Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Michael Nevin <mikepnevin@yahoo.ca>]

Hi - I am getting puzzled also by what I think is a difference between applying well-finished compost vs basically using a green manuring or sheet composting of  that plant matter already growing on site. And the issue is not always just humus creation although that is obviously very important.

Some composting in containers or hot composting as opposed to sheet composting is motivated by waste handling concerns.For example, where I work, we have appx 200 -300 kg of rotty, smelly food and kitchen scraps to deal with every week and very little garden space on site to use for sheet composting. Dealing with "waste" is a driver of our actions.

Given our waste issues, hot composting leading to the creation of finished compost is our best way to go. Whether our approach maximizes humus production as opposed to resorting to sheet composting or turning plant and food scraps into soil, I could not say.

Our compost is sold to local small-scale hobby and community gardeners who will pay a premium price because of the purported quality of our compost and the need in urban ag to -as it were- force feed nutrients to plants in the confined spaces available in cities.

It seems obvious that our pricey compost would be prohibitively costly for large-scale farmers many of whom are forced to cut costs and who are maintaining their farms by off-farm employment. It is quite possible to compost on a large scale as municipalities do. But the best bet for a farmer would be to use a cover crop/green manuring either disced in or left on the surface to break down instead of applying finished compost which is hard to create in quantities sufficient for large acreages anyway.

So, maybe the "method" of composting is not always determined by humus considerqtions but by concerns such as suggested here.

 

From The Sugar Cane by a James Grainger (1721 -1767) and I glean this excerpt from Very Bad Poetry, edited by Kathryn and Ross Petras, Vintage Books, 1997, p43,44

 

    Whether the fattening compost in each hole

    `Tis best to throw; or, on the surface spread;

    Is undetermin`d: Trials must decide.

    Unless kind rains and fostering dews descend,

    To melt the compost's fertilizing salts;

    A stinted plant, deceitful of thy hopes,

    Will from those beds slow spring where hot dung lies:

 

     But, if `tis scattered generously o'er all,

     The cane will better bear the solar blaze;

     Less rain demand; and, by repeated crops,

     Thy land improv'd, its gratitude will show.

 

  I think we are still debating issues that 18th century planters were puzzling over.

Cheers, Mike in Toronto 

 

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