Author: Larry Stephenson
Carroll County, MS
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. – Theodore Roosevelt
Black Gold, Peeing in a Bucket, Giant Corn, Disposal of Deceased Pets, and Other Things You Need to Know
NOVEMBER, 2017 – It’s Composting Season! The last of the grass is being cut, leaves are falling, sawmills are grinding out wood chips, cotton is being ginned, cardboard is being thrown away, cows are cr…well, doing what cows do best, and frequently, plop, plop. I love composting time. Sometimes the composting can be as interesting as the fruit-growing.
I’ll pot between 500 – 1,000 trees this year. I have a ½ acre of nursery beds. I have one tiny plot of pure sand, and the rest is hard red clay – those beg for amendment, and I couldn’t successfully grow much without a lot of mulching/ composting. Fate has destined that I shall be a poor man, monetarily (that’s OK, I am exceptionally wealthy in family, friends, and interests); I can’t afford to purchasean 18-wheeler load of potting soil every year, so I do what pore folks always do – I make do; I make my own. I haven’t bought bagged potting soil for the last several years. I make my own, by composting.
My one-acre yard is completely surrounded by a fence of stacked railroad ties, waist high. Jenniffer (and my neighbors) object to my keeping big piles of rotting composting materials in our front yard, and moving them around with the tractor, so I’ve come up with a clever solution: I take heavy wire fencing and roll it into a cylinder, four or five feet wide, and place those right along the outsides of my railroad tie fence – they’re hidden by the fence and go unnoticed by a casual observer. I can walk right up to the fence and dump composting materials right over, into my wire baskets, handy and convenient. It works great. I have rather a lot of these.
Sometimes I use 6’ tall wire, the kind often used in dog kennels, with 2” X 4” squares. I roll these into a cylinder about 3’ wide and stand it upright, to make a tall “composting tower.” I use these in the fall, when I’m raking hardwood leaves, and I dump them right in there and wet them down. After you fill it up to the top, you can KEEP adding leaves, later – especially if you dampen them; those leaves SETTLE, and you can watch the top level sink lower and lower, two or three inches per day, as the weight of the top layer mashes down and condenses the lower. It will surprise you how you can keep adding and adding leaves to such a pile, as the bottom layer decays and condenses. A big pickup load of leaves, in time, will rot down to, say, a gallon or two of finished compost. That compost will be BLACK, with fine particles and grains, and rich as sin. A few handfuls of that in a pot is better than Miracle-Gro, believe me.
A tall “composting tower” like this is probably best used with mostly lighter-weight material, like leaves. If you add denser materials, the weight can get to be TOO much, and spread out and warp the wire basket. Even heavy steel wire has its limits.
After you dump each armload of leaves into the basket, wet them down thoroughly with a water hose. That’s important. Fresh dry leaves won’t absorb water very well; it kinda runs right off, but soak them as well as you can. The process of decay DEPENDS on water, dampness – if you just let a big pile of dry leaves sit, it’ll take YEARS for them to decompose properly. If dry, I believe they are broken down mainly by fungi, rather than bacteria, and that process is slower. For proper decomposition, you need a mix of things: biological substances that WILL decay, moisture, a degree of warmth, bacteria, fungi, and a host of various small insects and worms. Those things are ubiquitous, found all over the world, so all you really have to do is put them all together in one spot, and time and nature will do the work for you.
For a big leaf pile like this, it’s important to COMPACT it, for speediest results. A stack of dry, loose leaves won’t decay very fast. You really want them all mashed together, tightly. Wetting each layer with a water hose will help compact it quite a bit. Another way is to pack denser, heavier materials on top, and also wet them. I often build up a big stack of pure leaves, then pile cow manure or cotton gin trash on top of those, and wet it. For maximum and fastest decomposition, the various components of your compost pile need to be in close contact, pressed up tightly against one another. Smaller particle size will help, too. For example, I often rake leaves into long windrows in my yard, and then run them over with my lawnmower, with a grass catcher attachment. This works well to chop them up into a smaller particle size (especially with big magnolia leaves, otherwise slow to break down, as are pine needles). Then I dump the contents of the bag into my leaf piles and wet it. It’ll work faster.
A leaf pile may take MORE than a year, or two, to decompose completely. What you really need are your “Browns” and your “Greens.” “Browns” are carbon-rich materials with low nitrogen content, like dry leaves, paper, cardboard…by themselves, Browns aren’t exactly inert, but they will be slow to decompose. What you need are “Greens,” materials with a higher nitrogen and moisture content to “fire off,” begin the process of decay. Fresh green grass, kitchen vegetable scraps, green leaves, animal manure, cotton gin trash, roadkill, etc., those are “Greens.” Yes, gin trash and manure are brown in color, but they’re high in nitrogen, so they’re “Greens” (that makes perfect sense to composters).
See, you want your leaf piles or compost piles to do a little more than just sit there and slowly decay; you want them to “heat up” – the beginning process of decay generates HEAT, a fair amount of it. They can get QUITE warm, up to 160°, too warm to hold your hand in there for very long, and that initial stage of the decomposition process is what breaks down material fastest. Once your leaf pile heats up, you can watch the top level sink down rapidly, inches per
day, as it “works.” That level of heat is enough to kill off some harmful bacteria, and it kills most undesirable weed seeds (You hope. Morning glory and cocklebur seeds WON”T be killed, unfortunately.) This “hot” part of the process normally lasts three or four weeks, then it’ll cool down, and the initial and fastest stage of the composting cycle is complete.
I’ve not had any luck re-starting this “hot” phase – has anyone else? I’ve tried wetting it more and adding a few handfuls of urea. 46-0-0, or urine (Yes, I’ll admit it; I pee in a bucket outside for much of the year, for the sake of my compost pile. No, my wife and son adamantly refuse to make their own contributions; they just don’t see the science or the logic behind it. Yes, I may have to drink more beer than I actually want, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Yes, my neighbors occasionally make smart-alec remarks about my personal habits, and Jenn makes sure I empty and wash out my collection bucket before we have company, but…I’m right and they’re wrong. I have very nice compost piles, and that’s important to me.), but to no avail.
Once this “hot” phase is over, fungi and soil-making insects move in to complete the cycle. Earthworms too; they help a lot. I’ve not deliberately tried to cultivate a vermicomposting pile, but when I’m removing my finished compost, I can literally pick out an earthworm from each handful. That’s some rich stuff, Black Gold to me, and it gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
(Bioturbation – the reworking of soils and sediments by animals or plants. Bioturbating activities are thought to be a primary driver of biodiversity.)
I begin most of my composting process in the fall or winter, simply because that’s when materials are easily available to me. Our housecats and the local freeloading raccoons have discovered that my actively-working leaf piles make wonderful wintertime BEDS – think about it, a nice layer of leaves with waves of heat rising from below – I’d sleep there myself!
So far, what I’ve been talking about are LEAF PILES, which is NOT the same as a compost pile. There’s an important distinction. My leaf piles are long-term projects, with minimal efforts put into them. Once I get them gathered and piled up and dampened, I won’t do much else to them, other than an occasional watering. Nature will do the work for me. Typically, they’ll reduce down to about ¼ of their original volume, over a year. After one year I’ll combine the partially finished compost, wet it down again, and wait another year for it to be broken down completely. Slow, yes, but it also takes minimal labor.
A real COMPOST PILE, now, that’s a different beast. The difference is that you “turn” a compost pile regularly—“work” it. You turn over the layers of the pile with a pitchfork, turning fork, or shovel, twice a week or so. Working it like this mixes the components better, gives the individual particles contact with each other, and importantly, aerates it, exposing it to the air. Most of the decaying organisms are AEROBIC bacteria, which need air to function. Mixing it often like this keeps the entire pile at the same level of decay, and you’ll get an evenly-finished product.
ANAEROBIC bacteria, ones that live without the presence of air – those function to break down biological matter, too, very well, but many of the anaerobic types are also ones that are harmful to human health, i.e., cause diseases. It’s mostly the anaerobes that are responsible for bad smells, too, as they emit methane or sulfurous gasses.
These actively-working compost piles break down surprisingly fast. If you put the labor into it, you can get usable, finished compost in a month or six weeks. It’s fastest in the warm seasons, of course. The “leaf pile” baskets that I’ve described are inferior for an actively-working compost pile, because it’s inconvenient to have to reach over the tops of them to get in to fork the materials around. A three-sided, C-shaped structure is best for working compost, because it gives you room to get in there and “work” the materials. Some people use wooden pallets, stood upright in a C-shape, to contain their compost piles. The best composting containment system I’ve used: I take “cattle panels,” cheap and easily available, made of very heavy galvanized steel wire, usually 5’ X 16’ in dimension, and I’ll line those with ¼ hardware cloth. I’ll bend “legs” on them, about 4’ long, then stand them up to get a fence 5’ tall, with 4’ X 8’ X 4’sides, open on one side. I stake the corners with t-posts. This works fantastically well; it gives you elbow room to get in there and really work over your materials; it’ll hold a ton of finished compost; with a smaller amount you can easily toss compost from one side to the other to mix it; all the components are cheap and easily available. These will also last forever, never rot out, but can still be moved easily if you need to change locations.
How to tell when compost is finished – It’s “finished” when you can no longer distinguish one component from another. You shouldn’t be able to pick out leaf fragments, acorn hulls, pieces of paper – it should all be a fine-grained, black, gritty substance.
Sources
If you’re orcharding, doing nursery stuff, farming, or gardening, you already know how important your “sources” are. You don’t want to PAY for composting materials, of course – you want to use what others discard as trash, which you can haul off for free. If you purchase a bag of fine pine bark, one of cow manure, and one of peat, and mix them up…where’s the fun in that? It’s the scrounging, the search for materials and steady sources, the thrill of the chase, which make for the exciting part of composting. (There’s a clue as to my personality, that I find watching things rot “fun.”) It’s VERY important to develop your sources, so keep a sharp eye out.
(Bricolage – something made or put together using whatever is at hand.)
Myself – there’s a cattle sale barn one mile from my place of work, with a mountain of cow manure out back, and those guys are happy for me to haul off a truckload, anytime. (Go for the dried manure. The fresh stuff is…well, you’ll see for yourself.) The nearest cotton gin is ten miles away, but on my way back from work, so I stop by there and load up with gin trash. My uncle crafts outside lawn furniture and kindly saves his sawdust and shavings for me, so I get a
couple of big bags of that each week. There are numerous small sawmills in this area, so I can easily find more wood chips and sawdust. I watch the sides of the road, especially within city limits – homeowners often, especially in the fall, set out bags of raked leaves on the curb for the garbage truck to pick up – it’s FREE, they don’t want it, and the garbage crew doesn’t either; all that stuff does is take up space in the landfill. Last year I scored fifty big bags of clean pine straw from ONE place – why a person would plant pine trees all around their house, if they abhor pine needles that much, I don’t understand, but their trash is my “Black Gold.”
You can find some of your best composting materials closest to home, in your own yard. I’m not a guy who places a high priority on yard and lawn maintenance, you probably get that. I look out over my yard, see the high grass, piles of leaves drifted against the corners, the sprouts of new growth on the hedges, the dead possum my dog drug up last night…those are all harvestable CROPS to me; more fodder for my compost files. How much scrap PAPER do you throw away each year, do you think? Don’t throw it in the garbage and pay someone to haul it off – compost it, make soil.
Composting Materials
Well, in theory, anything of a biological origin will rot, decay. Some are better than others. PAPER – The average American household throws away 850 lbs. of paper per year. I don’t think modern human society could function without paper. I think sometimes we forget – paper is a biological product; it’s wood, made from ground-up trees.
Coarse-textured, unbleached paper, without much ink, is best. The old-fashioned brown paper grocery bags are perfect. Cardboard, sure, but not if it has a glossy, printed side. You’ll want to pick out steel staples from large cardboard boxes, and remove any tape. Newspaper is good – most of the ink they use nowadays is soy-based, and biodegradable. Typing and copy paper, office-type waste, yes, most of it is good. Most of that kind will break down faster if it’s chipped
up or shredded. Junk mail, bills, cancelled checks – good, if not too heavily printed, and make sure you tear out the plastic “windows.” Paper towels, the cardboard cores from paper towels and toilet paper, they’re perfect. Paper products are the most easily-available for most of us. The kind of paper to AVOID – slick, glossy, printed paper is not the best to compost. There are too many chemicals in that ink, and they may not break down quickly, or be desirable. Some paper may even have a thin plastic coating; throw it in the garbage. Glossy, colored fashion magazines, nope. Christmas wrapping paper, ugh, no. National Geographics and Playboys, no way.
KITCHEN FOOD WASTE – Of course, nearly all of it. Vegetable trimmings and scraps are great. Chicken or fish bones will break down relatively quickly. A t-bone or pork chop bone, um, it’ll take a while. A ham bone, no, too big, make soup with it instead, and then give it to your dog, she deserves it. Eggshells are wonderful, a fine source of calcium. Let them dry a day or two and crush them in your hand to break them up into small fragments. Tea bags and coffee grounds are fantastic – instead of composting, you can add these directly around a plant, as mulch. Paper coffee filters are good. Avoid a lot of plant oils or animal fats. They’re slow, slow to decompose. So, if the oil in your Fry Daddy or fish cooker is getting rancid, dispose of it otherwise.
MANURE – Yes, from cows, horses, sheep, rabbits, and chickens. It’s far easier when it’s dry, trust me on this. Manure from cats, dogs, pigs, or humans – eh, not so much. Those animals can carry diseases which infect humans, so I avoid them myself. The heat of an actively-working compost pile MAY kill most potentially harmful organisms, or it may NOT. Bacteria, viruses, and some parasites have the ability to encapsulate when faced with an unfavorable environment, and they can lie in that dormant state for hundreds of years before springing back to life.
In 2012, the long-lost gravesite of King Richard III, who died in 1485, was discovered. This was an intense archaeological dig, done exactly right. Around his pelvic region, and nowhere else at the site, were found ROUNDWORM EGGS, Ascaris lumbricoides. He was known, historically, as suffering from intestinal ailments. 527 years, some eggs survived? THAT’s my opinion of humanure.
Horses, cows, and sheep are often dosed with Ivermectin to kill intestinal parasites (worms). That medicine is said to sometimes pass through an animal’s digestive system and still be active in the manure, and it actually kills MOST worms, including (desirable) earthworm populations.
Practically, I have not found that a problem; the cow manure I haul from our local sale barn is full of red wrigglers and nightcrawlers.
ANIMAL WASTE AND MEATS – OK, to a degree, but I’d prefer those in small amounts. Big bones, like a cow femur – no, it WILL decay and add calcium, but it’ll take years. A deboned deer or pig skeleton – I’m unenthused about those. A bucket of rancid lard – no, it’d take decades to break down. An occasional small piece of roadkill, fish, a deceased goldfish, turtle, hamster, or parakeet, yes I’ll use those, but I’d bury them deep so they don’t smell and attract flies and scavengers. I’d prefer to use those in a “hot,” actively-working pile. Put it this way: I’d compost a Pekingese, but not a Doberman.
PERENNIALS vs. ANNUALS – Some experienced composters believe that plant tissue from annual plants, those that die back after one season of growth, decay more rapidly than those from perennials, like the leaves and wood chips from trees. I’m prone to agree with them, but mostly, I’ll really use whatever I can get. Wood chips may be slower-rotting by themselves, but if you keep them damp, and mix with other, faster-decaying matter, they’ll rot down soon enough.
URBAN SOURCES – Well, suburban, anyway. Oh yeah, just because you live in the big city, it doesn’t mean you can’t find PLENTY of compostable materials. Sometimes it’s even easier than it is in a rural area, with less driving. Your yard, even a small one, and your kitchen and household will provide lots. Grocery stores, restaurants, or any kind of food-processing place generate HUGE volumes of food waste. Many of your neighbors like a well-maintained yard, and they’ll kindly gather up leaves and grass clipping, bag them, and leave them on the curb for you to pick up. Every city will have arborists, tree-trimming services, who usually grind up their limbs, and are LOOKING for a place to dispose of these. Is there a horse stable in town? A zoo? IF you’re allowed access to go in a city landfill – some cities separate garbage by category, and you might find an acre or two covered with mountains of wood chips or bags of yard waste. You’ll be amazed at what you can find in an urban environment, if you do a little searching.
AGRICULTURAL WASTE – Some are potentially GREAT sources. It depends. If you are lucky enough to have an agricultural source, it’s usually a lot, a large volume. Farmers growing corn, soybeans, or wheat – you may not be able to get much from their fields; the harvesting combines usually pick the grain clean. Corn kernels are separated from the cob by the combine, and cobs and stalks are chopped up and spread out over the fields. Soybeans are separated from the pod, and wheat from their stalks. The place to look for their wastes is at a grain elevator or processing plant. Those most often will have mountains of waste that they’ll be happy to let you haul off, for free – they WANT to get rid of it. Peanut processing plants, pecan cracking outfits, cotton gins, vegetable processors, apple cider mills, sugarcane or sugar beet processing plants, sawmills, wood processing plants, rice and other grain mills – all great sources. You’ll need permission to go onto their private properties and gather. It’s VERY important for you to always keep in mind – places like this, they’re FACTORIES, serious industrial endeavors, and they’re not going to concern themselves much with a guy wanting to scrounge a pickup or two of their waste. They can be DANGEROUS. They’ll likely have big piles of waste materials sitting around outside, but there will probably also be lots of heavy machinery moving around, driven by employees focusing on their JOBS, their work, and not on avoiding or working around YOU. You need to keep a sharp eye out and DON’T get in their way! They’re BUSY during harvest, their peak season, so during their slower off-season is a much better time to collect.
Chicken-raising farms generate very fine composting materials. Chickens are raised on bedding of rice hulls, peanut hulls, straw, or wood shavings, stuff that will absorb their wastes. This bedding will also be full of their spilled food, feathers, and dead carcasses – wonderfully rich materials which are high in nitrogen and will decompose quickly. Chicken litter is usually NOT so high in nitrogen that it will burn plants, so it can be applied as mulch/fertilizer even without composting. In MS, there’s actually an industry of chicken litter; the big chicken operations in south MS haul big truckloads to farmers and cattlemen, who spread and till it into their fields for tilth and nutrients. It depends on their feed and type of bedding used, but some chicken litter can be slightly alkaline, which will raise the pH just like lime does, which is very desirable for most of us. Good stuff, chicken litter.
When we were younger, my cousin raised quail for a while, commercially. He bedded them down on pine wood shavings. Every now and then, he’d clean out the pens, and I’d help him. We’d shovel out the pens and throw the quail litter in a trailer, and haul that out to my grandmother’s garden. Instead of spreading the litter properly, we just tossed it out randomly about the garden, by the shovelful. The next summer, after the garden was planted – you could
look out over the garden and see where literally every single shovelful fell; the plants there were three times the size of their neighboring plants; with robust stems and dark green foliage. If there was ever a single incident in my life that showed me how important it is to work biomass back into your soil, this was it. (My uncle made some snide remarks about what a careless job we’d done in putting out the quail litter, so next year I obtained a packet of “giant corn,” corn that made small ears but threw a stalk twenty feet high, and I covertly planted them here and there, amongst his sweet corn. He’d stand out in the garden, musing at those gigantic stalks. “Yep, that quail litter sure did the trick. Wonder why they don’t all look like that? Next time, you boys be
sure to spread that litter out better.”)
Understand, all these potential composting ingredients I mention – I gather them with the intent of MIXING them together, and letting them rot, usually NOT using only one single element! Each different component adds a certain part, or vital nutrient or mineral or micronutrient, so a MIX is important. By themselves, many would compost poorly, with a not-so-great final product. A compost pile of pure paper, for example, is only a soggy, smelly mess. Mix it in with leaves, spoiled hay, or gin trash, a heavily mixed composition, and stir it around and it becomes something quite improved. ONLY table scraps or pure animal waste products, yuck. If I had to pick only one single substance that could be composted by itself – leaves, I’d say. Leaves, by themselves, break down into a very nice compost. Cotton gin trash does too, even quicker.
COTTON GIN TRASH – Gin trash is interesting enough to warrant a few paragraphs of its own. This will probably be new information to my Northern friends who aren’t familiar with it. Gin trash – after cotton bolls are picked from the fields they’re carried to a cotton gin, where the lint is separated from the seeds. Of course the lint is the most valuable, desired product, but the seeds and hulls are also used – cottonseed oil, pressed from these seeds, is a valuable product. (When I was a kid, raising cattle, the cotton hulls and a coarse meal ground from the seeds were what we fed cattle during the winter. They were waste products then, and CHEAP. You could get a barn filled with cottonseed hulls for, say, $10, or so. The cottonseed meal came in 100-lb. bags, and I’d mix a gallon or two with a bushel of hulls, like mixing mashed potatoes and gravy. My cows loved it. There’s 46% protein in the meal, and 4% fat, so it’s a fine winter feed. We fed only a little hay.) The definition of gin trash; everything else, besides the lint and seeds and hulls; it’s the chaff, the dried flower parts, sepals and petals, pieces of the stems and leaves, some lint, and broken up pieces of the hulls and seed. Unfortunately, other plants, weeds, that happen to be growing in the fields, like cocklebur and morning glory, are also contained in it. Everything that the combine sucked up and that the gin machinery rejected as not-lint or not-seeds, that’s what it is. (Probably a few insect parts in there, too).
Gin trash is a dingy brown color and slightly oily from the cottonseed oil, and not very appealing. Cattle will eat it (hungry cows). When it gets a little damp – wow, that stuff fires up fast, makes a very “hot” compost that “works” fast, and quickly breaks down into fine particles. If you’re turning it in a proper compost pile, you can get fine, finished compost in only a couple of months.
The thing about gin trash – “organic,” it ain’t, not by any stretch of the definition of the word. Cotton, as grown in the Southeastern US, is probably the most chemical-infused plant material you can find. It’s been grown on soil that has been chemical-laden for decades. ALL cotton is a GMO, a genetically-modified organism, very highly bred. “Natural,” “organic” cotton, I don’t think there is such a thing, not on any large scale. The chemicals – more than a normal person could understand, but cotton is cultivated with herbicides, insecticides, bactericides, fungicides, miticides, defoliants, liquid fertilizers, growth hormones, boll-openers, growth restrictors – the modern cotton plant comes from the efforts of plant breeders and chemical manufacturers, working hand-in-hand, and is BRED, developed and designed, to grow in conjunction with these chemicals. So, you can imagine, my organic-growing friends faint or throw up their hands in horror when I mention using cotton gin trash in compost.
In some states, I know they have a three-year standard – if you let gin trash sit outside and weather for three years, all the chemicals are theoretically leached out, and it can be legally labeled as “organic,” and sold as such. That’s a rule of thumb farmers use too, three years after application, they figure any chemical residues will be gone. In practice – I’ve lived in a cotton-growing region most all my life. For several decades I’ve observed my family and neighbors use this product in their gardens and yards, and have never observed any detrimental effects from it. Just the opposite; it really is “Black Gold” for any growing plant. It’s best when it’s rotted down for at least a year, but I’ve used it fresh, too, directly on my garden and nursery beds as mulch and compost. The fresh gin trash will have certainly been sprayed with defoliant just before picking, but I’ve not seen that harm any living plant.
I guess it depends on how strictly you want to adhere to an “organic only” strategy, as to what materials you choose to compost. If you want to be really, purely “organic” – you’ll have a hard time. There’s not much in this world that is completely untouched by human activity, you know. Leaves that you rake up from your yard? They’ll have traces of vehicle exhaust residue on them. Grass clippings from town? Most homeowners use some sort of fertilizer or weed control on their lawns. Wheat or rice straw, or hay? Those will nearly always come from fields that were cultivated with herbicides. Eggshells or chicken litter, or manure from feed lots? Those animals will most always have been fed with antibiotics, dewormers, or growth hormones; that’s how meat animals are cultivated, with the aid of modern medicines and chemicals. “Sustainable,” I’d say that these products are, but “organic” – umm. I believe there’s a middle ground we must all seek, as in most every aspect of our lives.
Humankind, despite its artistic pretensions, its sophistication, and its many accomplishments,
owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. – Anonymous
*(There are an estimated 1100 elephants in North America. Each and every one produces 300
pounds of dung per day, on an average. That means 60,000 tons of elephant poop are
generated in North America every year, enough to fill the Rose Bowl Stadium 3½ times, by
volume – so, where IS it? Have you ever SEEN any? I’m suspicious – I suspect The
Government, or Big Ag, or Big Chem, has a hand in this mystery, somehow. And, I’m not even
mentioning the rhino, giraffe, and hippo manure that should be available…)
