permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Thomas Gorman wrote:

> Would composting fireplace ash with kitchen scraps, humanure, and  
> other usual compost materials for a year or so eliminate the  
> 'poisons' and be better than a direct application to a garden.
> Wondering for the future...

No.

You wan to let your compost work off naturally. Never add lime of wood ash 
(both high pH)
but you can add ordinary quarry rock dust, azomite, greensand and rock 
phosphate; these will help
microorganisms process the compostables. A compost pile does its own pH adjusting; there should be a graph showing the 
pH change curve over a period of time somewhere.

Just save the ashes to mix with aragonite, dolomitic lime or high calcium 
lime to apply to land needing pH raising and
amendment with calcium. Filter it as suggested earlier and use the fines for dish washing - put the rest aside to put on 
the garden when you lime it.