A Quickie Guide to Compost

The group behind the PennWell Community Garden has been e-mailing back and forth a bit about our plan for getting our plot some compost. Some of us knew quite a bit about the process, but for those who'd like to learn more, here's a basic guide to how it's done and why you'd want to do it.

I had an editor once who told me, "Given enough time, anything will rot." I guess I should point out that we were talking about gardening when she said that.

While composting might not be as simple as all of that — when you have a garden that could benefit from some compost, you don't have years and years to wait for everything to rot — it's not hard to do. Nor is it smelly or gross, either. I'm not sure how that myth got started. A well-maintained heap of compost should smell like the forest floor. Maybe with a whiff of citrus or coffee grounds or whatever you've stirred in recently, but it certainly isn't a nasty process to make good compost.

The benefits of compost are too many to name. It increases soil tilth, which means the soil has a lighter, fluffier texture that's easy for you to work with, and for plants to grow in. It adds nutrients and trace elements. It boosts nitrogen, which is crucial for vegetative growth. It sponges up moisture, making the soil hold water better. And of course, since you're using things you'd normally throw away, it reduces landfill garbage. It's a win for you, for plants, and for the environment.

There's no reason to spend any money at all on compost. You can buy bins or barrels or "turners" at hardware stores or online, but I made mine out of scrap lumber. In fact, you don't even need a bin at all if you don't mind just heaping it up somewhere. But the ideal size for a compost pile is generally agreed upon to be three by three by three. Three feet high, three feet wide, three feet deep. This creates a good "center" for your pile where all the little microbes can chew away at your compostables contentedly, provided they have enough water and air.

Water and air are something you provide by making sure your compost materials don't get too matted down or compacted. Turn your compost every now and then with a steel garden rake or shovel. Ideally, your compost should be kept moist — not wet — about the way a well-wrung kitchen sponge feels. Without adequate oxygen and moisture, the anerobic bacteria that convert compost materials into the finished product (humus) will smother out and fail to thrive — leaving you with a mostly inactive pile that will decay slowly.

But what to put in that pile? How do you get started? Well, the short answer is you can add anything organic. Avoid anything that comes from an animal (with some exceptions). You don't want any fats, greases or animal proteins (meat) because these items will attract pests. Also, they'll stink.

How I get my pile started at the beginning of the season is to gather up fall leaves. This is your carbon material, or your "browns." You can also use sawdust (as long as it's not chemically treated), spoiled hay, dead grass and plants, cornstalks, dead sunflowers, wood ash, dried pine needles, paper products, shredded cardboard — even junk mail.

Your "greens," or your nitrogen materials, will be mostly kitchen scraps and other yard wastes. Manure from herbivorous animals is also a great nitrogen source. For greens, you want coffee grounds, eggshells, trimmings and waste from fruits and vegetables, yard clippings (not treated with chemicals) and blood meal.

You want to break these items up as small as possible to speed decay, but you don't have to. I've gotten lazy before and composted entire pumpkins without any serious problem. Your ratio of browns to greens should be three to one. The leaves and other browns will form the basis of your pile, and the greens will provide the balance. With too many greens, there will be too much food for the microbes and the pile will stink. With too many browns, there won't be enough food for the microbes and pile will decay too slowly.

How can you tell things are cooking? Stick a wooden stick or the handle of a garden tool right through the middle of the pile and leave it there about a minute. If the handle comes out warm, you're cooking along nicely. On some cooler days, you can see a nice warm compost pile appear to steam or "smoke."

The finished product — compost pay dirt— is called humus. You know your pile is done when the compost has turned a rich black color, and you can barely tell what the material used to be. There might be some stray stems or leaf petioles in there, but you can filter those out either by hand or with a mesh frame. Humus should feel like soil — because it is soil. It should smell rich — kind of like the forest floor when you drag your feet as you walk through it.

Now it's up to you how best to use your compost. You can top-dress with it, mulch with it, plow it into your soil. Some people even make a compost "tea" (you don't drink it, but rather apply it as a liquid fertilizer). But no matter what you do with it, compost is pretty magical stuff. You can turn garbage and waste into tasty foods and herbs, just like nature does all by itself.

Other composting tips:

1. Provided your pile is hot enough, you can destroy weeds safely by stirring them into the center of the pile. The heat will render the weed seeds unviable.

2. Another form of composting is worm composting, in which red wiggler worms are kept and provided a steady stream of materials to eat. The worm "castings" (worm poo) is harvested and used as one of the best organic fertilizers available.

3. Wastes from food and yardwork constitute as much as one third of the landfill waste in the U.S. With composting, it's possible to cut back on your curb trash by roughly 30 percent.

4. Small particles of composting materials will decay faster than large items. So crush your eggshells, grind your leaves, cut apple cores into smaller pieces, and you'll find your compost converts more quickly.

5. A well-maintained compost pile will sometimes provide a home for insects and arthropods, such as ants, fruit flies and pillbugs (roly-polies). These critters are not a sign you're doing anything wrong and they will not hinder your efforts. They might even help speed along the decomposition process.

6. Sometimes when I have a spot where the soil is in bad condition, I'll use that spot to dump a pile of compost and allow it to cook there, touching the ground, for a while. As the materials rot, they will improve the soil they are sitting on. Then you can move the pile and use that spot as the beginnings of a gardening bed.

7. When gathering materials, it helps to have a bucket or other container in your kitchen. Make sure it seals up tightly. If you want to prevent smells or keep gnats from taking an interest, you can keep it in the freezer. Then just dump them on the pile.

8. If you mow your own lawn, invest in a mulching blade and use a self-bagging mower. When your bag fills up, just dump it into the pile. I do this every fall when my yard fills with leaves. The ground-up leaves and dead grasses provide the basis for that season's compost. With this method, I haven't touched a rake in quite a while.

Getting Started

The first meeting of the PennWell Community Garden Crew just wrapped up. I never noticed it before, but we've had for about two years a 12'X36' slightly raised bed on the northeast corner of the PennWell property. People have been trying to get this idea off and running for a while, apparently, and now we're getting ready to move some dirt!

My name is Jeff Postelwait, and I was volunteered to be the "education coordinator" of the group because I can run my mouth about gardening pretty well. (Whether or not I can manage to coax a tomato out of the ground this year is another matter) So as time goes on, I'll be using this blog to help coordinate our efforts and stay in touch with the other members, as well as provide little updates now and then on how things are growing. Maybe I'll snap a picture or two with my trusty iPhone.

We had some big ideas in the meeting, and it sounds like we'll be focusing on herbs and veggies. Most of the people in the group were at least somewhat familiar with growing what I call practical plants, although who's to say we might also plant some stuff later simply because it looks good.

As a reminder to our members, and to anyone who might be reading this, the Sand Springs Herbal Affair is April 21. If you ask me, it's an incredibly valuable source of knowledge and materials for any gardener in the Tulsa area. I've been going for the past four or five years, and they have some cool stuff there. Maybe we could do a meet-up, or at least grab a unique or interesting plant or two for the PennWell garden.

All right. Now that I've got this blog thing started, I'll just hit post and share it with the members we have right now. Hopefully we'll see our numbers grow as time goes on. When you have a garden, more hands always makes the work easier. I'll also try to update this with a complete list of our members as soon as I can get that.

UPDATE: Our members right now are confined to the Power Group, but of course we're open to anyone who wants to get in on this. Our members right now are: Jan Simpson, Amanda Brumby, Kathryn Dickerson, Sharryn Dotson, Traci Huntsman, Shelly Haire and Jeff Postelwait.