Master Composter
Snow has all gone now. The water hasn’t though. Very wet.
This blog has been read by 100,200 people. Now come on folks you don’t think I have read my blog that many times…
Sometimes I despair about the way that misconceptions are readily passed on in education. I look at quite a few gardening sites and it is remarkable how many of them just repeat the same advice without any reference to where it originally came from. I think that a lot of this is self perpetuating and feeds off itself. I have just found this again on crop rotation. AHHHHHHHH! I have rotated crops every which way but loose and have never found any difference in the way that the vegetables grow. Just don’t grow the same crop in the same area year after year if you can help it. I have a six year rotation and I am fairly strict about not planting brassicas in the same place for at least 6 years.
Too many so called scientific facts are based on little empirical data or evidence. Don’t just repeat: make sure that you do it yourself or at least look at the data and make up your own mind. Science is not the recalling of facts. It is the interpretation of data and evidence. While anecdotal evidence is anecdotal at least it is evidence which can be interpreted. Repeating facts unquestioningly means that you are not making a judgement about their worth. This is the problem with the public understanding of science. People do not understand that science is not a body of facts. It is a body of best interpretation of data. And that interpretation will change as more data is obtained. The most sensible interpretation of the data is that Jeremy Clarkson, TV presenter, is wrong. Global warming is happening and human augmentation is significant.
I hear that nowadays you can become a master composter. My word, I don’t know how I could possibly have successfully gardened for fifty years without this accolade. I have been piling up vegetable matter into a heap, leaving it for a while and digging it in every year since I started gardening, when I was eight years old. Some compost was better than others and I must admit, if the layer technique; which I learnt from the old Victorian books, was used I got fairly good friable compost. However, just piling it in a heap did more or less the same job with much less time and effort needed.
Who makes up these awards and what authority do they have to hand out these qualifications?
The layer technique was:
- Put a good layer of brush wood at the bottom for drainage.
- Start the compost off with a 1 foot layer of difficult to decompose material like straw, hedge cuttings, woody perennial material, leaves and woody weeds etc.
- Next put on a 1 foot layer of easily decomposable material like annual weeds, lawn grass cuttings, vegetable peelings, cow, pig, chicken and pigeon manure etc.
- After that put 1 foot of sieved garden top soil.
- Dust the topsoil with a couple of handfuls of lime.
- Then put a new layer of difficult to decompose material maybe shredded paper this time and then repeat the process again
There were several reasons why I never was able to do this kind of composting. You never have the right kind of material at the right time. During the autumn and winter I have lots of difficult to decompose material and in the summer I have tons of the readily decomposable material. Secondly, where am I going to get good top soil to put on a compost heap? Digging holes in the allotment and using precious top soil was never an option for me. I have used poorer soil and subsoil on the compost to try and improve the soil and use it on the allotment. It has worked to some extent but it made the compost very stony.
Now I have made the heretical assertion that you should put leaves on a compost heap. Shock and horror. By leaves in this context I do mean tree leaves. For some unknown reason they should not be added to the normal compost heap but should always be composted on their own.
I think that this is because in the Victorian age the estate gardeners would use rotted tree leaves as a potting compost. It does make a really good friable medium for seed compost and when mixed with sieved topsoil and grit will make a very acceptable potting compost. Yet there is no law that states that you cannot put tree leaves on an ordinary compost heap. I have heard people say that tree leaves are rotted down by fungi. That’s true, but so is virtually all the other things that you put onto a compost heap. If you don’t believe me look at grass cuttings after they have been on the compost for a while. They have the tale, tale signs of white threads running through them.
There are few composts that will add appreciable amounts of nutrient to the soil. However, plants do not necessarily need an awful lot of nutrient. Just as long as you put back what you took out you can’t go wrong. In addition to compost from the compost heap, I add cow, horse, pigeon, sheep and goat manure when I can get it. It’s all grist to the mill.
For many years I did not have a compost heap at all. Now I have three that I put up last year. Before, I liked to bury all the compost material directly into a trench between the comfrey plants and I may continue to do this this year now that the comfrey has established itself again. I was always cautious about adding grass cuttings that people had left near the gate because you never knew what noxious substances they had been putting on their lawns. Allowing it to first be processed by comfrey plants seemed the best thing to do.
I was up the allotment today for the first time in about three weeks to do some serious work. I have been harvesting the Brussel, parsnips and leeks but doing nothing else. The bloke with the shire horses on the common brought some horse muck over and when he was tipping it out got the trailer stuck in the mud. The amount of running water on the surface is phenomenal although I have seen this before when there has been a thaw. I said that I would help by taking off as much of the horse muck as I could to lighten the trailer.
Well he tried several times to get the trailer out and it was stuck fast. He went off to get a four wheel drive big tractor while I and two other blokes from the allotment tried to offload as much as we could.
We must have emptied about a third of the trailer before he came back and it took a couple of seconds for the big tractor to extract the trailer. The rest of the manure was dropped off and he left.
I think that the new concrete bins are far too far back from the trackway and this means that the trailers need to cross the soft ground before they can be off loaded.
Still I got some manure and put it around the black current bushes. I had a good look at the bushes because I thought that I had some big bud. (Eriophyes ribis). Now I don’t think I have. They are just good big plump buds.
I think that a lot of people dig out a runner bean trench and put peelings, lawn mowings and other composty things at the bottom of it then backfill. I have done that with impunity for years, never having any problems with the beans. I may not have time to do this this year because I still have not transplanted the raspberries yet and this is where I have decided to put the runners. Having said this, I will dig a trench if I have the time. I don’t know if it makes any difference to the crop you get and I have never compared trenched with untrenched.
Some people line their trench with newspaper. I don’t do this mainly because I never remember to take newspaper up the allotment at the appropriate time.
I am sure that while the newspaper will inevitably cause nitrogen to be removed from the soil for a while, (while the bacteria are decomposing the paper) at this depth it would not adversely affect the runner beans.
What amuses me is, although these people do this for their beans, they criticise me for doing it with the whole allotment. If it is good enough for beans why is it any different for the other vegetables? I don’t use newspaper. I use brushwood. I expect it does a similar job.
My runner beans this year will be “Aintree”. It cropped really well last year and the year before. Although I do have a soft spot for “Scarlet Emperor” and grew if for a great number of years, it does not do as well as Aintree.
At about 12 o’clock today I harvested several parsnips, leeks and some brussel sprouts. They were washed and cooked by 4 this afternoon and eaten for dinner. By jove the taste was wonderful…
Makes it all worth while.
Beetroot seems to have gone over. They were affected by the snow.
