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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Charcoal
  • Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 20:49:20 -0000


She has written often that most of the samples of compost that she is given, backyard or commercial, are nearly dead, far out of balance microbially, and give mediocre to poor results in soil and teas. Most people are used to terrible compost, and although adding bad compost is probably better than adding nothing, we're mostly very cavalier about how we make it. If it doesn't get to 140-160F (60 to 70-ish C) and various other characteristics, it's not going to have the right microbe mix in it, and Elaine says we shouldn't call it compost.

I'm just sayin'. Compost is any old pile of rotting stuff, and we love it. Biochar has to be perfectly made under controlled conditions, and we still hate it. Hmmm.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

I did not want to start this for lack of time Toby and you are right, compost making, since you are dealing with living processes, is a lot more complex than burning any old wood until it is black.

Personally I prefer cold made compost following the giant earthworm technique of professor Alwin Seifert. And before anybody else comes up with an Ad Hominem, I know that the man was responsible for cabbage and potato growing around Buchenwald concentration camp during the Nazi era.
It still produces the best compost I have ever seen because the windrows are kept aerobic at all times and the organic layers are alternated with layers of loam. It gives the best variety of beneficial micro organisms bar none imo. And I use this resource for seed and potting compost. Seedlings grow well unless we have no sun shine for months on end and I have not seen damping off for 20 years.

Hot composting can be very useful especially when you need a ready source of heat. Victorians used these heaps inside green houses during winter and it made it possible to grow hot climate fruits like pine apple while it was freezing brass monkey nuts off outside.
Another application is to start with water pipe coils and to build a hot compost heap around that. Gravity fed ice cold water goes in and warm water at 60-70 degrees C comes out. If the pile is big enough for at least 5-6 months non stop.
The cooling water keeps the pile from catching fire. I saw that happen once in my youth with a straw-horse manure pile. And before I forget, some people have used such piles to capture methane that escapes from it.

The disadvantage of hot compost to me is that thermophilic bacteria (also called fire-blight) are about the only micro organism that can survive the temperatures generated for days or longer. It cooks everything else including weed seeds and compost worms but also tens of thousands of species of other beneficial micro organisms. When this pile is finished it is as good as sterile and it really needs to be re-inoculated with all that is good. Often not so simple unless you have an enormous variety of beneficials handy.

Anyway, I think the most important rule in compost making is to avoid bad smells. When this happens you are loosing many necessary minerals such as phosphate and sulfur. It is the sulfur under the form of H2S that gives the smell. And it means that the pile does not get enough air and has gone anaerobic.

When we first started farming in Ireland we found out that the top layer of luxurious grasses was growing on bare rock in many places. It took us 26 years but now we have two feet of good soil in most places. We achieved that through sheet composting, just spreading whatever organic material we had available (and in the beginning that was almost pure sawdust and wood shavings). The first 4 inch layer took 6 months and longer to decompose. In fact we could not wait until it was completely gone for we needed to grow food and plants need a medium to root in. In the first few years the C/N ratio of the materials we put down was nowhere and still plants grew. Only explanation I could think of was that there were microbes on the saw dust getting nitrogen from the air under sufficiently damp conditions. (After all there are about 8 metric ton of nitrogen gas pressing down on every single square meter on earth).
Anyway, we have since done our best to cure mineral deficiencies when that became possible. These days we mulch twice a year and except for the top few millimeters that is digested within weeks and turned into soil. I let the worms do the work and we never dig except when that is unavoidable for harvesting root crops.
This lazy system has also enabled me to get rid of potato blight and cabbage clubroot completely and to do away with a lot of rotation. Diseased plant parts were composted in situ to stimulate species of micro organism that could eat the pathogens or give at least protection to later plantings. This has worked really well.

So, what is the problem with compost?

John






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