![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Greetings! I've decided to resume the Resilience Club posts, but in a more bite-sized format, at least for a while; I will be breaking down the theme of producing necessities for oneself into a series of posts over several weeks, if not months, depending on how it goes. To wit:
Once you have spent some time assessing your real needs, living with less, and conserving your resources, it is time to shift your attention from pruning to fruitfulness. Rather than living as a consumer, even a frugal one, you should begin to produce some necessities for yourself.
If you don’t know where to begin, I would suggest that compost, food, medicine, clothing, shelter for yourself and/or your possessions, and furnishings are extremely useful, and producing them is eminently achievable for the beginner with access to the internet or a public library. There are, of course, almost innumerable useful or beautiful things that one might produce, but we’ll look at each of these in a bit more depth over the coming weeks.
Compost
Compost may not make it onto many people’s list of necessities, but it’s hard to do without if you want to grow food organically (which, as someone who makes her living as a regenerative farmer and rancher, I am biased in favor of). It is also a good way to reduce waste and even to save money on landfill fees if you currently throw away food scraps or pay to have yard waste hauled away.
There are many methods of composting, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages, but in deference to the busy and inexperienced, I'll start with the two easiest ways that I know of: 1) the Ruth Stout method and 2) a mouldering pile, or what is sometimes called a cold pile (as opposed to a hot, or thermophilic pile). We'll cover the better-known, more elaborate and labor-intensive methods later.
The Ruth Stout Method
The Ruth Stout method has the advantage of taking place on location, as it were, rather than in a separate pile which must be moved once it is finished composting.
In this method, you essentially lay down a thick, permanent mulch (it can be basically any form of vegetation, including leaves or wood chips, but spoiled hay is often preferred if you can get it–although these days you must be very wary of persistent herbicides in any hay you source).
You can either build the mulch with the most nitrogenous material (such as kitchen scraps) at the bottom, covered by increasingly carbonaceous material (such as dead leaves), or you can lay down the carbon mulch and then periodically tuck your nitrogenous material underneath, right in the garden itself, and allow it to decompose over time, enriching the soil in that location.
There are some disadvantages–in my experience, primarily:
1. It can be difficult to acquire enough mulching material to get started, and if the mulch is not sufficiently thick, it doesn’t work very well and can even be counterproductive (for instance, by introducing weed seeds in the mulching material without being thick enough to suppress their germination).
2. It is inconvenient and occasionally gooey and malodorous to have this sort of thing going on right where one works in the garden. For this reason, the method is in my opinion better suited to being used around perennials rather than in an annual vegetable garden, or on fallow beds that will not be used until next season, or to prepare a new garden which will henceforth be maintained by the addition of mature compost.
3. The addition of large amounts of carbonaceous material can actually result in nitrogen immobilization, especially in the beginning, making it less available to plants–a serious detriment for most gardens, although one that will improve over time.
4. You can occasionally kill a plant by “burning” it if you are not careful and put highly nitrogenous material such as chicken manure or a pile of kitchen scraps too near a delicate plant.
It takes longer than a thermophilic pile to break down, so it’s not ideal if you need to increase stable soil organic matter quickly.
5. You have to keep track of where you added the last batch of scraps so as not to put too much in one area, and even so you don’t end up with an easily portable, uniform, or evenly distributed end result. This variety can be a good thing, as different plants thrive in different conditions, but for a new gardener and/or one trying to achieve consistent results in a traditional row garden, it can be problematic.
I’ve used this method extensively in the past, but ultimately abandoned it for the most part. I would certainly consider it in the future if I had access to lots of high-quality mulch material and were going to prepare a new perennial bed. The method certainly has some staunch (and successful) advocates, and Ruth Stout herself was rather magnificent.
Here is a write-up with more detail about both Ruth and her methods:
https://www.homestead.org/gardening/ruth-stout-no-dig-duchess/
Ruth Stout also wrote several books, although I haven’t read them and can’t comment on their quality:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ARuth+Stout&s=relevancerank&text=Ruth+Stout&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
Many of her titles are variations on the theme of “no work”--this will probably seem like a vicious lie if you try her method on a decent-sized garden having never gardened before, but if you come from a background of, say, double-digging, it might very well seem accurate.
Mouldering (or Cold) Compost Piles
When most people talk about composting, they are referring to "hot," or thermophilic compost piles. These have the advantage of producing finished compost quickly and of killing weed seeds, but they require more labor and more attention to inputs than a mouldering pile. We will discuss thermophilic piles in a later post, but for now, let's talk about cold piles.
Since you are not trying to get the pile to heat up to a specific temperature, you can use any combination of "greens" (nitrogenous materials, often but not always green in color) and "browns" (carbonaceous materials, often brown in color). You can also add them slowly over time, rather than in one big batch, and you don't have to turn the pile. You can even, especially if your pile is large and relatively far away from the house, toss in things that people are always saying you can't compost (meat, fat, dead varmints, etc), but I would save that for when you have more experience.
The basic procedure is this: Choose a location for your pile. My favorite thing to do is to choose a place where I would like to plant a tree in a year or two; once the pile is finished and moved, the soil underneath its former location will be very rich and easy to dig.
I also like to rotate cold piles through my vegetable garden, with one pile maturing and one pile being added to at any given time, changing locations each time so that eventually the entire garden space has been covered and enriched by the piles. Do note that this won't work if you are limited in space or in more commercial garden spaces which need to be laid out very efficiently, and you may experience some slightly unpleasant smells periodically if you add lots of nitrogenous material without much carbonaceous material.
Once you have a location, you can simply start piling things there, or you can create a bin out of pallets wired together, wire mesh bent into a loop and wired to itself, or something of that nature. You don't really need a bin, but it can make things look tidier and provide some containment.
Then you just add your materials as they need disposing of. Yard waste such as grass clippings or raked leaves (if you don't just leave these on the lawn), kitchen scraps, tree trimmings, spoiled hay, straw, or wood shavings from the barn, stable, or chicken coop (again, be careful about herbicides and wormers; persistent herbicides used on hay fields can destroy your garden's ability to produce anything but grass for years), sawdust from the wood shop, etcetera. If the pile starts to stink, it's a good idea to throw on some carbon-rich materials such as dead leaves or wood chips if you can get them; you can also just wait a few days without adding more kitchen scraps or other nitrogenous material, and the problem will usually take care of itself.
Eventually, you stop adding material, start a new pile, and wait until the old pile matures. This will take at least nine months or so in my experience; when ready, the compost will be dark brown, finely textured and uniform in appearance (except perhaps for some resistant materials, such as bones, eggshells, tree branches, etcetera), and will smell earthy and rich, with no offensive smells. At this point, it is ready to use; you can sift it through a screen to remove any larger bits if you like, but I usually don't unless there's a lot of awkward large woody material left or I intend to use it in seed trays or houseplants or something similar.
Some people water their piles periodically to keep them moist or build a little roof over them to prevent leaching, but in my opinion it's not terribly necessary unless you live in a very wet or dry climate or really wish to optimize the quality of the compost. If you simply want a low-labor source of stable organic matter for your soil, an open pile will usually suffice. If you want to make the best possible compost (to my knowledge), we will cover Johnson-Su bioreactors in a later post.
The advantages of the mouldering (cold) compost method are:
1. It's easy! You don't have to think about ratios of carbon to nitrogen or turn the pile periodically.
2. You don't have to source large amounts of inputs at once, and can add materials as needed.
3. Because it is left in place to compost rather than turned, it will develop a very diverse, usually fugally-dominated (as opposed to bacterially-dominated) biological community with many trophic layers present. As a general rule, a cold compost will be biologically richer than thermophilic compost. This sort of compost is especially good for trees and perennials.
The disadvantages are:
1. It takes a long time (I've had cold piles going for multiple years at times, but you'll need a few months at least, and a year is better; two years may be better still, depending on your inputs and your climate).
2. It doesn't kill weed seeds, so if you add weedy plant waste, you can end up planting weeds in your garden when you add the compost later.
3. You can end up with a perpetual compost pile and no finished compost if you're not intentional about it. At some point you have to stop adding material and allow all of it to finish composting. As the material composts, it shrinks, so if you are using a bin of some sort, you can easily add material periodically for years without the pile ever filling the bin and triggering the creation of a new pile. In that case, you've really just created a waste heap, not a useful source of compost for gardening.
There you have it! Next time, we'll cover classic thermophilic composting, and perhaps vermicomposting.
Once you have spent some time assessing your real needs, living with less, and conserving your resources, it is time to shift your attention from pruning to fruitfulness. Rather than living as a consumer, even a frugal one, you should begin to produce some necessities for yourself.
If you don’t know where to begin, I would suggest that compost, food, medicine, clothing, shelter for yourself and/or your possessions, and furnishings are extremely useful, and producing them is eminently achievable for the beginner with access to the internet or a public library. There are, of course, almost innumerable useful or beautiful things that one might produce, but we’ll look at each of these in a bit more depth over the coming weeks.
Compost
Compost may not make it onto many people’s list of necessities, but it’s hard to do without if you want to grow food organically (which, as someone who makes her living as a regenerative farmer and rancher, I am biased in favor of). It is also a good way to reduce waste and even to save money on landfill fees if you currently throw away food scraps or pay to have yard waste hauled away.
There are many methods of composting, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages, but in deference to the busy and inexperienced, I'll start with the two easiest ways that I know of: 1) the Ruth Stout method and 2) a mouldering pile, or what is sometimes called a cold pile (as opposed to a hot, or thermophilic pile). We'll cover the better-known, more elaborate and labor-intensive methods later.
The Ruth Stout Method
The Ruth Stout method has the advantage of taking place on location, as it were, rather than in a separate pile which must be moved once it is finished composting.
In this method, you essentially lay down a thick, permanent mulch (it can be basically any form of vegetation, including leaves or wood chips, but spoiled hay is often preferred if you can get it–although these days you must be very wary of persistent herbicides in any hay you source).
You can either build the mulch with the most nitrogenous material (such as kitchen scraps) at the bottom, covered by increasingly carbonaceous material (such as dead leaves), or you can lay down the carbon mulch and then periodically tuck your nitrogenous material underneath, right in the garden itself, and allow it to decompose over time, enriching the soil in that location.
There are some disadvantages–in my experience, primarily:
1. It can be difficult to acquire enough mulching material to get started, and if the mulch is not sufficiently thick, it doesn’t work very well and can even be counterproductive (for instance, by introducing weed seeds in the mulching material without being thick enough to suppress their germination).
2. It is inconvenient and occasionally gooey and malodorous to have this sort of thing going on right where one works in the garden. For this reason, the method is in my opinion better suited to being used around perennials rather than in an annual vegetable garden, or on fallow beds that will not be used until next season, or to prepare a new garden which will henceforth be maintained by the addition of mature compost.
3. The addition of large amounts of carbonaceous material can actually result in nitrogen immobilization, especially in the beginning, making it less available to plants–a serious detriment for most gardens, although one that will improve over time.
4. You can occasionally kill a plant by “burning” it if you are not careful and put highly nitrogenous material such as chicken manure or a pile of kitchen scraps too near a delicate plant.
It takes longer than a thermophilic pile to break down, so it’s not ideal if you need to increase stable soil organic matter quickly.
5. You have to keep track of where you added the last batch of scraps so as not to put too much in one area, and even so you don’t end up with an easily portable, uniform, or evenly distributed end result. This variety can be a good thing, as different plants thrive in different conditions, but for a new gardener and/or one trying to achieve consistent results in a traditional row garden, it can be problematic.
I’ve used this method extensively in the past, but ultimately abandoned it for the most part. I would certainly consider it in the future if I had access to lots of high-quality mulch material and were going to prepare a new perennial bed. The method certainly has some staunch (and successful) advocates, and Ruth Stout herself was rather magnificent.
Here is a write-up with more detail about both Ruth and her methods:
https://www.homestead.org/gardening/ruth-stout-no-dig-duchess/
Ruth Stout also wrote several books, although I haven’t read them and can’t comment on their quality:
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ARuth+Stout&s=relevancerank&text=Ruth+Stout&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
Many of her titles are variations on the theme of “no work”--this will probably seem like a vicious lie if you try her method on a decent-sized garden having never gardened before, but if you come from a background of, say, double-digging, it might very well seem accurate.
Mouldering (or Cold) Compost Piles
When most people talk about composting, they are referring to "hot," or thermophilic compost piles. These have the advantage of producing finished compost quickly and of killing weed seeds, but they require more labor and more attention to inputs than a mouldering pile. We will discuss thermophilic piles in a later post, but for now, let's talk about cold piles.
Since you are not trying to get the pile to heat up to a specific temperature, you can use any combination of "greens" (nitrogenous materials, often but not always green in color) and "browns" (carbonaceous materials, often brown in color). You can also add them slowly over time, rather than in one big batch, and you don't have to turn the pile. You can even, especially if your pile is large and relatively far away from the house, toss in things that people are always saying you can't compost (meat, fat, dead varmints, etc), but I would save that for when you have more experience.
The basic procedure is this: Choose a location for your pile. My favorite thing to do is to choose a place where I would like to plant a tree in a year or two; once the pile is finished and moved, the soil underneath its former location will be very rich and easy to dig.
I also like to rotate cold piles through my vegetable garden, with one pile maturing and one pile being added to at any given time, changing locations each time so that eventually the entire garden space has been covered and enriched by the piles. Do note that this won't work if you are limited in space or in more commercial garden spaces which need to be laid out very efficiently, and you may experience some slightly unpleasant smells periodically if you add lots of nitrogenous material without much carbonaceous material.
Once you have a location, you can simply start piling things there, or you can create a bin out of pallets wired together, wire mesh bent into a loop and wired to itself, or something of that nature. You don't really need a bin, but it can make things look tidier and provide some containment.
Then you just add your materials as they need disposing of. Yard waste such as grass clippings or raked leaves (if you don't just leave these on the lawn), kitchen scraps, tree trimmings, spoiled hay, straw, or wood shavings from the barn, stable, or chicken coop (again, be careful about herbicides and wormers; persistent herbicides used on hay fields can destroy your garden's ability to produce anything but grass for years), sawdust from the wood shop, etcetera. If the pile starts to stink, it's a good idea to throw on some carbon-rich materials such as dead leaves or wood chips if you can get them; you can also just wait a few days without adding more kitchen scraps or other nitrogenous material, and the problem will usually take care of itself.
Eventually, you stop adding material, start a new pile, and wait until the old pile matures. This will take at least nine months or so in my experience; when ready, the compost will be dark brown, finely textured and uniform in appearance (except perhaps for some resistant materials, such as bones, eggshells, tree branches, etcetera), and will smell earthy and rich, with no offensive smells. At this point, it is ready to use; you can sift it through a screen to remove any larger bits if you like, but I usually don't unless there's a lot of awkward large woody material left or I intend to use it in seed trays or houseplants or something similar.
Some people water their piles periodically to keep them moist or build a little roof over them to prevent leaching, but in my opinion it's not terribly necessary unless you live in a very wet or dry climate or really wish to optimize the quality of the compost. If you simply want a low-labor source of stable organic matter for your soil, an open pile will usually suffice. If you want to make the best possible compost (to my knowledge), we will cover Johnson-Su bioreactors in a later post.
The advantages of the mouldering (cold) compost method are:
1. It's easy! You don't have to think about ratios of carbon to nitrogen or turn the pile periodically.
2. You don't have to source large amounts of inputs at once, and can add materials as needed.
3. Because it is left in place to compost rather than turned, it will develop a very diverse, usually fugally-dominated (as opposed to bacterially-dominated) biological community with many trophic layers present. As a general rule, a cold compost will be biologically richer than thermophilic compost. This sort of compost is especially good for trees and perennials.
The disadvantages are:
1. It takes a long time (I've had cold piles going for multiple years at times, but you'll need a few months at least, and a year is better; two years may be better still, depending on your inputs and your climate).
2. It doesn't kill weed seeds, so if you add weedy plant waste, you can end up planting weeds in your garden when you add the compost later.
3. You can end up with a perpetual compost pile and no finished compost if you're not intentional about it. At some point you have to stop adding material and allow all of it to finish composting. As the material composts, it shrinks, so if you are using a bin of some sort, you can easily add material periodically for years without the pile ever filling the bin and triggering the creation of a new pile. In that case, you've really just created a waste heap, not a useful source of compost for gardening.
There you have it! Next time, we'll cover classic thermophilic composting, and perhaps vermicomposting.
