I’ve just been reading “Soil Science Simplified” by Kohnke & Franzmeier and that reminded me of some insight that I now take for granted, but which was originally one of those ‘blinding flash of light’ moments for me.

On the second page, they point out that “A green plant is made up of about 80% water and 20% dry matter. The largest part of the dry matter is composed of the elements hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen which occur in air and water, while the rest consists of a great variety of elements that originate in the soil. In spite of the small amounts of these components, they are absolutely essential and the complete absence of only one of them makes plant growth impossible.” (emphasis added)

Buried in that paragraph is a nugget of information that is vital to the organic grower: the essential nature of trace minerals.

Lowly compost does the heavy lifting in my garden

Trees, like any other plant, generally take up only the nutrients they can use and they do so in the precise ratios needed for growth. The proof of this is that these ratios DID result in growth.

Tree leaves are abundant now in many locations around the world and they represent an incredible storehouse of those trace minerals brought from deep below ground in an easy to collect and use form. This isn’t rocket science, folks, the trace minerals have already been mixed and proportioned and packaged for you. The brain part is done: now all that is needed is a little grunt work.

Although there are a number of subtle shadings about how to use them, let’s look at just a couple: decomposition in situ and decomposing before incorporation.

Firstly, let’s tackle ‘in situ’. All this means is to mulch the leaves directly into your lawn, to dig them into your garden or to layer them on top of the soil so as to provide a blanket over it. This will use a goodly number of leaves and is a recommended practice. A mulching mower set to a low cutting height is ideal for the task of mulching leaves into the sod, as the grass should in any case be cut short this time of year to avoid fungal diseases over the winter. The less green you see, the fewer sugars to tempt snow mold and other fungi.

The second general manner of using tree leaves is to decompose them somewhere other than the point of final use. You might want to finish off a compost pile begun earlier in the year by turning leaves in to it, mixing them thoroughly as you do to prevent them from forming a water-shedding layer. You might also take a tip from others and, after shredding them somewhat with a mower, stack them against a fence or other structure to allow them to begin decomposing there. To the extent that weather permits, earthworms will gladly turn the bottom layers into something called “leaf mold”, which makes an excellent mulch or soil amendment in the spring. Also, in the spring, you can use the dried top layers as the initial ‘browns’ charge for a fresh compost pile.

Fall is also important because soil amendments applied now … lime, bone meal, sulphur, green sand, compost and so on, will have time to be incorporated into the root zone before spring planting. This allows the moderating influences of chemistry (organic chemistry can be gosh-awful slow) and microbiota to be felt, leaving the soil in a more ‘settled’ state. For instance, adding lime or sulphur will change the soil pH (that’s generally WHY they are added) and that will cause distress for the biota that thrived at one extreme or the other. Having winter to work in allows the other biota favoring the new pH to re-establish themselves. You want your soil fully populated by the time it is warm enough to plant. Applying amendments in the fall assists in that goal.

Now is the time to discard leftover plant parts. If the plant simply died because of the cold, it can be sent to the compost. If it died because of disease, send it straight to the trash hopper. Compost cures a lot of stuff but if you add diseased plant material to a late-fall pile, it may never get hot enough long enough to sterilize the pathogens. In that case, you need to allow the pile at least one, and preferably two, years to sit and mature.

Unless beans, peas or other legumes died from disease, do not pull them up by the roots. Rather, cut them off at the soil surface so as to leave their rhizomes in the ground. A quick flick with a sharp hoe will do the trick as will running over them with the mower if you have planted alfalfa or buckwheat and intend to use the top portions as green manure.

Look for some quotes from Kohnke & Franzmeier’s book in the sidebar. I’m liking what I see.

With the economic situation what it is, likely there are many first-time or returning gardeners searching the internet for tips this year. That is good. But there are many sites that are long on eye-candy and conjecture and short on facts.

1) Many sites will refer to compost as ‘fertilizer’. While most of my readers know better, new gardeners might get hood-winked. With an NPK macro-nutrient rating of 1-1-1, “fertilizer” is the worst of all possible reasons for using compost. Although the actual values will vary somewhat from batch to batch, compost will NOT ‘shock’ your plants into incredible growth spurts like the bagged and commercially-hyped stuff will. Moreover, some of these sites will try to sell you some compound or other for making ‘super compost’. Ain’t no such thing. Stuff rots. Compost happens. The formula for a healthy compost pile is simple … and free. Water and air along with a 50:50 mix (by volume) of nitrogen-bearing material such as kitchen or garden refuse and any manures you might have access to and carbon-bearing material such as dried tree leaves or straw. Add enough water to make the whole thing fairly moist, toss so as to mix things up pretty well and walk away.

2) Compost is an excellent source of minerals and trace nutrients. These are needed for the major nutrients (usually present in the soil and air in sufficient quantities) to work. The neat part about it is that all of these nutrients are available in a very complex and precise ratio with no effort on our part. The trees, grasses, manures, and other plants that went into the compost already did the mixing for us, having drawn from the ground precisely what they needed … and nothing more. As they decay, they release these micronutrients again and, voila! compost!

3) Many sites will tell you not to use (fill in the blank) type of manure in your compost. These sites are full of (fill in the blank). Don’t use any manures directly in your garden; that is, don’t just toss a shovel full of cat turds on top of the soil. DO include them in your compost.* DO work them into the soil if you can completely cover them to a depth of an inch or more. Nature has effective means to deal with pathogens or mankind would have become extinct a LONG time ago. The idea in organic gardening is to work alongside the mechanisms of nature synergistically. Figure out how nature is handling things and, when beneficial, ‘turn up the volume’.

4) DO make compost and DO add it to your soil. It will work wonders for it, no matter what type of soil you have. It will loosen clay soils, bind sandy soils and will cause your drainage to become right in both cases. If, by some chance, you are able to make more than you can work into your soil, apply it as a mulch in a layer at least two inches and preferably 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) thick.

5) DO read up on compost. Get a sense of how to do it right. Then get out in your backyard and make some. Then make some more. It may take several batches before you get it just right. But that day will come and you will never look back.

6) There are a lot of ways to make compost and only a couple of them call for an obvious above-ground pile. Possibly the above ground method is not the best one for your circumstance. For instance, nosy neighbors might object to what looks like a pile of garbage in your backyard, but they wouldn’t think twice if they saw you layering straw over the ground (especially if they didn’t see you spreading out garbage and manure beforehand). The neighbors and the police are unlikely to say a word if you dig post holes during the day (and fill them with kitchen scraps, straw, grass clippings and leaves at night). There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. Find the one that works best for you.

7) DO invest in a compost thermometer if you are going to use the above ground pile methods. A good one with a 20” stem and an analog dial is roughly $20 mail order. It will last for years and, among other things, tells you if the compost pile is getting hot enough and alert you to when to turn it by letting you know when it has begun to cool off. If you turn too often, the pile won’t reach its peak temperature of 160F but if you turn too seldom, the outside layers will lose their nitrogen before they get a chance to heat up, too.

DO plant more than you think you’ll be able to eat. The critters will take some, the neighbors will appreciate your largess. ALSO plan on preserving much of what you grow … it won’t be harvest time all year.

9) Many years ago the USDA determined that a quart of home-canned vegetables or fruit cost (are you ready?) just 10 cents from planting the seed to the table. Ten cents! Using organic methods, my wife and I normally grow food that we value at over $4,000 (compared to in-season grocery store prices) from only 240 sq. ft. in our backyard. We are out the price of the seed / plants, the water and some perspiration in the spring and fall. During the summer, a few minutes in the morning, coffee cup in hand, is enough to keep the weeds down.

10) Although, as I stated in item (1) above, compost will not shock your soil into record production, it does something else even more valuable. It builds up the soil, while the commercial preparations deplete it. When a soil is converted from chemical farming to organic farming, the first year sees yields drop sharply. The second year, there is some improvement. By the third year, the organic output matches the chemical output. That’s where most of the studies of the process, funded by the chemical companies, end. In the fourth year … and every year after that … the organic soils out-produce the chemical soils. I have a 10 ft trellis in each of my garden beds. I’ve picked tomatoes, ripe tomatoes, 11 feet up in the air. I live in Michigan, so that was no ‘long season’ stunt. We’ve got about 6 good months to grow vegetables and a couple of ‘iffy’ ones. I garden organically.

If you want to know the REAL ins and outs of composting, there are lots of books you can read and I’ll list a couple of them below. But if you are really curious about what happens in a compost pile, I can recommend no better volume than The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition by Joe Jenkins. Don’t let the title put you off – the guy not only knows his stuff, he documents it and presents it in such a way that you’ll know your stuff, too, when you’ve finished reading it.

Be safe. Have fun. Eat well. – Bill

*Cat turds can pass parasites to humans. While this is a rare occurrence, if you have any doubts about how well a particular compost pile containing them did, allow it to sit for a year. The additional exposure to temperature extremes will work wonders.

“We can fertilize with s**t but will have to sterilise (sic) it. That requires energy. We have to move food from farms to the public and s**t back.”

That’s what I found when I stumbled upon one web site this week. It is representative of wide ranging ignorance about some of the natural processes we relied on to obtain food LONG before Monsanto and Cargill were ever thought of.

Those of you who occasionally thumb through the scriptures are invited to consider how the first couple were supposed to get along without Monsanto. Their job, you will recall, was to extend the boundaries of paradise and fill it with children. LOTS of children. No fertilizers. No GMOs. No mention of tools, either. (It’s called no-till agriculture and we are just now rediscovering how to use it.)

How gullible are you?

That these companies, and others like them, are not only still in business, but “riding high” proves that it is possible, at least for a while, to fool everyone. Somewhere in the 1920s we got hoodwinked into thinking that natural processes which had worked since mankind first learned to plant in a straight row, had stopped working. Greed set in and reasoning went on holiday. We stopped manuring our fields and started fertilizing them. This led directly to the dust belts of the Great Depression as the reserves of humic acids were pulled from our soils. Without humus to bind them together, the soil particles were free to leave the Midwest on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Literally … some of that dust made it all the way to the ocean.

Not coincidentally, by the 1940′s vitamin advertising had leaped “from a little over a million dollars in advertising to two hundred fifty million dollars a year in just four years.” (The Have-More Plan – A Little Land –  A Lot of Living, Robinson, Ed and Carolyn, p.20, 1973, Storey Publishing, MA. $9.95). Why? Because, as Ed and Carolyn also note on the same page, “vitamin and mineral deficient spinach looks about the same as spinach right out of a good garden.”

Friends, these problems were already known in 1945 when this book was first published.

So, are we returning to the old ways? No. In fact, Monsanto is now one of the companies leading the charge toward GMOs and dominating the seed market (to the tune of roughly 95% domination).

We are believing them again.

The wide-ranging discussion on the site was interesting, to say the least. Mostly it was focused on how to survive a government ‘gone wrong’ scenario. The commenter, perhaps intending to lend weight to his opinions, had closed his post with the statement “This is not theory. My machines work.”

Here is my response, altered somewhat for this blog, to that comment:

This is not theory, either.

As a machinist and then die-maker, I made the machines that made your machines. As a railroad conductor and skilled-tradesman, I understand the difference between reliable facts and conjecture. And you, sir, are full of conjecture. Your ‘facts’ are merely guesses and not even educated ones, at that. Only a few more degrees off target and I would have accused you of being a shill for the chemical manufacturers and purveyors of the GMO seeds that go with them. Instead, I think you may simply be someone who hasn’t troubled himself to do his homework. Well, sir, not all opinions are equal, not all are valid. Sometimes we have to rely on guesswork because not enough facts are available. But it is intellectually indefensible to form an opinion before we have at least considered the readily available facts, weighed them carefully, and then, based on the facts available to us, formed an opinion that is honest at its roots. Even then, as new facts surface or as we come to understand earlier facts differently, an honest man is prepared to shuck his former opinion and dress himself in new conclusions.

Wrong on all counts.

First of all, manure – even human manure – doesn’t need sterilization. If you are worried about the health of its source, it is enough to either compost it aerobically or spread it and allow it to sit a while. The diseases and parasites that fare so well inside a human body generally fare extremely badly outside of it. For a complete discussion of the matter, see the link at the bottom of the page. The book it references has a permanent place in my library.

Second of all, when it decomposes aerobically – whether in a pile or spread on the surface of a field – manure is exothermic and thus yields more energy than consumed. Humans are mammals just as much as horses, cows, pigs and sheep are. This fact provides the thinking behind quite a few hothouse heating systems and more than a couple home toilet systems. Since the stuff needs to rot and since rotting releases heat, why not capture the heat and use it? This isn’t rocket science; it’s economics.

Third, human manure is too rich to use directly as fertilizer, having too much nitrogen to apply directly. A side dressing, when fresh, DOES run the risk of food contamination; but more so of chemically ‘burning’ the plants. However, it is of immeasurable worth as a soil amendment. By the time it has decomposed along with the needed high carbon materials, it will assay out at around 1-1-1 (while being an excellent source of the minor and trace elements that are also needed for healthy plant growth).

Its primary value, then, is as food for soil microbes. It is these, as they release the chemicals from the raw ingredients and the minerals in the soil, who make the fertility of the soil available to the plants while binding up generous amounts of carbon. That is a layman’s way of saying “carbon sequestration” and the more organic material applied to the soil, the more carbon is sequestered (hidden away) there instead of being released into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas.

Fourth of all, this gentleman’s thinking is still locked in the monoculture / agribusiness mode. Suppose that each person simply recycled his/her OWN manure into their OWN garden? This is more than just a closed loop: it is also a means of adding external inputs (the foods eaten that were not grown on that soil). Or, if the manure, etc., from a city was recycled within 20 miles of that city* the energy needs for transporting both the waste and the produce would decline dramatically. Twenty miles is not zero, I know that, but it is a great improvement over the average of 1,500 miles that our food currently travels to reach our plate. I know for a fact that I can grow roughly $3,000 worth of vegetables on the 240 sq ft of raised beds in my backyard per Michigan growing season and this is without the addition of any sort of manure … just rough-finished compost whose ingredients originated either in my kitchen or within 100 yards of my house.

This, too, is not theory.

My machines also work. (Mostly my pressure canner.)

Here’s a link to the book I was talking about in the first exception: The Humanure Handbook. I don’t recommend books that I haven’t read and value … and that means that I read a lot more books (roughly one a week) than I recommend. However, the two mentioned in this post are both well worth owning and will set you back roughly $25 if you buy them both. I think I paid a little more for them, but they were still a bargain.

This planet, whether our production systems recognize it or not, is essentially a closed system. There is no “away”. Your manure and urine, no matter how hard or how often you flush, does not go there.

Simply raising your own vegetables and omitting meat one or two days a week is enough to reverse the global warming caused by humans and also eliminate world hunger (by reallocating resources which is, admittedly, a political hurdle yet to be conquered).  It would also reduce diabetes, cancer of the colon and heart attacks … politics not withstanding.

Seriously.

Simultaneously. It could also reduce your risk of cancer of the colon … but that’s an issue for another day. If you drop your consumption of meat to just one day a week, we can eliminate factory farming altogether.

- Bill

*According to the The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition, some Chinese cities do just this … and are surrounded by circles of green vegetation observable from space. Lots of vegetation means lots of oxygen is being released, helping to keep the city healthier and more livable. I neglected to mention that human manure can be incorporated into the soil in exactly the same fashion as manure from other mammals. Most soils can benefit from the incorporation of generous amounts of manure (as much as the first six inches can contain) from any source available. It can decompose there even more beneficially than it can in a pile because it is available to more earthworms, etc. Get the book (yes, those are affiliate links) and do the thinking for yourself.

If you find that you have more leaves than you can compost this fall, there are strategies for dealing with the excess that don’t involve blowing it onto the neighbors’ yard while they are at work.

Not that I would know anything about that.

The simplest is to clean the old vegetation off your garden beds and cover them as thickly as you can with leaves. This will provide insulation through the winter (not to prevent freezing, but to prevent a rapid freeze-thaw cycle that leads to frost heave) and fodder for the earthworms. I have even gone out in February, pulled some of the leaves aside and planted leaf lettuce in the soil … only to break through a snow igloo later on and pick enough for a few cheeseburgers! (Back when I still ate meat.)

So pile it on your growing beds. A foot, or even two, is none too much. A lot of it will be ‘gone’ by spring. If you till (many of us do not), till a bunch in, too. THEN pile ‘em on.

The second easy way to deal with the excess is to pile it up against a fence or other sheltered location so that it doesn’t blow away. Again, the earthworms will thank you and work hard to provide you with a large quantity of leaf mold to start spring with. Bear in mind that they will only munch on the bottom of the pile, so spread it out as much as you can.

Thirdly, why not simply mound it up as a stockpile for next summer when you will have a lot of nitrogen-rich material and little carbon-rich material to go with it?

If you can’t afford a shredder and are too lazy to make repeated runs over them with a mower, it’s okay to simply pile the leaves up whole. Nature has done without a shredder for millennia … so can you. Then, too, nature has millennia at its disposal and you probably don’t.

Shred ‘em if you can, but, at any rate, don’t let them leave your property.

In fact, I go around to my neighbors and collect the paper bags of leaves that they have already gathered up for me. The bags store well upright. I leave the tops open so water can enter and the wind has no effect on my precious leaves. Then, all summer long, I have leaves to mix with my lawn clippings.

(Revised 2/26/09)

If you’ve never started a garden from seed, you’re in for a treat … if you do it right.

Here are a handful of links and some useful commentary to help you do it right.

The first thing you need to know (to a reasonable degree of certainty) is the last frost date in your location. While the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) keeps the detailed records, you’ll probably find that this list, at Victory Seeds, works well enough for your needs. I don’t have any financial association with them but, since they had already did the grunt work with the tables from NOAH, why not give them the credit?

Then, when you’ve got that handled, head on over to Little House in the Suburbs for a little calendar / planner to help you use those dates you got from Victory Seeds.

If you don’t already have seed catalogs filling your mail box, surf on over to Jungs Seeds and Plants, Hirts Greenhouse or Totally Tomatoes and either order the seeds and plants directly or at least get your name in the hat for their catalogs. Hirts claims to have the world’s hottest pepper, the Bhut Jolokia.

A few years ago I made the mistake of handling a number of habaneros with bare hands. I will NEVER, EVER repeat that mistake again. At well over 1,000,000 Scoville units, the Bhut Jolokia blows the Habs away. It deserves to be handled with extraordinary care.

In the past, planting a few extremely hot peppers scattered through my garden has seemed to repel a number of bugs. Apparently they know to avoid the aroma and having the hot peppers interspersed with the other plants makes the whole area smell ‘off limits’. I have seen exactly ONE bite taken from a habanero leaf. The Bhut Jolokia is pretty expensive … a show-off plant. But a dozen habaneros (or similar) would not be terribly expensive and could well pay for themselves via produce saved from bugs.

I would encourage you to give extra preference to open-pollinated and heirloom varieties. These do not fall under plant patent protection and will generally breed true … allowing you to save seed from one year to the next. You may need to select for disease or pest resistance if such are not controllable through other means (and they usually are – see the tip about hot peppers above), but the hybrid plants or seeds that you buy will not breed true the following year – if they will sprout at all.

Avoid GMO seeds and plants at all costs. Pandora’s box is being opened by the seed companies in a bid to monopolize all food production everywhere. (When their plants breed with your plants, your seeds end up carrying the patented genes added by their pollen. You, then, are held to have violated their patent on that gene. Is this unfair? ABSOLUTELY. But it is the way the law works.)

If you’ve got a favorite seed or plant vendor and I haven’t mentioned them, why not pass the word via a comment below? When we’ve collected enough to make things interesting (a dozen or so), I’ll create a list as a permanent page.