The Magic Ingredient

So. Spring is just around the corner (all evidence to the contrary) and I’ve just taken delivery of a truckload of compost which is currently hiding under a tarpaulin on the driveway, awaiting my pleasure. Compost isn’t cheap to buy in, largely because of haulage charges, but I’ve got no choice this year; I have an area of about 20′ (7m) square to bring into cultivation in a hurry and various patches of ground where I’m still trying to build up fertility. Then there’s the regular stuff – the raised and flat vegetable beds, and the polytunnel. But herein lies the problem of no-dig gardening; the Hollow Garden itself only produces enough compost to cap the rasied beds. If I’m going to be able to practice no-dig sustainably, I need to take a serious look at how I make compost.

There are two sorts of composting people, apparently; utility composters like myself who make compost as a way of recycling kitchen and garden waste, and fertility composters who see compost as an end rather than a means. Gardeners who are lucky enough to live very close to a ready source of organic material (spent hops and coffee ground are favourite old chestnuts from permaculture books) can compost these, but there are no obvious green waste-producing businesses around here so I’m going to have to get creative.

Growing green manures will only take me so far. We already compost every scrap of kitchen and garden waste, except the woody stuff (which goes into the dead hedge) and weedy material. Weedy stuff needs hot composting, and up to now I’ve not been running a hot heap. This has to change, as my next obvious source of organic material is the abundant supply of chocolate-covered sludge formed by the action of traffic on the edges of the shared roadway that links the Hollow Garden with the rest of the world. Made up of leaf fall and weedy growth, it’s lovely stuff - but full of viable seeds.

A regular hot heap is, I’m afraid, not for me. Ingredients have to be collected in piles and kept dryish until they are mixed, and the heap mixed several times to keep the heat up for as long as possible. In my heap things arrive as and when, and mixing largely happens to other people - but there is another way to end up with a hot heap, and that’s to add fresh manure balanced with untreated sawdust (next to free from a nearby sawmill). And the handiest source around is…

Well, have a look at this book and you’ll see what I mean. A little unplumbing and a modicum of carpentry, and we should be in business; that’s my target for 2009!

This entry was posted on 09/02/2009 at 10:49 am and is filed under Opportunistic Ecologist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.