I am assuming that anyone who reads Fay's Of Life already recycles metal, glass, plastic and paper. If you don't, please stop right now and spank your butt. However, there's more you can do to spare landfills and sewage systems while getting black gold for your garden. You've gotta compost, Baybees! Composting can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. I am currently doing number two (on a one to ten simplicity scale, of course.)
The easiest way I've ever composted involved my chooks and sheep. Back in the day, I had a beautiful cedar hen house, with a goodly number of girls happily living there. They ran around and ate bugs of all varieties and anything green they could get their smiling beaks on. Such beautiful, big eggs they gave us with such bright orange yolks!
I also had a goodly number of sheep, who would also eat anything that grew within reach. Both groups ate any vegetable or fruit scraps I had, trimmings from the veggie garden, plant-based leftovers, and the veggie/fruit trimmings and stale bread from the organic grocery where I baked.
Then they pooped.
The poop went onto a pile where it cooled down a bit before getting tilled into the huge veggie garden, causing the plants to be incredibly happy and produce lots of veggies which the man and I ate and shared with the chickens and the sheep. See how that works. Sort of a big circle. Veggie - chicken/sheep - poop - soil - veggie.
I know, I know, it's brilliant, but trust me, I'm not the one who invented it. Mother had it all figured out.
Luckily, one can still easily compost without the benefit of sheep or hens. Now I have a big black container. If you have so much money that it's clogging your pores, you can buy a fancy schmancy compost bin. You can also use a garbage can. Gourd knows, the suckers are made of plastic and will probably still be here when the dinosaurs roam the planet again, but they exist and you might as well put one to good use.
First cut the bottom out of it and find a nice place in your yard to put it. Put it where it's going to soak up sunshine and get mighty hot inside. Rot likes hot. And ya gotta have the rot. Cut some vents in the sides because rot likes air, too.
Next, forget you have a garbage disposer. When you peel veggies or fruit, put the bits in a container of some kind. If you have more money than you know what to do with, send some to me. Then buy some fancy schmancy compost collecting crock. Otherwise a coffee can works fine. You aren't going to keep it around long enough to stink up your house. Then you put all compostable stuff in that coffee can and empty it in the compost bin every evening after dinner and before the news.
GOOD FOR THE CAN
any veggie or fruit bits
egg shells that have been crushed
stale bread (go ahead and tear it up if it's a whole baguette)
coffee grounds and paper filters
leftover coffee
leftover wine (hahahahaha. . . who has leftover wine!)
tea bags
bad birthday cake
BAD FOR THE CAN
any part of a dead animal
gravy (it's got dead animal in it)
eggs
anything so toxic that you shouldn't be ingesting it anyway (sweet drinks, soda, candy)
anything dairy (good gourd, I hope you know what dairy is)
You will also add stuff like lawn clippings (which of course you will not have poisoned with chemicals because if you have you can't be my friend), leaf mulch, the soft clippings from your hedges, the flowers your sweetie got you that have turned yucky, saw dust, twigs. Basically you can compost all the stuff you might have been burning or putting in those big plastic bags. You want to keep the composting material moist. You don't want it sitting in water, but you don't want it to dry out, either.
Go to your garden center and get a bag of lime. Not fancy schmancy granulated schmanulated lime, just plain ol' powdered lime stone. (The limes that go with margaritas can also go into the compost.) Every now and then sprinkle some of that lime on top of what's in your bin. Use enough to make the surface look like about 1/4" of snow fell onto grass. The lime helps stuff decompose and that's what we're after here.
Now here's the real poop on how to make great compost! You need manure. Preferably bird or ruminant manure. Find a friend with chickens or sheep, goats, or cows, and ask them very nicely if you can have some shit. They will probably tell you to come and get it. If you have no friends of this quality, you can buy some composted manure at your garden store. It's a sad thing, but you can do it. If you know of a park with geese, you can go scoop up goose poop. Many people will stay far away from you and snicker, but no one will stop you.
GOOD POOP
cow
bull (that's a boy cow)
steer (that's a sort of boy cow)
sheep
goat
chicken
turkey
parakeet
alligator
turtle
gold fish
llama
OKAY POOP
horse
pig (only happy, free range pigs)
BAD POOP
dog
cat
people
raccoon
Why are some poops better than others? I'm glad you asked that, Cindy. Ruminants, such as cattle, sheep, and goats, have four stomachs and cameldae, such as llamas, alpacas, and camels, have three. This gives their bodies a lot of opportunity to digest seeds and stuff. So while you can use happy pig poop and horse shit in your compost, you might just end up with some dandelion seeds in it. However, the compost will probably get hot enough to burn most of them off anyway.
I reckon birds grind up any seeds they eat in their gizzards. By the way, do you know why birds eat tiny rocks? (FInd the answer at the end of this educational essay.) Usually, if you are collecting crap from feathered friends, you'll get some straw, or newspapers or something with it. That's just a bonus that can go right into the compost bin.
You don't want to use the bad poop because that's just gross. That poop contains e. coli and other nasty germs. We like good, clean compost.
Newspaper, corrugated cardboard, and paper that isn't shiny and that is printed with soy ink, can all be easily composted, however it only adds bulk and not much in the way of nutrients. But what the heck. You may also want to add a shovel or three of good looking dirt into your bin. Use some real dirt that has some life in it. If you find worms, that's good soil! That will kick up the life in your compost more quickly.
You need to stir that compost up. You want to make sure the soggy cucumber gets mixed in with the leaf mulch and the llama poopy. How often you'll do this is equal to your desire for great compost. Every 3.6 weeks should do it if you're lazy. The easiest way I've found to do this is to lift the bin right up off the lawn and move it over a space then sort of reload it randomly with your pitch fork.
YES! Composters get to use pitchforks!
You'll want to keep a eye on what's happening in your compost. Does it look happy? Is it well mixed? Is it moist but not runny? When you stir is a good time to remove things such as corn cobs or avocado pits from the mix, or anything big like that that you thought might, but actually isn't breaking down. You will notice that your compost is hot or warm. That's good. It should be. There's a lot of stuff going on in there.
When will it be done? I'm glad you asked that, Timmy. It will be done when you're ready to use it, actually. You are your own compost king, so that stuff will be done when you say it's done. One day you'll be stirring your compost and you'll notice that the stuff on the bottom is looking like dirt. That's because it is dirt, so use it.
However, it will be optimum when it looks like beautiful, black loam. You can get as anal about this as you want. You can buy a fancy schmancy sifter if your excess money is causing you to lose sleep at night. Or you can just sort of pull out the bits that aren't beautiful, black loam yet. Or you can just till it all into your garden, what the heck, it'll breakdown eventually.
You can find all sorts of recipes about ratios of brown to green to manure, blah, blah, blahhhhh. Like I said, you can make composting as crazy as you'd like. I don't believe in recipes. They slow me down, but if you actually measure your flour when you bake bread and stuff, you might want to read one of the more OCD guides to composting as well.
I hope you'll all remember that though at first, composting may seem a little dirty or nasty, Mother Nature created composted to be a beautiful activity between gardeners and their gardens. There is nothing shameful or sinful about composting.
So get out there and shovel that good shit. You'll be glad you did.
* answer: because they can't eat big ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment