Hi Dieter,
if you have ever seen a good made compost - dark, good smelling,
loose structure and full of life - you wouldn't say so. There are
lossses of amount, that's true. But what you get, when the process of
composing comes to an end, is more valuable than the loss.
Alwin Seifert, a german pinoneer of organic gardening, explained it
like this:
a wild crab aple tree (with small fruits which are only a shell for
the important seeds) grows and lives only from that, what he took
from the soil and what he got back from the leaves falling down in
autumn and return to the soil again. This one layer of leaves is
enough for him.
But for our productive apple trees, with big amount of apples this
one layer is not enough.
Because it is not possible to put the necessary ten or twenty layers
around the trunk he did it on another side nearby - the compost
heap.
In my garden I do both: composing (espacially when a lot of organic
matter accumulates in a short time without free space on the garden
beds) and applying organic matter directly whenever possible.
Compost I also need for potting soil, for my greenhouse and as a
fertilizer for cabbage and others.
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