Alan and Linda Kapuler
Peace Seeds
6-28-06

 

The cool moist spring has become summers melting heat. Many plants have made their way from overwintering and springtime beds to the compost pile. Lettuces have begun to flower. Mustards, cabbages, broccoli, turnips, arugula and their other brassicaceous relatives have flowered and many have matured seeds. Weedy grasses and daisies have shed their pollen, made seeds and spread them widely in the wind, in the soil and in the intestines of many creatures.

So when the lettuces have yellow flowers and they mature into puffs of fluff that catch the wind and the seeds begin to fly off into new locales, put the maturing plants in the compost pile. When the Red Russian Kale matures its golden yellow flowers into 2” long cylindrical seed pods (technically called siliques) filled with a dozen seeds, pull the plants and put them in the compost pile.

The idea is to allow the plants we grow for food to complete their cycles both in the garden and in the compost. Rather than collecting and saving the seeds, an alternative is to plant them en masse by putting the maturing plants in the compost. A month or two later, with a simple turn of the plants, stalks, leaves, stems, flowertops, seedtops and weeds, the piles turn into densely planted beds of salad plants with some unwanted weeds. The weeds are easily pulled as part of the next compost pile and what remains are fully planted food beds, done without buying any packets of seeds, sidestepping seed collection, drying, preservation and storage.

Composting to make compost is a sidestep also.

Composting is to make soil. Compost soil made from foodplants making mature seeds makes fertile, amendment free, food plant replete, garden beds. As a general process, we mix about half green and half dried material to the compost. This includes grass clippings, prunings from trees and shrubs, returns from previous compost piles and seaweeds from the local coastal shores.

We consider the compost pile a compost organism. In the field, raw materials of all sorts coming from the garden are the contributors. In the home kitchen garden, scraps from meal preparation combined with weeds are mixed and fed to the head of the organism. The tail of the compost organism is fertile soil.

Our composting organisms are not particularly hot, though sometimes the mix of fresh green with old dried brown heats up to pasturization temperature. The piles are aerated with bigger materials and their height is rarely over 3’ If we include maturing food plants with their seeds, then high temperatures will kill the seeds. So high temperature leading to sterilization are not particularly useful if the proportion of food plants seeds to unpalatable weed seeds is high and hence the soil coming from the compost is rich in foodplants. Nor are our compost organisms particularly abundant in earthworms, though there are some and sometimes many. Big stalks and woody stems go through several cycles of compost organisms to become microscopic particles useful as food and environments for bacteria, archaea and fungi.

Nor is it necessary to find and provide additional amendments to the compost. The old plants carry the inoculants for transforming the plants into compost. Add water and mix. Without enough water none of this will work. Occasional thorough watering will give great compost soil, the rate depending on the temperature, the number of times one turns the piles, rainfall and new food for the Composting Ecological Organism (CEO).

The CEO is our gardening ally. By feeding the CEO we encourage recycling, promote fertility and make gardening more fun. And this is one example in which the CEO is fed old plants, fresh green leaves; no $$$ and no manure.

Economic consumerism has obscured some of the essentials of organic gardening and farming. We tend to purchase solutions to our problems rather than figure out ways to use abundant local resources. In touch with the cycles of seed to plant to seed, the composting process, feeding the compost organisms, gives us fertile, foodplanted soil, satisfaction of using what is easily available and right around us, and a way to promote gardening with less expense and more food production. The key is to allow our favorite foodplants to complete their cycles, make seeds, and then sprout them up in the compost. In an increasingly more interesting process, composting allows us to deal with difficult weeds and to develop areas where the rhizomatous weeds have taken over. We pile “bad weeds” on top of “bad weeds” making difficult gardening locales amenable to fertility enhancement thru compost location and development. By attending the composting process, rolling or moving the pile, feeding the head and weeding the body and the tail, the compost organism becomes an integral part of organic gardening.