(Part 2 of Composting with Success)
This whole process demonstrates one of the principles of chaos theory in action because, in nature, things tend toward chaos or unpredictability. At first, I can identify oak leaves from hickory leaves, chickweed from dock leaves, onion skins from banana peels or carrot tops or pumpkin rinds. After a few stirrings, however, you might still see the pumpkin rind or eggshells, but other things become brown and less identifiable – it’s chaos.
The chemistry at work involves the nitrogen of the green and the carbon of the brown performing their magic by breaking each other down over time. All the other stuff like bruised peaches, cabbage leaves and old blueberries, just add to the chemical dance.
For extra magic, leave the container open for a day, and if you have good enough karma you will be blessed by a visit from black soldier flies who will lay eggs in there. Soon, the happy larvae will emerge. Oh, joy! Their only mission in life is to eat all our garbage with humble and hungry hearts, ask for no compensation, and leave behind rich fertile biomass. These wiggly wonders are easily on the Hit Parade of the most useful creatures in nature.
I also have the luxury of enough space to maintain a big debris pile. At the edge of the woods I pile leaves, weeds and garden debris too large for the compost containers. It’s a heap. I add things throughout the year, and it all breaks down in its own time. If you insist on compost in a hurry, a debris pile is not your answer.
Eventually at the bottom edges of the pile, dark brown crumbly leaf mulch just like compost is ready to shovel into the wheelbarrow and add to a garden bed. Since I am a scientist and an engineer, I developed a plan whereby I carefully shift the pile in one direction or another during the year so that one side gets the new material and another side is where the good stuff waits. I keep spinning the pile year after year. It’s not an exact science, but you should have seen the loads I wheeled over to the garden.
Again, everything in the pile was hauled there because it was not wanted elsewhere, and now it feeds the vegetables and herbs.
Smarty-pants know-it-alls (assuming they even read this) are dancing conniptions about what I left out of this discussion and they might be right, and that is okay because dancing might settle down their know-it-all souls. Nevertheless, an earnest gardener can use this information and nothing else to figure out a successful compost strategy for a lifetime. It’s a personal journey.
John Sebastian also sang “Daydream” in which, of course, he was thinking about compost with all the ideal components arranged with chemical, agronomical and compostidian precision, just like every gardener’s dream.