I PROMISED THIS year to offer more columns on green, eco-friendly gardening, so here is another, as we are now just 15 days away from the beginning of fall.
Lots of jobs need to be done around your yard, including a lot of cut back, and it is no different for me.
In fact, this has been a very busy gardening week for me — but when is any week not?
The usual and daily tasks of deadheading various flowers at the several gardens I maintain is producing a multitude of 5-gallon buckets, chock full of old flower heads.
The dahlia blossoms are increasing exponentially, so their dead-heading needs are ever expanding as well.
Oriental lilies are quickly fading, requiring one to clip them off halfway down the stalk, and many gladiolas are finishing their flower cycle, which means cutting away the flower stalk.
Everyone’s annual and perennial flowers are in full display, so daily pruning, pinching and deadheading is producing an abundance of green or colorful organic material.
As if this week were not enough, next week the old lavender heads (all 140 of them) at one of my most cherished client’s gardens must be trimmed back.
So, along with all the grass clippings, a large amount of plant material is being produced as summer moves into its last trimester.
This is why I have chosen to write about compost and composting this week.
Compost is truly a miracle drug in anyone’s garden because of several beneficial qualities it possesses.
Compost is great fertilizer.
It has within it all the various minerals, trace elements and nutrients from all the products from which it was produced.
It is an organic fertilizer as well, so it is released slowly into the soil at a very consistent rate and not in such quantities as to greatly disrupt or kill indigenous and beneficial soil microorganisms that are crucial to good, healthy soil.
Compost is a soil conditioner.
Compost is made up of numerous particle sizes that, when worked into the soil, vastly improve the soil structure, making it even more fertile while increasing its tilth.
Tilth is a term that expresses both the fertility of the soil and its workability.
Poor soil tilth leads to compacted soils, which means they hold moisture poorly. Plants are then stressed and produce, or grow, at vastly lower rates than those growing in healthy soil.
Compost, being organic, holds and retains moisture.
Compost is like a thousand little sponges that soak up water and then slowly release it back into the ground.
As the surrounding soil begins to dry out, the water drains off or leeches down to the subsoil.
Compost adds mini-microorganisms and fungi into the soil.
Healthy soil is full of life. In fact, it is best to think of soil as a complex living structure and this life is linked to fertility. Compost is rich in a plethora of life, so compost ensures a healthy plot of ground.
There are numerous ways to build and make compost: From very simple to quite elaborate, from store-bought tumbling drums to just a pile of heaped up garden and kitchen waste in your backyard.
The Romans actually recorded using simple compost piles as early as 23 A.D.
They were just piles of organic material, stacked high, and by the next year’s planting season, they had sufficiently rotted away, and broken down enough to use on the agricultural fields.
Compost can be made in as little as a month by including three important steps.
First, however, compost requires organic material in the form of both carbon and nitrogen.
Carbon is for energy and heat.
Nitrogen is to feed the decaying organisms.
Brown and green
Carbon basically means brown, such as bark, branches, stems, stalks, coffee ground or dried garden material.
Nitrogen means green, such as grass, leaves or colorful flower heads and vegetable waste.
When piling, stirring or tumbling compost, water is the first primary ingredient.
Too dry, and the pile putrefies, and nothing happens.
The heat of decay dries out the pile, so water needs to be added, as well as a little water with each addition of material to the pile.
Too much water, and you drown the pile, which is why tarping or covering it over the winter is a very good idea.
Correct storing of the pile is next.
Oxygen is essential in order for oxidation (decomposition) of the carbon to occur.
Mixing or stirring the pile also rotates around the material for a more uniform decomposition and thus a more consistent looking and textured compost.
Finally, inoculation really speeds up the process.
This is accomplished by adding (sprinkling) some semi-decomposed material with each addition to the pile.
Layered like lasagna
Even a shovelful, or two, of some half-composted material adds hundreds of thousands of decaying microbes to the pile, and rapidly reproducing microbes populations explode into the new food source.
So, a great compost pile is like a lasagna recipe, made of many layers.
Put down a few inches of organic material, add some water, add some semi rotted material — even a little soil — then more organic material, more water, more soil and not quite ready compost.
Just keep laying it on.
Then every so often, stir or fluff it — which is done best by re-piling it over to another bin or area.
A small tractor can work miracles here, but if not, making compost in layers with water and inoculate will produce great compost in 3 to 6 months.
And please … stay well all!
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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).
