Compost as a Matter of Survival
 

I have been gardening for the purpose of feeding the family since I was three-- likely sooner, but I'm going from memory here.....

I recall my early days in St. Louis, Mo. My father was a fresh graduate and was hired as a school music teacher. That was his first real departure from the farm here where he grew up. We spent 4 years there, in a modest little house in downtown Jennings, a suburb..... and Dad had a compost pile right next to the roughly 500 square foot garden. It was a hefty pile for being down town. He had it piled against the cinder block garage and tarped with one of those heavy old black oil tarps. I don't recall much detail about his application of the stuff nor where he got most of the raw components. I do recall the healthy green of the tomato patch, and I do recall the day that I saw movement under the tarp and went straight to the house to make the report only to have Dad come out and peel the tarp back to reveal a 'possum.
He promptly dispensed the 'possum with a crowbar and I got my first lesson in composting animal carcasses.

Years passed. Gardens were grown. Leaves, grass clippings and table scraps were procured and composted.
Justice would not be served if I failed to make mention of my paternal grandparents, their obsessive work ethic, and their flawless gardening over the years. Grandma, especially, encouraged me in many ways to become, among other real and crucial things, a master composter.
In my early teens, circumstances unfolded in a manner to give me the opportunity to become head stall cleaner at the local thoroughbred race track. It was a smaller, family-run affair, but there were 20 or so horses on the place and they knew what fresh bedding was for....
The local sawmill was a quarter mile north of home, and they gave me sawdust. The race track was a few hundred yards across the field from home and I got all the manure I wanted, plus a few bucks an hour for the shoveling.
The true nature of Heaven cannot be far removed from that picture.
I used Dad's John Deere A and an old homemade trailer that hauled about a pickup load to do my trucking. The trailer did NOT have a dump mechanism....

Well, I was an impressionable young lad, and eager to please, so when Grandma came out one summer afternoon to look at my tomatoes and potato patch, only to confide proudly to me that my garden was doing much better than Dad's..... I was hooked.

I bought the place, here, in '89. I was young, 22, and stuffed clear full of pioneer spirit. This was an old, rundown farmstead that hadn't seen life for nearly 40 years... the last being a pair of loggers that helped run the long-since disbanded mill on the river, a mile or so south of here, so they tell me.
The soil here was, at best, timber. At worst, sand and clay.
I remember our first few years, and recall that gardening was on the back burner due to the fact that we had succumbed, a bit, to the modern notion of eeking out an existence, "off the farm". I was doing backhoe work and shoeing horses. She was teaching school.
It was likely our third or fourth year here that she wanted to start a garden.
I had a neighboring farmer plow up a good sized patch east of the house-- which was about the only level site on the place at the time.
That was my--and her--first experience gardening in raw clay.

This is where the survival end of the story begins.
People have to eat. It is fast becoming apparent that people are soon going to be forced to grow their own food, or suffer the consequences.
There are very few places left in this country, or the world, I suppose, where the ground is of proper tilth to raise quality produce, without the diligent hand of man being wisely and laboriously applied.
The time to begin preparing your soil for your family's future survival is now.
The men who grow the food for this nation have been mining the soil for what it can provide THIS YEAR, without giving a thought to the next, for decades. The quick fix of NPK, with an occasional shot of calcium or sulfur, has become the norm. Indeed, the men who grow this nation's "food" have largely forgotten the value of humus, let alone the dire need for a balance among all of the trace minerals. Consequently, the nation's collective health is at an all time low, regardless of what the media or medical lobby might be shouting from the rooftops.

Most of us have no sense of bearing for the sake of comparison. We have never known real health..... real energy..... real strength. We only assume that what we know and are is normal. We assume far too much.
In order to thrive, people need to eat plants that are superior in every way.
For a plant to be superior, to be full of vitality and high resonance, it must be grown in soil that contains the minerals, the humus, the enzymes, the balance and the energy that only millennia of natural topsoil development can provide..... or..... in soil to which a few short but intense years of composting has been applied.
Compost offers clay soils drainage and the enzymes required to release the abundance of minerals that clay contains naturally.
Compost offers sandy soils the structure required to resist erosion and drought. It offers many of the minerals and organic nutrients devoid in sand.
Compost is composed largely of carbon, the natural sponge that was intended to absorb and slowly release all manner of nutrients required by plants.
Heavily composted soils resist excessive moisture as well as drought.
I have many times been in my small fields with my mid-sized tractor and disc, days ahead of the local chemical farmers. My living soil does not compact near as badly nor mire down the equipment as a typical clay or timber soil field would.
Compost chemically and physically binds nutrients to the soil molecules in such a manner that they will not wash out with heavy rainfall.
Compost can absorb up to ten times or more the amount of water that other soils can, thus reducing runoff, leaching, erosion and the resultant flooding and polluting of the waterways that has become pandemic these last few years.
I dare say that if just 20% of this nation's agricultural land were so tended, the rivers would be calm, the waters clear. Surface wells would contain far less in the way of nitrates. More carbon would be locked into the soil rather than saturating the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Topsoil erosion would be checked. Riverbed silting would be drastically reduced. Food would contain nutrition again.....

I'll leave off now, and go to bed.
If anyone isn't convinced of the dire straits in which rest this nation's agriculture and food industries, or needs more evidence before he or she starts throwing their own pile of organic matter together, we can take it up tomorrow.
Ernie, is this a fair introduction for what you had in mind ?

Excelent post, I agree, thank you for saying it so well!

Great post Forerunner.

A good explanation of composting and it's benefits. The only thing I would add is that no meat, fat, or citrus should go into a compost pile.

I have a very large, but shrinking as I type this, compost pile of chipped wood & leaves. I hope it will be ready to go on the new garden spot soon. I'm starting a new garden in soil that has laid fallow for about 15 years. It had cattle on it for 3 or 4 years, horses for a few years, goats for a few years, and chickens free range it all the time. I hope it will turn out to be a good garden spot. If not, then I'll find another spot to work on next year.

This will be the 4th spot on this place. I have several gardens every year (except last year when the goats got loose and ate everything up!) And the damage the year before that when the neighbors bull invaded the garden, and a few other times when things went wrong... there are always things beyond control that can happen to destroy a garden or part of it anyway.

If you have an organic garden, I would of been very wary or using racehorse manure. They pump all kinds of toxic things into those horses (I have a friend that has a couple race horses and that's what she told me when I asked about manure).

Two quick points this morning.

One.... I've been composting meat, fat, even whole cow and horse carcasses for years. The key is to have enough material to heat, and enough carbon to absorb the nitrogen and sulfur coming off the decaying animals.

Two.... again, in a large, hot pile, the microbes will make a shambles of any chemical that they come in contact with, really only choking a bit on chlorine. Thermophilic bacteria are famous for turning bad things into good, if they are properly fed and cared for.

This quote kind of goes along with my question...

This year was our first year composting, and it went ok I guess. We used leaves, grass clippings, and fruit/vegetable peels in our compost pile. We did not, however, have access to any type of manure. My aunt has offered to give us buckets from her chickens though. The only problem is that her chickens are the super-mega, mass-produced monsters that are sold to a big company. Who knows what they're fed or medicated with. Should I pass up my aunt's offer or do you think the waste would be ok to use?

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I'm just absolutely intrigued by your story!

Excellent start, Forerunner. Excellent start. I think I'm going to mail you a case of Mountain Dew if that's what it takes to pry the information loose. Unless of course you mean "that old mountain dew" that Grampa Jones used to sing about in which case I'll ask you to email me your supplier. :)

If you don't mind me talking out of turn, I'll describe a little of the surrounding area. On the drive up to Forerunner's farm, it's mostly commercial agriculture. It's prairie. Clay sod stuff that Pa Wilder would have built houses out of. Then you turn into his drive and the first thing you see are the gardens. Sweeping gardens full of thick beautiful plants. Dark, black soil that looks like it would swallow you whole if you stepped out into it.

I saw what I would consider more "normal" compost piles out near the house. Those are the small scale piles I am familiar with from my own farm. Nothing new there, though his were actually churning and mine tend to be mostly just big piles of manure. Then I saw the monster compost piles, bigger than a house and full of logs, branches, flood debris, and probably the odd cow carcass or two. Forerunner seems to be on a mission to gather in everything organic within 20 miles and put it into his soil. And I've seen the results and so I'm absolutely amazed. I saw new compost that had been spread out as thick, healthy soil and it had a few bones scattered around in it, evidence that a cow had been very nearly completely "digested" by the microbes in the pile.

An animal carcass is simply a more "concentrated" source of the nutrients that make up soil. In the fall I bury fish, offal, and sometimes whole chicken carcasses near my apple trees up in the orchard. Most of the books that talk about composting warn against putting any sort of animal matter into the piles, but they are talking mostly about small backyard piles. They make no allowances for a pile the size of your house. This year, since taking Forerunner's advice, I had combined several smaller piles into one big one and they finally started getting "hot" enough to churn and burn more thoroughly. It took about 3 weeks for my new monster pile (I call it Compostzilla) to "eat" a dead possum someone hit on the road in front of my house. When I turned the pile I only found a small patch of what may have been fur and the spinal column. Now I'm not even sure even that is out there.

We are stewards of the land. People will own it long after I'm gone, and some of those people may even be my descendants. As the owner of a farm with impoverished soil, I am determined to break the chain of that impoverishment and return to it a fertility that it had before generations of farmers sold off grain crops, hemp, and hay without replacing any of those nutrients.

That was a really interesting read, Forerunner!

Great post. Great info. Note to self - get more educated on composting.

Ernie - Ok if I'm a ding dong, but I learned a new word from you today: offal

had to look it up, didn't know it meant innards. :D

When I was about 5 or 6 my Dad taught me about composting, he told me that "we grow good dirt and that dirt grows good food" I've composted all my life except for the few years I lived in an apartment when I forst got married, everytime I've lived in a house I've composted, even when living in the city.
I have gone strickly organic for the past few years, and just started with 100% heirloom plants last spring - had some great results this year (and a few flops too).

you really need to read the humanure hand book , it is probably the best acidemic study of composting i have ever seen compiled into a somtimes humorus book
good read available free for down load in about a dozen languages

http://humanurehandbook.com/contents.html

you have everything you need to get your compost pile really going with you right now, and you call it waste and go to expensive lengths to get rid of it.

happy composting

WOW. Now that was a post! I have only seen pics of these piles. If I conly had the space...*sigh* For now I'm thinking about getting the lights together and doing an indoor garden in a spare room, just to see what I can do. I'll need to gather bins for this. I'm planning on plnting some of the garlic I have sitting around. I have also decided that dehydration is the way to go in order to frugally store up my excess. HyVee had a good sale on russets 5 pounds for .88 so I bought two bags. Those will go into the dehydrator at some point soon. Plannign on makign soup with the "good taters". Keep this conversation going.

Wonderful information, Forerunner, thank you for sharing.

I have a compost issue. I have two piles (next to each other) in a setup my husband built. The sides of the bin are hardware cloth, the top is exposed to the elements. Here's what I've done:

Year one: added horse manure, leaves, weeds, egg shells, veggie/fruit peelings, etc. to both piles.

Year two: left pile 1 alone, only added content to pile 2. Included straw and chicken manure from my coop (new items this year).

Year three: left pile 2 alone, only added content to pile 1. Included straw and chicken manure from my coop (new items for this pile).

Year four: (same as year two)

Here's my question... I don't "water" my compost, nor do I turn it (I'm a very lazy composter, it seems). I understand that while this method will work, it will take longer. How much longer? Two years? Does the straw take longer to break down?

On a side note, this year I converted an old sand box into a veggie garden. It was nicely framed, so it made for perfect edging. Our soil is not clay-like (we live in the kettle moraine of Wisconsin), but it is very rocky. I added purchased top soil to the sandbox, and for the first time ever I used some Miracle Gro (I feel a bit ashamed, but am getting over it). This fall, it will be covered in straw and chicken manure and allowed to lay throughout the winter. Come spring, I will till it into the garden. Do you see anything wrong with this plan?

Thanks for the OP Fore! and the replies everyone else

I've been composting on a small scale for a few years and have always highly advocated it

I readily concur with the Humanure Book suggestion.
The author is Joseph Jenkins.

The only book that I would more highly recommend is "Rodale's Complete Book of Composting". Get the original, now out of print, circa late '60s. It's hardback and well over a thousand pages of solid meat. Amazon.com, etc......

Princess, your plan is sound. Compost need only be irrigated if you are compiling dry materials or live in arid country. Compost need not be turned and if your pile has enough mass to heat well it will finish in less than a year. If your carbon/nitrogen ratio is adequate (25-30/1, respectively), it will finish quicker than that.
The finished product will give very little indication of the nature of the original contents,
will have no residual urea odor and will be black and crumbly.
I would only turn a pile if I were concentrating on a weed seed or pathogen kill.
BUT, that can be just as effectively accomplished by covering the finished pile with sawdust, leaves or other benign carbon material. That layer will insulate the heating action emanating from the center of the pile and cook everything below to perfection.

Bon appetit.

I had the honor of touring the Jenkins homestead with a permaculture class a few years ago, that place is AWESOME!

really tasty blueberries too. we are entirely too afraid of poo in this country! there are some valid concerns, but education and proper practices can drastically reduce the risks.

its cool to see a big-stemmed thermometer stuck in the pile (i cant remember the temperature, but it was a cookin!)

I would like to get around to composting urine eventually, I could do a bigger composting toilet if we had some land some day, they dont exactly stink but I dont think I could get away with it in the city.

Viva la microherd!

I have always said we need to look at our trash for food. I don't mean dumpster diving for sandwiches either. here all the compostable trash is consitered food for our worms. In return for feeding them they feed our garden and us.
i hope never to have to have worm speggetti, though, even though it is one of our favorite jokes about preping.

That was a great read Forerunner. I'm a firm believer in composting and vermicomposting. (funny how spellcheck flags that word) Just wondering if any of you have to deal with the stigma related to it?

Very informative.

Forerunner,

Thank for the post, but I have two questions.

What equipment are you using to manage the large piles.

Have you heard of / use "biochar"? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar)

Thanks
Kevin

Great post! Makes me want to expand our composting patch!

We just moved out of St. Louis County to an area between St. Louis and Springfield, IL. Be thankful that your parents got out of Jennings. It's now one of the worst areas for crime in the whole county. The only thing that grows there is dispair, filth and violence.

Jennings...... yes.... we moved from there in 1972. :)


I have residual excavating equipment and a variety of farm equipment that I use to haul/handle the material. But I can short cut anyone's guessing as to what might work best.... Of all my heavy equipment and tractors, I by far prefer the John Deere 3010 w/loader and a couple homemade dump trailers.
The 3010 is older-- 1960s, thus cheaper.... roughly 70 horsepower, fuel efficient (I do travel up to 20 miles to collect the different materials), and with the right configuration of trailers (I pull two at a time) I can haul 15-16 tons with no problems. I paid 10,000 for the 3010 with loader attached. It was one of the best investments I've ever made.

If Ernie had sent me my case of Dew™, I might have been more inspired to share the next chapter of the story last night, but I'm hoping for a block of time tonight. Chapter two will put things in layman's perspective as well as fill in some gaps. Composting need NOT be the least dependent on heavy equipment or expensive investments.

I've not looked into biochar. So far, I've managed to keep things relatively simple...... obsessive and excessive, perhaps, but simple.

I'm looking forward to your second installment, forerunner.
Is there any chance that you might decide to host an HT gathering? i would absolutely love to see this in action.

Thank you, Ernie, for encouraging forerunner to share his passion.

Forerunner, is farmerswife.com your blog?

Yup.

http://frmerswife.blogspot.com/

She gets a bit candid, at times.
You might have to sort through some girly sentiment to find the meat.....

Your compost piles sounded like the guys in the blog, LOL!

I would be delighted to host an HT gathering, no matter how large or small, at any time that any number of you care to make the trip.

Yes, thanks to Ernie AND Angie for their double-teaming me and convincing me to get out of the woods long enough to write.....
Thanks to Ernie for offering the second witness to my efforts here.
Just imagine the possibilities if he ever does bring me a case of Dew™.:bouncy:

Oh come on now, you like girly sentiment as much as the next guy :nana:

I have been trying to encourage my husband (forerunner) to guest blog on my blog.. but he has yet to take me up on it... :grump:

Hi Lori -
Why don't you start a thread about something you learned after moving to the farm, or do we need to read the blog.

Anyway - welcome, and thanks for sharing forerunner/Timothy with us.

Angie

Hey! great post! I would like to add that it's worth it to do a little research into the chemical stuff that goes on in the soil too. Compost is of course great stuff, but there are other chemical things going on that need a little help that compost may or may not readily help(depends what your compost recipe is). For instance my soil is temperate forest clay(it is always good to learn what your soil is clay/sand etc and its origins, my=ine is uplifted seafloor basalt) along with tons of rain that leeches stuff down in the winter(which can be used to advantage).


Wood ash returns the metals/some minerals that the tree took up from the soil, and also has a liming action, sweetens the soil. So I put a lot on mine, all through winter. Also the ash loosens up the clay, for a fluffier soil and unlocking the nutrient bond with teh clay particles. The winter rains carry the ash deep into the soil and loosen it up over the winter.

Roots need calcium to uptake nutrients, so I powder up eggshells and throw it in the hole when I plant. I also fluff in cracked up eggshells for slower release of calcium.


I compost directly into the beds during fall winter, digging in kitchen scraps, ash, and the dead veggie matter from the summer, rotten spongy logs from the woods, moss from trees that were cut for firewood. Also grass clippings and fall leaves are mulched on top.

In the spring I fluff this up with a garden claw when the moisture is right, I dont' double dig or anything, but I can tell the soil is loosened up and if I do dig a hole for a post of something it's nice and fluffy 18" down. Also plants with healthy vigorous root systems will also loosen soil up too, let the roots die off and they compost in.

My knowledge is very scattered. I have done some of everything since I have been here. I wouldn't know where to start :doh:

bumping to the front page

We're on two lots in a small town. In our area native top soil is deep black and fertile. Where we garden one area was an old wash house with cement floor, brick paved path to the outhouse (many years before we arrived) and dumping ground for cinders and trash. I cleaned up a pickup load of rotten cement from the area and we've been adding compost and picking up trash for over 30 years. We now have a worm filled garden that grows about anything we plant. We're still finding broken glass, square nails, bits of barb wire, but I just keep picking the stuff and discarding it. We also had an F-4 tornado in 1979 that added a good bit of debris so I pick up roofing nails and bits of shingles too. Immediately after the tornado we removed a large section of someone's kitchen floor (plumbing & wiring attached), a big section of the church on the corner and one neighbor's house and another's garage from the area. We consider it a miracle we don't have more trash than we do!!

Since the town began enforcing dogs being confined and we had an outbreak of rabies in cats, rabbits have overtaken us. Dh got permission (after doing it for years!) to shoot rabbits with a bb gun. He's killed quite a few over the years and they always get buried in the compost. I've yet to see anything more than a bit of fur from the compost spread in the garden.

My personal hero, early composting pioneer Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, spearheaded efforts in the forties and fifties to process a major percentage of refuse and sewage in some very large municipalities across the country.
He set up a two-stage grinding system to reduce all material to a very fine consistency. Between that and the magnetic separators, he could produce a very attractive product.
There are many substances in refuse that are rather unsightly and long in the decomposition process, yet valuable to the soil.
Bringing in truckloads of yard waste from the municipality near me as I do, the issue of dealing with foreign matter is familiar to me.
I've even been known to dump truckloads of lightly burned hay, stall floor debris, burnt nails and ashes from neighbors' recently burned barn cleanup projects directly on the gardens. Burnt nails decompose quickly enough and the other trash is easy enough to pick out after working the soil or during weeding, mulching, etc. The extra effort is definitely worth it to me for the return of the super rich soil amenities.

Incidentally, big oil/pharmaceuticals/chemical ag lobbying groups finally used misleading public opinion to shut Ehrenfried down.
After all, imagine the sustainability, independence and productivity of a nation that recycles everything......