The Glory of Mid-Season Compost
Of Love and War
I gave the compost pile a little love yesterday, and it returned the favor. And I thought I should share this grimy little story of love and war.
You can see my composting area in the photo, behind the wheel barrow. The left side is full and the right side is empty. That situation was reversed an hour earlier; I start a compost pile on the right side, and then move it to the left when the material is usable but not quite finished. This particular hot and sordid affair started April 22, when I did my spring composting — I moved the winter compost pile from the right side to the left side, and gradually used the stuff on the left side over the past couple months. That process ended yesterday, when I moved the last bits of the winter batch to the garden. With the left side now free, I could move the April material from right to left. And, as you can see, I had enough spare material to fill the wheel barrow.
More on that in a moment. But first let’s talk about, uh… drugs.
Moving a dense, cooked compost pile like this is strenuous work, but that is part of why gardening is so good for the body and mind. When a taxing task like this is on the day’s agenda, I often pre-medicate with some ibuprofen, which helps in multiple ways. I work more effectively, and I feel much better afterwards. Obviously, one should not abuse medications, but this is the kind of occasional, targeted situation where the benefits far outweigh any issues. So if you’re feeling a little creaky, it might be worth considering. Anyway, back to the compost…
This is a particularly exciting time of year for composting freaks like me — when activity inside the warm piles is off the charts, and a pile of yard waste and kitchen scraps can transmute to garden gold in as little as six weeks. As the old farmer’s saying goes “When the sun is shining, make hay.” Or, in this case, compost.
The timing is not accidental. This is precisely when the vegetable garden, which has fully morphed from spring mode to summer mode, could use a little shot in the arm. But I don’t mean fertilizers — which are just hard drugs for plants, and have all sorts of hidden side effects. As always, your goal at this point in the season is not to treat plants, but to replenish the soil. The soil will take care of the plants; you take care of the soil. And no chemical fertilizer will do that work. Your soil needs a fully-balanced and biologically active visit from the soil cavalry. There is only one way to do this properly, and that is with good quality compost.
The wheel barrow in the photo is filled with semi-finished compost. I say “semi-finished” because fully-finished compost is unrecognizable as anything but black, crumbly soil. Most of the visible, macroscopic creepy crawlies are gone by that time. I reserve that stuff — typically lurking at the bottom of the pile — for making super high quality potting soil. We will discuss that in a few weeks, when soil-making time rolls around. But the semi-finished stuff is better for what I had in mind this weekend. The soft kitchen waste (banana peels, coffee grounds, etc.) is fully transformed by this time. But you can still make out the shapes of tougher things, like small pieces of egg shells, crumpled avocado husks, and even some shredded leaf material from the edges of the pile. More importantly, it still has worms, centipedes, sowbugs and other organisms, all of which continue to work feverishly to finish the job they started. This is important, because these and other creatures will do important police work in your mid-season garden soil, which is probably now teeming with bad guys. From fungi to aphids to moth eggs, your July garden is a war zone. And if you want to win the near-term battle, you need to bring out the heavy artillery that will solve problems, while precluding all civilian damage. And a compost pile is the arsenal that can pull off this magic.
In my case, I started with a couple of my small beds/boxes, which I recently cleared of spent spring lettuce, peas and turnips (which all went to the new compost pile that I will soon build on the right side of the composting area). Those beds are ready for full rejuvenation, which means adding three or four inches of compost and incorporating it into the top layers of the soil. Because I will replant with seedlings rather than seeds, I don’t have to worry about creating a refined seed bed on top. So in this case I just dig the compost into the soil, and that’s that. As I wrote in an earlier post, if I am direct sowing seed, I will reserve some soil to add to the top of the bed, which provides a better germination environment.
But the immediate concern is not those cleared beds, which require basic soil rejuvenation that I do throughout the year. The more interesting and pressing challenge is the tomatoes and peppers and squash and swiss chard and other things that all seem to be thriving at the moment. They look fine now, but behind those beautiful green tomatoes and proud, sauropod-worthy zucchini leaves is a cry for reinforcements. The barbarians are at the door.
You have a choice: You can be ancient Rome, busy with its own problems and barbarians, and let the Saxons and Picts have their way with folks in faraway Britain who seem to be getting along well enough. Or you can take action while the problems are easier to handle, so the barbarians don’t get any ideas. Biologically active compost would not have helped those poor British Celts in the fifth century, but it will help considerably in the war you are waging in the garden.
If you love your plants, help them win the war that is now raging in their world.
So let’s get to the point. The soil that sustains your maturing garden plants is taxed, dizzy and losing its balance. Bugs and diseases seek hegemony. Defenses are weak. Reinforcements are needed. Tossing chemical fertilizers and insecticides at the challenge is like shipping nuclear warheads for use on domestic soil. Don’t do it. Just head over to the compost pile, fill a wheel barrow with the soldiers and supplies that can make a real difference, and spread them around the war zone, under the plants. They’ll know what to do.
It seems like a minuscule, easy and low-cost act, and it is; the ten minutes required to spread some compost around the garden is one of the easier jobs of the gardening season. But it rests on a long foundation of planning and commitment. The story of the compost that I deployed this weekend goes back to the fall, when I reserved some extra shredded leaves for the spring compost pile, and started collecting the kitchen scraps in a trash can. It continued in April, when I set aside a few hours to turn and move the old piles, and start a new one. It continued this weekend when I used some of the semi-finished material to replenish soils and harden the defenses of maturing plants. And it will come to its conclusion, nearly a year later, when I transform the finished, crème de la crème material into potting soil for next season.
It is a labor of love. But if you want to defeat the barbarians in July, you need to plan ahead.