Compost on the Soul
Turning shit into sugar
An Iowa State Extension agent recently examined 50 Asian pear trees in one of our orchards. Founding an innovative nonprofit took me away from the land these last few years, so they were struggling. It’s a bad sign when you can pull on a branch and it breaks off in your hand.
As we went tree by tree looking closely at dark limbs and damaged bark on three-inch diameter trunks, the agent asked how old the orchard was. I mused that it was maybe seven years. When his eyebrows went up, I didn’t volunteer that records might show it’s closer to 10. The guilt-laden diagnosis: failure to thrive due to severe neglect.
I recognized the symptoms – fragile, low energy, overwhelmed by everything around you. Undernourished roots exhausted from pushing through well-established weeds that choke out anything new or different. Shredded bark meant to protect that can no longer fend off the disease of weak relationships. Stunted growth. Like these trees, my soul has been suffering from malnutrition.
Good organic practices start with planting healthy plants, then giving them the optimal environment and maintaining it. It involves strong stock that’s well-fed, surroundings that are weeded and mulched so roots can breathe and limbs pruned to help them focus on productive growth. This is called the “cultural” level of disease control. Not surprisingly, it requires constant vigilance and even less surprisingly, it’s been lacking around here lately.
Developing such practices is a lot like going vegetarian. You can remove a major source of nutrition from your diet but you have to substitute something else. Humans generally switch out meat with beans. For plants, we switch out chemicals with compost. At Draco Hill, we took away some of least natural yet still helpful processes like synthetic fertilizer, but didn’t replace them with an abundance of good, healthy food in the form of compost.
Good compost is an elegant and simple way to turn animal manure, food scraps, grass and paper – often referred to as trash – into food for trees and plants. But “elegant and simple” doesn’t mean easy. It requires the right proportions of carbon (browns) to nitrogen (greens) heaped in large enough piles kept damp and turned regularly so they generate heat to cook down into soil. While city people and famous authors have used the phrase more loosely in recent years, good composting almost literally turns shit into sugar, a source of fuel, of energy, plant food. Poor composting, on the other hand, is like a life out of balance. It can lead to a slimy stinking mess or a dry heap of orange peels and newspaper that just sits there saying, “You wanted us to do what exactly?”
Perhaps you can tell that growing good compost has eluded me over the years.
Sourcing enough of the right ingredients can be a challenge in a household of two. Our handful of chickens can’t provide enough because their numbers, well, fluctuate. (That’s another story.) A few years back, I thought I’d secured a major source of local horse manure. I now realize it’s been more than five years since they delivered any. My neighbor has a handful of sheep but got her compost supply cleaned out last year. She’s understandably protective of what’s cooking now.
The extension agent had the simplest answer – 10-10-10, a granular mix of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, or NPK in farm jargon. I have a bag of it in the barn, which is actually a geodesic dome. (Another story.) When we planted our first maples and oaks around the house 15 years ago, the nurseryman told us to put a few tablespoons of NPK around each tree. Not long after, we stopped eating that metaphorical meat, so the bag sat in a plastic tote, through mice, snakes, rain, snow and a derecho because I can’t throw away 20 pounds of anything that might be of use someday, no matter what my family might tell you. This Spring I’ll use it, but I really don’t want to buy any more of it.
As fate would have it, I recently met a man named Jim who lives near us and has horses. He smiled when I asked about manure. He has plenty, already composted, and offered to load it in a trailer for us. Paul and I drove a utility trailer rigged as a wagon to Jim’s and he loaded it up.
The next day, while Paul steered our electric utility vehicle, I stood on top of the trailer full of brown gold shoveling it onto hungry plants. When the trailer jerked, I fell off my feet and onto the sweet-smelling compost. As it crumbled into my work gloves and jeans, I laughed so loud it echoed down the river valley.
This is my life now, and what a well-nourished, well-tended life it is becoming.
The best source on soil health in America - Dr. Elaine Ingham and her Soil Food Web School
A webinar from Dr. Elaine’s school on how soil health works:
Oh yes Suzan, good compost needs to be managed well. Good to know you are back talking and interacting with your soil friends.