From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: lazy composting
Followup-To: rec.gardens
Summary: we're in no hurry
Organization: lsa, osu, outil, stanford,...
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 19:54:31 GMT

back at the beginning of labor day weekend i was mining compost to
build up some beds for the fall crop of lettuce (which is now up and
looking good, thank you) when i began to reflect once again on the
differences between our household's approach to composting and the way
more industrious - i was about to type "normal" - gardeners do these
things.  (mining compost is a soothing enterprise and tends to lead
to reflection, or at least it does me.  it's also a chance to get
scandalously dirty, with only good earthy smells nevertheless, so it's
great play too.  and people ask why i garden!)

mining compost is one of the three things jacques and i do that
correspond to what hard-working gardeners call "turning the compost
heap".  the other two are (a) digging holes in the heap to bury the
pail of stuff from the kitchen, and (b) putting the heap back together
after the raccoons have been hopefully prospecting in it.  mining
actually causes some of the stuff on the top to go on the bottom and
vice versa, so i suppose it approximates turning (small parts of) the
heap, but we never do it for its own sake.  occasionally, when we are
in a coltish mood, we will stab the heap in lots of places with one of
those weeders-on-a-pole, which has the dual effect of aerating the
heap a little and letting off our aggressive impulses.

well, yes, it takes some time for the heap to turn coffee grounds and
leaves and pulled-up weeds and shreddings and so on into crumbly black
gardener's delight, but then we're in no great hurry.  sometimes the
heap gets steamy hot in places, but mostly it doesn't, because the main
ingredient in it is sod, which is very much at the phlegmatic end of
the decomposition scale.

why so much sod?  because we are forever removing lawn to make new
beds and bark-covered paths, and because the remaining lawn is always
trying to take over the *old* beds and bark-covered paths, so that
we're kept busy removing strips of sod from the edges.  (a friend who
took up gardening rather late in life and so tries to keep labor to an
absolute minimum, or to something she can hire a kid to do for not
much money, visited us some years ago, took in the panorama, blanched,
and cried out in anguish, "all those *edges*!"  it's a fair cop.)  one
thing we never need to add to the heap is soil (for its excellent
micro-organisms); our problem is getting enough stuff in there that
will rot, decay, or otherwise transform itself.

we used to get grass clippings from the one neighbor who didn't nuke
his lawn with chemicals and didn't let the clippings just fall onto
the lawn.  now fewer of our neighbors subscribe to the lawn-poisoning
services, but they have all learned from us to let the clippings lie
there and fertilize the grass.  when we still got them, layers of
grass clippings did wonders for the compost heap.

we have an old sears electric shredder (roaring away deafeningly since
1971, and still doing its job) that i use to chop up all sorts of things.
the woodier stuff goes to help make those paths, or gets piled onto
the heap anyway.  the greener stuff, shredded, is almost as good as
grass clippings for cranking up the heap.

everything that isn't actually diseased gets used: the big stuff
becomes firewood, and the next size down kindling (and then their
ashes go onto the heap the next season), and the next size down
shreddings, and the rest just gets thrown on the heap directly.  we
used to collect leaves from the neighbors in the fall, too, but now
the leaves from our own maturing trees (plus the blow-overs from one
neighbor's gigantic tulip poplar and, ugh, silver maple) provide more
than enough.

we collect the coffee grounds from my department's coffee maker and add
those.  plus vegetable scraps from the kitchen (broken-up corn cobs
and artichoke leaves are particularly good), tea leaves and more
coffee grounds, kleenexes and paper towels (so long as they don't have
dubious household chemicals on them - your ordinary amounts of human
substances are ok, though), cut-up corks from wine bottles, and
eggshells.  with a substantial wetting-down of urine (which we started
saving for this purpose during a severe drought in 1988, when we were
trying to use as little water as possible for *anything*, and then just
got into the habit).  no, it never smells, nor do flies breed in it.

the heap is now about seven feet long, two to three feet high, and two
to three feet deep, all in the shade of dense shrubbery.  it takes no
more than a year, often much less, for all this waste material to turn
into usable compost.  we get 30 to 40 wheelbarrows of rich compost
a year.  it is never enough.

yes, sometimes we'll come across areas of the heap that haven't been
mined for years and are now solid soil.  and we always have to toss
back a fair amount of stuff because it's still sort of recognizable
as something other than compost.  and some seeds survive; tomatoes
are especially tough customers.  but on the whole this is a very
lazy scheme for composting - no layering, no special additives, no
turning, no transfer from one pile to another.  not what the books
tell you to do, but it works for us.

arnold