By Karen Kirchoff
Six light-green lettuce sprouts emerge from a seedling tray, exuberant and healthy. Each of these sprouts will soak up a few sunbeam hours a day, “hardening” into sturdiness before transplanting. Spring has arrived!
It’s time to shovel up the most important garden tool you have: Your soil.
All over the city, gardeners are preparing their soil for spring plantings of vegetables and flowers.
During a recent Arnold Arboretum “Urban Veggies” class, Abby Hird emphasized basic garden elements that will nourish these lettuce blooms. Pointing to a large outdoor circular bin, Hird showed table scraps and kitchen waste decomposing within: veggie peelings, citrus rinds, eggshells, and even torn-up egg cartons.
“Compost really started with people just digging a hole in the ground and burying their waste,” Hird explained. As she used a shovel to turn the black mass in the compost pile, a vapor of heat rose. The class shared a collective gasp of surprise and delight on that April night: compost biology before our very eyes! This compost will “wake up” garden soil for lettuce leaf plantings.
Evidence of composting has been found as far back as the early Romans. If you haven’t considered making your own compost, this is a good year to start. The beauty of making compost is the sustainable cycle it creates: table waste becomes nutrient-rich food for your garden and lawn. Your composting efforts will reduce your household’s contribution to landfill waste. And you will be making steps toward a green environment.
Lisa Becker, of Mass Audubon Habitat, is an avid composter. “Good composting makes life happy for the FBI: fungi, bacteria and invertebrates. These tiny creatures of nature do all the work in composting, breaking down all your waste into black gold: chocolate cake-like soil! The FBI need water, food, air, and a place to live,” explained Becker, “and your compost pulls them into your garden.”
Becker will be talking about compost at the next GreeningRozzie meeting on May 18 at 6:30 p.m. at the Roslindale Community Center.
She teaches that a good compost recipe has “brown” (carbon) and “green” (nitrogen) materials mixed together, preferably in a 3:1 ratio. This ratio allows for good aerobic activity by microbes and keeps the mixture from being smelly. As one website put it: “Too much brown slows it down; too much green makes a scene.”
“Brown” compost sources include “dead, crunchy leaves” and mulch. “Green” sources include vegetable scraps and grass clippings. Others advise pine needles, corn stalks, and paper for added “brown” materials and coffee grounds, seaweed, and overripe fruit for “green” sources.
When compost is added to soil (1/4th to 1-inch around plants), the soil is inoculated with beneficial microbes. These microorganisms then make essential nutrients available for plant growth: natural sources of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and other elements. Nothing is wasted. A wonderful system of symbiotic relationships now enhances the food soil web of your garden. This “microbial manifest destiny” is self-sustaining over time.
Compost is additive nutrition to your soil. It gives soil structure, strengthens plant roots, deepens their root systems and builds defense against disease. Compost doesn’t depend on fossil fuels, as does synthetic fertilizer. It’s a fun project to do with your family and friends. As Hird put it, “I told all my friends to give me their kitchen scraps for my compost pile!” In exchange, people share their veggie bounty.
All this soil nutrition without spending a dime on synthetic fertilizer. Compost, in place of chemical fertilizer, also avoids toxic run-off into groundwater. Research has shown that synthetic fertilizers deplete the long-term immune capabilities of plants, weaken their root structures and cause plant dependency on the chemical soup.
Compost improves plant health by increasing the plant’s own defense system against pests and disease. Why use pesticides, which are linked to human health consequences such as leukemia and endocrine disorders, when simple, cost-effective kitchen home gardening methods can prevail?
Synthetic pesticides cause the most risk for children and pets. Synthetic pesticides also build pesticide resistance in pest species, requiring more frequent and more intense applications – and more expense – over time. Compost is a safe, cost-effective alternative to both synthetic pesticide and fertilizer use in your lawn and garden.
Writer Michael Pollen has documented the cost of not growing local food. Each item of non-local food in U.S. households has traveled an average of 1,500 miles. North Americans pay $0.85 of every food dollar on processing, marketing and transportation. Hundreds to thousands of food dollars can be saved per household per year when food is grown in local yards and community gardens.
Small kitchen compost buckets can hold your vegetable scraps until you need to dump them outdoors. A suitable size for a compost pile in the yard is 3 feet x 3 feet x 3 feet and can be made with a circle of hardware cloth. Other options are a rotating drum or the nifty new Brave New Composter.
Compost typically matures through a four-season cycle, ready in time for your yearly plantings. Special amendments can speed up the cycle.
Becker uses her compost bins to produce mulch for her gardens. She mows her fallen leaves in autumn, recycles them in her compost pile, and by spring has “rich, bark-like mulch.”
This past year, Lisa experimented with leaving a layer of fall leaves spread over her garden and was rewarded with being free of weeding “thousands of maple saplings” that typically appear in spring. Over this leaf layer, she will now spread her rich, dark compost mulch to add attraction and nutritive value to her garden soil.
Back at Hird’s vegetable garden, she is ready to “wake up” her soil with mature compost. And her beautiful lettuce seedlings will bring local food straight from garden to dinner plate.
Get involved
Join GreeningRozzie at www.GreeningRozzie.org
Come to GreeningRozzie’s next monthly community meeting, Wednesday, 6:30-8:30pm at the Roslindale Community Center, for one action topic and planning
May 18 – Hands-on home composting demo
June 15 – Gardening and edible landscaping
Support GreeningRozzie’s information tent at Adams Park Farmers Markets, June 4 – opening day and World Environment Day – Composting demo
June 11 – Sustainability day – gardening and chickens info and demo
volunteer to increase composting in Roslindale, prepare a monthly newsletter, and collect information about resources to support our green efforts.
For more information, email Ken@GreeningRozzie.org.
This article first appeared in the Roslindale Transcript.
