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jenniferkobernikGreetings! I've decided to resume the Resilience Club posts, but in a more bite-sized format, at least for a while; I will be breaking down the theme of producing necessities for oneself into a series of posts over several weeks, if not months, depending on how it goes. To wit:
Once you have spent some time assessing your real needs, living with less, and conserving your resources, it is time to shift your attention from pruning to fruitfulness. Rather than living as a consumer, even a frugal one, you should begin to produce some necessities for yourself.
If you don’t know where to begin, I would suggest that compost, food, medicine, clothing, shelter for yourself and/or your possessions, and furnishings are extremely useful, and producing them is eminently achievable for the beginner with access to the internet or a public library. There are, of course, almost innumerable useful or beautiful things that one might produce, but we’ll look at each of these in a bit more depth over the coming weeks.
Compost
Compost may not make it onto many people’s list of necessities, but it’s hard to do without if you want to grow food organically (which, as someone who makes her living as a regenerative farmer and rancher, I am biased in favor of). It is also a good way to reduce waste and even to save money on landfill fees if you currently throw away food scraps or pay to have yard waste hauled away.
There are many methods of composting, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages, but in deference to the busy and inexperienced, I'll start with the two easiest ways that I know of: 1) the Ruth Stout method and 2) a mouldering pile, or what is sometimes called a cold pile (as opposed to a hot, or thermophilic pile). We'll cover the better-known, more elaborate and labor-intensive methods later.
The Ruth Stout Method
The Ruth Stout method has the advantage of taking place on location, as it were, rather than in a separate pile which must be moved once it is finished composting.
In this method, you essentially lay down a thick, permanent mulch (it can be basically any form of vegetation, including leaves or wood chips, but spoiled hay is often preferred if you can get it–although these days you must be very wary of persistent herbicides in any hay you source).
You can either build the mulch with the most nitrogenous material (such as kitchen scraps) at the bottom, covered by increasingly carbonaceous material (such as dead leaves), or you can lay down the carbon mulch and then periodically tuck your nitrogenous material underneath, right in the garden itself, and allow it to decompose over time, enriching the soil in that location.
There are some disadvantages–in my experience, primarily:
1. It can be difficult to acquire enough mulching material to get started, and if the mulch is not sufficiently thick, it doesn’t work very well and can even be counterproductive (for instance, by introducing weed seeds in the mulching material without being thick enough to suppress their germination).
2. It is inconvenient and occasionally gooey and malodorous to have this sort of thing going on right where one works in the garden. For this reason, the method is in my opinion better suited to being used around perennials rather than in an annual vegetable garden, or on fallow beds that will not be used until next season, or to prepare a new garden which will henceforth be maintained by the addition of mature compost.
3. The addition of large amounts of carbonaceous material can actually result in nitrogen immobilization, especially in the beginning, making it less available to plants–a serious detriment for most gardens, although one that will improve over time.
4. You can occasionally kill a plant by “burning” it if you are not careful and put highly nitrogenous material such as chicken manure or a pile of kitchen scraps too near a delicate plant.
It takes longer than a thermophilic pile to break down, so it’s not ideal if you need to increase stable soil organic matter quickly.
5. You have to keep track of where you added the last batch of scraps so as not to put too much in one area, and even so you don’t end up with an easily portable, uniform, or evenly distributed end result. This variety can be a good thing, as different plants thrive in different conditions, but for a new gardener and/or one trying to achieve consistent results in a traditional row garden, it can be problematic.
I’ve used this method extensively in the past, but ultimately abandoned it for the most part. I would certainly consider it in the future if I had access to lots of high-quality mulch material and were going to prepare a new perennial bed. The method certainly has some staunch (and successful) advocates, and Ruth Stout herself was rather magnificent.
Here is a write-up with more detail about both Ruth and her methods:
https://www.homestead.org/gardening/ruth-stout-no-dig-duchess/
Ruth Stout also wrote several books, although I haven’t read them and can’t comment on their quality:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ARuth+Stout&s=relevancerank&text=Ruth+Stout&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
Many of her titles are variations on the theme of “no work”--this will probably seem like a vicious lie if you try her method on a decent-sized garden having never gardened before, but if you come from a background of, say, double-digging, it might very well seem accurate.
Mouldering (or Cold) Compost Piles
When most people talk about composting, they are referring to "hot," or thermophilic compost piles. These have the advantage of producing finished compost quickly and of killing weed seeds, but they require more labor and more attention to inputs than a mouldering pile. We will discuss thermophilic piles in a later post, but for now, let's talk about cold piles.
Since you are not trying to get the pile to heat up to a specific temperature, you can use any combination of "greens" (nitrogenous materials, often but not always green in color) and "browns" (carbonaceous materials, often brown in color). You can also add them slowly over time, rather than in one big batch, and you don't have to turn the pile. You can even, especially if your pile is large and relatively far away from the house, toss in things that people are always saying you can't compost (meat, fat, dead varmints, etc), but I would save that for when you have more experience.
The basic procedure is this: Choose a location for your pile. My favorite thing to do is to choose a place where I would like to plant a tree in a year or two; once the pile is finished and moved, the soil underneath its former location will be very rich and easy to dig.
I also like to rotate cold piles through my vegetable garden, with one pile maturing and one pile being added to at any given time, changing locations each time so that eventually the entire garden space has been covered and enriched by the piles. Do note that this won't work if you are limited in space or in more commercial garden spaces which need to be laid out very efficiently, and you may experience some slightly unpleasant smells periodically if you add lots of nitrogenous material without much carbonaceous material.
Once you have a location, you can simply start piling things there, or you can create a bin out of pallets wired together, wire mesh bent into a loop and wired to itself, or something of that nature. You don't really need a bin, but it can make things look tidier and provide some containment.
Then you just add your materials as they need disposing of. Yard waste such as grass clippings or raked leaves (if you don't just leave these on the lawn), kitchen scraps, tree trimmings, spoiled hay, straw, or wood shavings from the barn, stable, or chicken coop (again, be careful about herbicides and wormers; persistent herbicides used on hay fields can destroy your garden's ability to produce anything but grass for years), sawdust from the wood shop, etcetera. If the pile starts to stink, it's a good idea to throw on some carbon-rich materials such as dead leaves or wood chips if you can get them; you can also just wait a few days without adding more kitchen scraps or other nitrogenous material, and the problem will usually take care of itself.
Eventually, you stop adding material, start a new pile, and wait until the old pile matures. This will take at least nine months or so in my experience; when ready, the compost will be dark brown, finely textured and uniform in appearance (except perhaps for some resistant materials, such as bones, eggshells, tree branches, etcetera), and will smell earthy and rich, with no offensive smells. At this point, it is ready to use; you can sift it through a screen to remove any larger bits if you like, but I usually don't unless there's a lot of awkward large woody material left or I intend to use it in seed trays or houseplants or something similar.
Some people water their piles periodically to keep them moist or build a little roof over them to prevent leaching, but in my opinion it's not terribly necessary unless you live in a very wet or dry climate or really wish to optimize the quality of the compost. If you simply want a low-labor source of stable organic matter for your soil, an open pile will usually suffice. If you want to make the best possible compost (to my knowledge), we will cover Johnson-Su bioreactors in a later post.
The advantages of the mouldering (cold) compost method are:
1. It's easy! You don't have to think about ratios of carbon to nitrogen or turn the pile periodically.
2. You don't have to source large amounts of inputs at once, and can add materials as needed.
3. Because it is left in place to compost rather than turned, it will develop a very diverse, usually fugally-dominated (as opposed to bacterially-dominated) biological community with many trophic layers present. As a general rule, a cold compost will be biologically richer than thermophilic compost. This sort of compost is especially good for trees and perennials.
The disadvantages are:
1. It takes a long time (I've had cold piles going for multiple years at times, but you'll need a few months at least, and a year is better; two years may be better still, depending on your inputs and your climate).
2. It doesn't kill weed seeds, so if you add weedy plant waste, you can end up planting weeds in your garden when you add the compost later.
3. You can end up with a perpetual compost pile and no finished compost if you're not intentional about it. At some point you have to stop adding material and allow all of it to finish composting. As the material composts, it shrinks, so if you are using a bin of some sort, you can easily add material periodically for years without the pile ever filling the bin and triggering the creation of a new pile. In that case, you've really just created a waste heap, not a useful source of compost for gardening.
There you have it! Next time, we'll cover classic thermophilic composting, and perhaps vermicomposting.
Once you have spent some time assessing your real needs, living with less, and conserving your resources, it is time to shift your attention from pruning to fruitfulness. Rather than living as a consumer, even a frugal one, you should begin to produce some necessities for yourself.
If you don’t know where to begin, I would suggest that compost, food, medicine, clothing, shelter for yourself and/or your possessions, and furnishings are extremely useful, and producing them is eminently achievable for the beginner with access to the internet or a public library. There are, of course, almost innumerable useful or beautiful things that one might produce, but we’ll look at each of these in a bit more depth over the coming weeks.
Compost
Compost may not make it onto many people’s list of necessities, but it’s hard to do without if you want to grow food organically (which, as someone who makes her living as a regenerative farmer and rancher, I am biased in favor of). It is also a good way to reduce waste and even to save money on landfill fees if you currently throw away food scraps or pay to have yard waste hauled away.
There are many methods of composting, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages, but in deference to the busy and inexperienced, I'll start with the two easiest ways that I know of: 1) the Ruth Stout method and 2) a mouldering pile, or what is sometimes called a cold pile (as opposed to a hot, or thermophilic pile). We'll cover the better-known, more elaborate and labor-intensive methods later.
The Ruth Stout Method
The Ruth Stout method has the advantage of taking place on location, as it were, rather than in a separate pile which must be moved once it is finished composting.
In this method, you essentially lay down a thick, permanent mulch (it can be basically any form of vegetation, including leaves or wood chips, but spoiled hay is often preferred if you can get it–although these days you must be very wary of persistent herbicides in any hay you source).
You can either build the mulch with the most nitrogenous material (such as kitchen scraps) at the bottom, covered by increasingly carbonaceous material (such as dead leaves), or you can lay down the carbon mulch and then periodically tuck your nitrogenous material underneath, right in the garden itself, and allow it to decompose over time, enriching the soil in that location.
There are some disadvantages–in my experience, primarily:
1. It can be difficult to acquire enough mulching material to get started, and if the mulch is not sufficiently thick, it doesn’t work very well and can even be counterproductive (for instance, by introducing weed seeds in the mulching material without being thick enough to suppress their germination).
2. It is inconvenient and occasionally gooey and malodorous to have this sort of thing going on right where one works in the garden. For this reason, the method is in my opinion better suited to being used around perennials rather than in an annual vegetable garden, or on fallow beds that will not be used until next season, or to prepare a new garden which will henceforth be maintained by the addition of mature compost.
3. The addition of large amounts of carbonaceous material can actually result in nitrogen immobilization, especially in the beginning, making it less available to plants–a serious detriment for most gardens, although one that will improve over time.
4. You can occasionally kill a plant by “burning” it if you are not careful and put highly nitrogenous material such as chicken manure or a pile of kitchen scraps too near a delicate plant.
It takes longer than a thermophilic pile to break down, so it’s not ideal if you need to increase stable soil organic matter quickly.
5. You have to keep track of where you added the last batch of scraps so as not to put too much in one area, and even so you don’t end up with an easily portable, uniform, or evenly distributed end result. This variety can be a good thing, as different plants thrive in different conditions, but for a new gardener and/or one trying to achieve consistent results in a traditional row garden, it can be problematic.
I’ve used this method extensively in the past, but ultimately abandoned it for the most part. I would certainly consider it in the future if I had access to lots of high-quality mulch material and were going to prepare a new perennial bed. The method certainly has some staunch (and successful) advocates, and Ruth Stout herself was rather magnificent.
Here is a write-up with more detail about both Ruth and her methods:
https://www.homestead.org/gardening/ruth-stout-no-dig-duchess/
Ruth Stout also wrote several books, although I haven’t read them and can’t comment on their quality:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ARuth+Stout&s=relevancerank&text=Ruth+Stout&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
Many of her titles are variations on the theme of “no work”--this will probably seem like a vicious lie if you try her method on a decent-sized garden having never gardened before, but if you come from a background of, say, double-digging, it might very well seem accurate.
Mouldering (or Cold) Compost Piles
When most people talk about composting, they are referring to "hot," or thermophilic compost piles. These have the advantage of producing finished compost quickly and of killing weed seeds, but they require more labor and more attention to inputs than a mouldering pile. We will discuss thermophilic piles in a later post, but for now, let's talk about cold piles.
Since you are not trying to get the pile to heat up to a specific temperature, you can use any combination of "greens" (nitrogenous materials, often but not always green in color) and "browns" (carbonaceous materials, often brown in color). You can also add them slowly over time, rather than in one big batch, and you don't have to turn the pile. You can even, especially if your pile is large and relatively far away from the house, toss in things that people are always saying you can't compost (meat, fat, dead varmints, etc), but I would save that for when you have more experience.
The basic procedure is this: Choose a location for your pile. My favorite thing to do is to choose a place where I would like to plant a tree in a year or two; once the pile is finished and moved, the soil underneath its former location will be very rich and easy to dig.
I also like to rotate cold piles through my vegetable garden, with one pile maturing and one pile being added to at any given time, changing locations each time so that eventually the entire garden space has been covered and enriched by the piles. Do note that this won't work if you are limited in space or in more commercial garden spaces which need to be laid out very efficiently, and you may experience some slightly unpleasant smells periodically if you add lots of nitrogenous material without much carbonaceous material.
Once you have a location, you can simply start piling things there, or you can create a bin out of pallets wired together, wire mesh bent into a loop and wired to itself, or something of that nature. You don't really need a bin, but it can make things look tidier and provide some containment.
Then you just add your materials as they need disposing of. Yard waste such as grass clippings or raked leaves (if you don't just leave these on the lawn), kitchen scraps, tree trimmings, spoiled hay, straw, or wood shavings from the barn, stable, or chicken coop (again, be careful about herbicides and wormers; persistent herbicides used on hay fields can destroy your garden's ability to produce anything but grass for years), sawdust from the wood shop, etcetera. If the pile starts to stink, it's a good idea to throw on some carbon-rich materials such as dead leaves or wood chips if you can get them; you can also just wait a few days without adding more kitchen scraps or other nitrogenous material, and the problem will usually take care of itself.
Eventually, you stop adding material, start a new pile, and wait until the old pile matures. This will take at least nine months or so in my experience; when ready, the compost will be dark brown, finely textured and uniform in appearance (except perhaps for some resistant materials, such as bones, eggshells, tree branches, etcetera), and will smell earthy and rich, with no offensive smells. At this point, it is ready to use; you can sift it through a screen to remove any larger bits if you like, but I usually don't unless there's a lot of awkward large woody material left or I intend to use it in seed trays or houseplants or something similar.
Some people water their piles periodically to keep them moist or build a little roof over them to prevent leaching, but in my opinion it's not terribly necessary unless you live in a very wet or dry climate or really wish to optimize the quality of the compost. If you simply want a low-labor source of stable organic matter for your soil, an open pile will usually suffice. If you want to make the best possible compost (to my knowledge), we will cover Johnson-Su bioreactors in a later post.
The advantages of the mouldering (cold) compost method are:
1. It's easy! You don't have to think about ratios of carbon to nitrogen or turn the pile periodically.
2. You don't have to source large amounts of inputs at once, and can add materials as needed.
3. Because it is left in place to compost rather than turned, it will develop a very diverse, usually fugally-dominated (as opposed to bacterially-dominated) biological community with many trophic layers present. As a general rule, a cold compost will be biologically richer than thermophilic compost. This sort of compost is especially good for trees and perennials.
The disadvantages are:
1. It takes a long time (I've had cold piles going for multiple years at times, but you'll need a few months at least, and a year is better; two years may be better still, depending on your inputs and your climate).
2. It doesn't kill weed seeds, so if you add weedy plant waste, you can end up planting weeds in your garden when you add the compost later.
3. You can end up with a perpetual compost pile and no finished compost if you're not intentional about it. At some point you have to stop adding material and allow all of it to finish composting. As the material composts, it shrinks, so if you are using a bin of some sort, you can easily add material periodically for years without the pile ever filling the bin and triggering the creation of a new pile. In that case, you've really just created a waste heap, not a useful source of compost for gardening.
There you have it! Next time, we'll cover classic thermophilic composting, and perhaps vermicomposting.
Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-02 07:51 pm (UTC)1) I don't dare put hay or straw in the garden anymore. Sourcing to avoid aminopyralids is too tricky.
2) I do use cardboard, but also this time of year I drive around the nicer neighborhoods in the morning, and collect bags of raked leaves, that people so kindly put out by the curb. You can never have too much carbonaceous mulch, and I don't know anybody who sprays their trees.
3) I like to add carbon mass-- especially charcoal if I've got it-- to any garden "deposits" that contain anything likely to attract digging vermin. It seems to cut way down on things digging up my compost.
4) Particularly with the cardboard mulch, I have still had problems with rats and mice deciding to nest under the cardboard layer, so watch out for that. I prefer the leaves for this reason, though would not want to waste cardboard either. But I tend to shred it up when possible, so it doesn't make a nice dry space underneath.
5) bones and eggshells: our soil is very calcium poor, and these are much appreciated by tomato plants.
6) Pumpkins/squash/melons are heavy feeders, so if you can start them out next to a pit containing charcoal and an animal carcass of some sort, they do really well and I have yet to burn any. Have used rotten chicken leftovers from fridge, cheap sardines, spoiled eggs, fish heads, dead rats from the basement traps, and small roadkill with great success. Waste not, want not...
Mouldering piles are... highly location-dependent. Here, they are just a good way to reduce how much you send to the landfill. They don't do anything for the garden. We garden in sand, and get 80 inches of rain a year, so everything just leaches out too fast. You can pile up compost all year, and at the end of the year, you've got... nothing. It's gone. This is why pit composting directly in the garden works better-- the plants at least have a shot at it before it washes away.
Hot compost... I think it's a myth! I know, I've read about it, and seen videos and whatnot, just... never been able to get one to *do* that. I think you have to have an on-site source of manure to make it work.
Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-11 04:56 pm (UTC)Persistent herbicides in hay and straw are devestating! Here it’s picloram mostly, but from what I hear they’re all terribly bad and hard to recover from. I’ve heard that fulvic and humid acids can help with remediation, but haven’t experimented with this myself.
My best tip for heating up a reluctant hot compost, inelegant though it may be, is honestly just to pee on it as much as possible.
Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-11 09:21 pm (UTC)I lied, our current place only averages 65" rain/yr ;) Still, between that and the subtropics, it's just as you say, intense biological activity + leaching robs everything-- all compost must go directly into the garden, if you're to get any use from it at all. So I try to tuck charcoal and other carbon mass into the pits. They are small pits- I dig one or two a day, just to not have a gross compost bowl on the counter, accumulating flies-- just spread them through the garden, between plants, working from one end to the other and then starting over. This past spring I picked up at least 6 huge leaf bags and tucked the whole little garden to bed under 4-6" of leaf mulch. It was mostly gone as of last month, with bare soil visible in several places. Have since added 3 more bags, and looking for more. Mostly what it does is keep the soil from getting hot in the sun, and help retain moisture.
aminopyralids: my mom lost her whole garden to a contaminated load of mushroom compost one year. That was like 6 years ago, and she's only just started being able to grow some stuff again. I'm super paranoid about that now. Even potting soil, I test by planting some seeds in it, in a pot, first-- if it passes, then I can use it for stuff I care about.
Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-12 03:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, I know organic gardeners who have been building soil for years or decades and then just lost it all due to the persistent herbicides. It gives me a turn just thinking about it.
Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-12 03:59 pm (UTC)Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-12 08:06 pm (UTC)But when it comes to persistent herbicides
THERE SHOULD BE A LAW
Re: Pit composting
Date: 2023-11-12 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-03 04:17 pm (UTC)Excellent post - as usual.
I would love to have a hot pile but the available time and energy of life make it a cold pile. In suburbia, we have a terrible animal problem. I do compost *everything* including the meat bones so it's partially my fault but we have to keep it locked down to keep the critters out. We built the classic three bin set up with hardware cloth on the frames and I do like it even if we only progress the piles every 2 years or so at this point.
I find the weed that sneaks through when we use the compost is mostly cherry tomatoes but I tend to let them go. It's messy but it is actually a free lunch. :)
On a related note, I do bring in outside compost b/c we don't make enough fast enough and I use the no till method so I throw down a lot. I had my soil tested and we were in the excessive territory for NPK. Too much of a good thing? I'm going to go easy on using it next year and see what happens.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-11 04:07 pm (UTC)I like the classic three-bin system a lot; I think it’s classic for a reason. Honestly I like cold composting a lot, too—I always wish for more finished compost, but IME the quality of the product is better and it’s dead easy.
Hmm, excess NPK is an interesting problem to have! I have seen soils get overly rich from imported compost, especially if it’s from, say, chicken farms instead of municipal yard waste or the like. Any idea about your micronutrient levels? Over the last few years, we’ve been learning that we benefit greatly from paying attention to trace minerals such as boron and molybdenum as well as the more typical NPK and calcium/magnesium balance, etc. In many ways we’ve found that balancing the micronutrient levels can hide a lot of sins.
We’ve also come to appreciate that allowing the plants to select what they like via symbiotic interactions with the soil biota is a whole different ball game than the more typical practice of forcing them to uptake water-soluble nutrients or fertilizer with their water intake, which removes their ability to regulate their intake. So you may find that high NPK in the soil is not actually problematic if it is not in the form of concentrated water-soluble fertilizers. I’d be interested to hear how your garden responds to a compost diet!
cold or none
Date: 2024-01-02 06:31 am (UTC)I live out of town and dont usually rake leaves or have a lawn. Since I dont end up with compost, I just put organic matter straight onto the garden beds. Usually I have goat stall cleanings once or twice a year, which is super nice to sheet mulch with, but my goats havent lived here since the fire 3 years ago, so I have managed to haul back only a small amount of it. SO, then I will also rake up some leaves and use them to mulch the beds and then I have to make sure to add diluted human urine. I always add wood ash. I do not buy in fertilizers. Years ago, we did humanure composting for a quite a few years, and then I did run hot compose piles ( my children have not so fond memories of visiting friends not being put out by the sawdust composting collection tiolet upstairs, but we did have a regular flush toilet others could use downstairs. Didnt have goats then either. It is good to know how to do it.
It is especially good to come up with some type of workable nutrient cycling for the garden and be able to feed yourself without bought in fertilizers. This is a great first thing to list to learn
Re: cold or none
Date: 2024-01-17 10:51 pm (UTC)