhaps because the mid-Atlantic near the coast is a cesspool.

It’s extra work to find out if what you’re innocently collecting up for an exciting and creative use and purpose (whether new or used) has some kind of deadly poison attached to it or not, but that is the condition of the planet unfortunately. And we’re doing something about it, fortunately. 🙂

Espoma organic fertilizer is the main thing we use. It’s the standard fertilizer for many organic gardeners and farmers. It gets great results. Don’t overuse, especially if your water table is high, as the nutrients end up in the water rather than on your plants.