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1. Introduction: Why Compost?
by Beth Hanson
I recently read somewhere that by incorporating just one generous dose of compost into your garden's soil, you are adding as much topsoil as it would take nature a century to accumulate. Considering the little bit of effort that is required to compost and to dig the finished product into the soil, this is an incredible payback.
If this isn't a compelling enough reason to start composting, consider these: New research is proving what many gardeners have long intuited -- compost helps protect plants from diseases and insect pests. Compost enhances the soil's ability to hold water and air, both essential for plants. Over time, compost-amended soil darkens and warms up more quickly in the spring, extending your growing season. Unlike soluble chemical fertilizers, compost releases its nutrients slowly as plants need them. And by composting, you can put your kitchen and garden scraps to good use -- much better than landfilling.
As you'll discover in the pages ahead, composting can be as big or little an undertaking as you like. For some composters, the process becomes a passionate pursuit; they are forever in search of the recipe and method that will reward them with a humus-laden compost in the least amount of time. Other composters have a spot where they dump leaves and prunings as they rake or clip, and once in a while they'll pull some finished -- also humus-laden -- stuff from the bottom of the heap. But like me, most composters fall somewhere between these groups. We keep a container on the kitchen counter for coffee grounds and carrot peelings, and when they become odoriferous, we dump them on the pile, mixing them with the twigs, weeds, leaves and old blossoms already heaped there. We turn the pile when we remember to, and are gratified to find that while we weren't looking, worms, bacteria, fungi and other creatures have transformed our organic waste into a treat for the soil and the plants.
A large proportion of the stuff we send to landfills is compostable. As landfills like New York City's Fresh Kills (above) close, composting makes more and more sense.
The multitudinous creatures in the pile, members of the "decomposer food web," are the reason that composting works so well. In a hot pile, one where the balance of carbon- to nitrogen-rich materials and air to moisture are just right, life explodes. Protozoa and bacteria absorb nutrients from the moist medium around them, and flourish. These one-celled creatures are preyed upon by nematodes (roundworms); some fungi snare nematodes in traps along their strands and consume them, and the fungi, in turn, are fed upon by mites. As they munch their way through the pile and through each other, these decomposers release energy and nutrients from organic materials, making compost the incredible stuff that it is.
You may have begun hearing about composting in the last couple of decades as the organic gardening movement has burgeoned, but for eons, people who lived off the land understood the salubrious properties of compost. As you'll read in the following chapter, by husbanding all their organics -- including "night-soil" or sewage -- and composting these using various techniques, Chinese farmers have managed to keep their fields fertile for thousands of years; they are so successful that they now feed 22 percent of the world's population on just 7 percent of the globe's arable land.
If, like the Chinese, you are challenged for space, don't despair. You can compost on a spot as small as a windowsill, and use the finished product on your houseplants. On the following pages you can learn about this and other ways to "micro-compost." If, as is more likely, you're going to compost in the backyard, you'll learn where to build your pile, what to put in it and lots of ingenious composting techniques. You'll even find complete plans for two compost bins -- one of them a compost bench that doubles as a retreat in the garden -- designed by staff of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Brooklyn Compost Project and architect Jeff Wilkinson.
What could be more gratifying than recycling all the "waste" from your yard and kitchen and doing so in a way that enhances the earth. In fact I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't compost -- so start reading, then start piling.
Beth Hanson is former managing editor of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 21st Century Gardening Series and former managing editor of the Natural Resource Defense Council's Amicus Journal. She writes about gardening and environmental issues for a variety of publications and composts just north of New York City.