Invisible Fire

Fire. Essential and dreaded. Fire has historical tendrils back to primeval times when people first discovered how to make fire when needed. Fire also includes the combustion and flames of a gas stove and oven, campfires, propane-fueled lanterns, and barbecue briquettes. All welcomed, desired.

Every garden is always on “fire”—without flames. Combustion is the oxidation of carbon-based materials which usually produces a flame. Garden “fires” are usually invisible, slow, and important. A single teaspoon of soil contains over one million of the soil’s beneficial bacteria alone This does not include: nitrogen-fixing soil algae, microbes, beneficial fungi and many other useful life. Each consumes various life-forms or inert elements and releases very minute amounts of heat into the soil. Like an aerobic workout, soil heats up—only in extremely tiny amounts.

Combustion in the compost bin also is at a lower temperature than a visible fire. Microorganisms feed on the carbohydrates; the carbon. The warmth of a well-made compost pile is tangible garden low-grade combustion. When the first nips of frost arrive, a compost made of fallen leaves, green lawn clippings, manure and kitchen scraps (I send all my kitchen compostables to an earthworm bin.) sends its wisps of warm fog to rise above its mass.

Only the fanatic composter runs the risk of spontaneous combustion. The pile has to be very large. And it rarely bursts into flames, but usually smolders like a coal mine "fire." Tim Dundon aka Zeke the Sheik (the compost king), of Los Angeles County, accumulated a compost pile over 17 years which reached the gargantuan size of 40 feet tall and up to 200 feet long. Twice in one month the pile spontaneously burst into flames and smoke, and the fire department arrived to douse the flames. While Zeke defends composting as "the key of energy that will eventually set mankind free from misery and gravity," I'd say his pile shows what happens when a zealous intellect elevates a natural process to unnatural proportions. He turned a beneficial process into a hazard.

The image above is a manipulated Polaroid. See my web site (www.robertkourik.com) for more examples of "Impressionistic Photography".

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A Sheety Garden

From my book Roots Demystified, Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Roots Thrive.

Nature builds soil from the top down with all the decomposition of carbonaceous materials such as fallen leaves and decaying grasses, as well as various forms of feces. In addition, there’s a lot going on, root-wise, beneath the surface of the soil that helps it improve without cultivation. The activities of roots loosen the soil; the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants add nitrogen; “compost” is created as roots rot at all levels to create decomposed organic matter for the use of other plants and microbes; nutrients cycle from root systems to the foliage of plants (and back to the earth again as leaf, stem, branch and trunk litter); roots develop tunnels for the movement of earthworms, root canals help rainwater soak into deeper areas and root exudates create a microbial “soup” which helps to liberate all manner of nutrients.

Sheet Composting

Sheet composting offers an easy way to improve the garden's soil without strenuous digging. The technique is akin to Ruth Stout's deep mulching practices. Sheet composting has nothing to do with woven percale or thread counts, but refers to the use of thin layers of compostable material laid out over the soil like a thick mulch. By layering high-carbon wastes with nitrogenous plant refuse, you essentially construct a thin, wide, two-dimensional compost pile. Use a blend of dry brown leaves or woody stems (chipped, chopped, or not); fresh grass clippings; green-manure crops such as buckwheat, vetch, bell beans, and clover; wet kitchen garbage or scraps (no meat scraps, as they’ll tend to attract hungry animals and/or smell bad); and green weeds from the garden before their seeds ripen.

Experiment with a ratio of one part green matter to three or four parts dry dead matter. Water the dry materials as you’re layering. At each planting location, make a large planting pocket in the native soil to receive the roots. NOTE: sheet composting doesn't generate enough heat to kill weed seeds, diseases, or pathogens, so after planting, water everything again, then cover the area with five to ten sheets of newspaper, and the newspaper with a weed-free mulch; this should take care of the nasties. The sheet composting slowly helps improve soils from the top down while allowing the gardener to quickly dispose of large quantities of compostable materials and avoid unnatural tillage. The sheet-composted area will require more irrigation the first year or two as the roots grow into the uncultivated soil.

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Compostin' Galore, a tribute

Fall is the time to rake up leaves in much of the country. Can’t burn ‘em anymore. Your city or you’ll have to make compost.

My Dad was trained as an engineer and has always looked upon science as a firm, reliable basis for much of modern life. He always used the most modern, chemical gardening products. For years, I imagine he looked upon my organic escapades as voodoo science at best--until he started to visit my California gardens and my client's landscapes. It was the highlight of my compost crusader period to get a phone call from Dad saying that he had begun a compost area for each fall's bounty of leaves. I think he appreciated the tidiness of the compost bins I used. Being a resourceful guy, he decided to use free pallets instead of the expensive, solid redwood walls I built. He gathered pallets from various loading docks to make the walls of each bin. He alternated six to eight inch layers of leaves with two inch layers of horse manure with bedding sawdust and adds 30-0-0 fertilizer if a pile didn’t heat up enough. At first he made only two bins. After seven years of leaf composting, in the same dedicated and ambitious style he has brought to everything in his life, he had six bins, with a total capacity of 22 cubic yards--nearly half the size of a small garage! He is certainly was the "Captain-of-Compost" of Olivette, MO.

The best hot compost piles requires a minimum size of one cubic yard. This is the smallest size for a proper ratio between the mass of the interior, which must stay at a certain temperature and moisture content, and the surface area of the pile's exterior, which is giving off valuable heat and moisture. Virtually none of the expensive plastic or metal compost bins for sale have an interior volume of one cubic yard. I think my Dad had the right idea for a good bin material at an appropriate cost--wooden shipping pallets, for free.

(I use past tense as he sold the house three years ago after taking care of a ½-acre lawn – and a family of four – for 40 years. He happily lives in a much smaller place with no lawn to mow or compost to make. At 86, it’s time to retire—some.)

Let me know what you think.

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Mounds, not the candy

I like to plant trees and shrubs on constructed
soil mounds as opposed to planting them in
flat ground. If you’re working with slightly
heavy clay/loam soils, the mounding is
especially critical to preventing root or crown
rot (Phytophthora spp.—a fungal disease of the
upper portion of the roots, near the soil surface).
Many ornamental and fruiting tree and shrubs die
of crown rot without the gardener ever suspecting
the culprit. The fungus damages the sapwood,
either killing individual limbs or the entire plant.
Once the symptoms (pale-yellow, wilted leaves)
appear, it’s too late to do anything about it.

So, mounds help stave off root rot.

In areas where the summers are dry, make your
planting mounds in the fall; then all you have
to do in early spring after bare root roses, fruiting
and ornamental trees, and berries arrive is open
the winter wet soil enough to place the roots and
cover it with native soil. In areas where it rains in
the summer, wait until the soil drains after a rain
so that it’s moist, not wet.

Here you can see the cross section of a mound made
of composting chips and leaves from a tree service.
The mound is capped with six to ten inches of soil and immediately
planted. All plants are still planted on small mounds on the composting mound.

Based on my book Roots Demystified.

Visit my web site to learn about my new book on drip irrigation and other gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Fire - Visible and Invisible

Fire. Essential and dreaded. Fire has historical tendrils back to primeval times when people first discovered how to make fire when needed. Fire also includes the combustion and flames of a gas stove and oven, campfires, propane-fueled lanterns, and barbecue briquettes. All welcomed, desired.

Every garden is always on “fire”—without flames. Combustion is the oxidation of carbon-based materials which usually produces a flame. Garden “fires” are usually invisible, slow, and important. A single teaspoon of soil contains over one million of the soil’s beneficial bacteria alone This does not include: nitrogen-fixing soil algae, microbes, beneficial fungi and many other useful life. Each consumes various life-forms or inert elements and releases very minute amounts of heat into the soil. Like an aerobic workout, soil heats up—only in extremely tiny amounts.

Combustion in the compost bin also is at a lower temperature than a visible fire. Microorganisms feed on the carbohydrates; the carbon. The warmth of a well-made compost pile is tangible garden low-grade combustion. When the first nips of frost arrive, a compost made of fallen leaves, green lawn clippings, manure and kitchen scraps (I send all my kitchen compostables to an earthworm bin.) sends its wisps of warm fog to rise above its mass.

Only the fanatic composter runs the risk of spontaneous combustion. The pile has to be very large. And it rarely bursts into flames, but usually smolders like a coal mine "fire." Tim Dundon aka Zeke the Sheik (the compost king), of Los Angeles County, accumulated a compost pile over 17 years which reached the gargantuan size of 40 feet tall and up to 200 feet long. Twice in one month the pile spontaneously burst into flames and smoke, and the fire department arrived to douse the flames. While Zeke defends composting as "the key of energy that will eventually set mankind free from misery and gravity," I'd say his pile shows what happens when a zealous intellect elevates a natural process to unnatural proportions. He turned a beneficial process into a hazard.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

Visit Robert Kourik's web site to learn about my other gardening books.

NOTE: The comments section at the bottom of the post has disappeared. Click on the "___ Comments" button or the title under the "Blog Archives". Thanks, Robert

Summer & Mulch

The following are several excerpts from my book - Roots Demystified, Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Roots Thrive.

It’s time to tend to mulching. If you haven’t already – shame on you. But mulching now is still a blessing for the plants. First a bit about where the nutrients are absorbed.

Most soils will contain more humus near the ground surface, since the highest population of the soil organisms that decompose raw fiber into humus tend to hang out in the most aerobic zone of the soil, that is, in the duff or just under it. [See the enlarged illustration by clicking on the image. From: Roots Demystified.] The upper horizon of the soil is also the place where the most nutrients are liberated. Soil flora and fauna act as nature’s little fertilizing machines, using the creation of humus, among other processes, to liberate unavailable nutrients into a soluble form that can be absorbed by tiny root hairs—a process known as “mineralization.”

One study estimates the number of the bacteria in a gram of soil taken from upper layers of soil surfaces as ranging from 58 million to as many as 3–4 billion. Dig and test just three feet lower, and the bacteria numbers drop to as few as 37,000 per gram.

However, it’s not just the soil’s humus-clay-moisture complex that liberates nutrients. As mentioned earlier, plant roots, stimulated by the action of organisms in the humus, aid in the nutrient-release process by exuding sugars, organic acids, and other compounds to stimulate the microbial action in the rhizosphere.

Plants primarily absorb most of their nutrients in a chemical process called “ion exchange.”

This is a process in which ions (an atom or a group of atoms that has acquired a net electric charge by gaining or losing one or more electrons) are exchanged between a solution and an ion exchanger, i.e., an insoluble solid. Two notable ion exchangers are clay and humus, which are found suspended in the thin, moist chemical and biological activity in this thin layer of moisture converts nutrients into a soluble form that roots can absorb via ion exchange. Humus binds the clay particles so that the clay forms the aggregates that help maintain a more continuous pore space. The perplexing nature of a healthy humus-clay structure is that it both holds onto and releases many of the nutrients plants utilize.

What to do?
Mulch with compost. Be sure the compost you apply to your garden is thoroughly decomposed. A “finished,” properly-aged compost is no longer hot and makes no “steam” when turned or off-loaded from a commercial supplier. The finished material should have almost no recognizable pieces of the original compostable matter. It should also have the sweet smell of a forest loam. To achieve the goal of finished compost, you need to turn the pile two or three times (maybe even more) to incorporate oxygen into all the raw, composting materials. Then let the pile age, so that it develops a large cross section of microbes and other beneficial soil flora and fauna. The process may take up to one year, so plan in advance and always have a pile going for the following garden season. (Using worms to compost kitchen scraps is like a fast compost bin. The raw materials are quickly converted to castings—manure—that both stabilizes and inoculates organic matter better than unfinished compost.)

Commercial compost is often turned, but because of the surface area required by the large quantities made to meet high commercial demand, it is usually not cost-effective to both properly turn and age the compost. Thus, commercial compost is often sold in an unfinished state; beware if you have a load delivered, and it is still hot and steamy. Such compost should be allow to “mellow” until it has a dark, loamy feel, and it may require more turning.

Be forewarned
If too much unfinished compost or fresh manure is added in great quantities, you risk the scourge of symphylans—nasty little critters that thrive in sandy loam soil, soils with a high level of organic matter and friable (crumbly) soil. Symphylans are 1/4-inch long and look like white centipedes. They eat the roots of many vegetable plants and are nearly impossible to banish by any organic method(s). However, a fallow period may be one option. Compulsive “Captains of Compost” are seeing more and more of this horrible pest. It can now be found in the northeastern, north central, and western United States. Beware of applying too much unsifted compost to your garden, especially in sandy loams. The addition of a layer of more than one to two inches may be too much. Keep the organic matter between three and five percent. Check with a lab report.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

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All rights reserved. Copyright 2008

Note: I somehow lost the usual section "Post a comment". To leave a comment, simply click on the area/button that says "___ Comments" below. Or,clicking on the title of a Post under "Blog Archive" also gets you to a view that gives the option of leaving a comment. Robert

Pop goes the weasel (tree)

As written in my book Roots Demystified, Change Your Gardening Habits to Help Roots Thrive, amendments are materials such as sand, peat moss, compost, and rice hulls have been added to the planting holes to supposedly improve drainage and keep the soil loose and friable. Fertilizers, such as blood meal, cottonseed meal, greensand, and wood ashes, are those ingredients added to provide mostly nutrients. Some amendments, such as compost, are thought to do both improve drainage and act as mild fertilizers.

One of the best studies of the effect of amendments for fertility was done at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater by Joseph Schulte and Carl Whitcomb. They planted 108 silver maple trees with 11 different soil treatments and a control (untreated planting hole). One conclusion was: "no benefit was derived from the use of soil amendments either with a good clay loam soil or a very poor silt loam subsoil." They found that the control plantings with no additional amendments generally outperformed the plantings with amendments for drainage and fertility.

The loose soil of the amendments in a traditional planting hole makes something like an underground swimming pool full of water when it rains hard, drowning important root hairs. Adding a lot of amendments only leaves the roots unprepared for the shock of what lies beyond the amended area. (And nobody can amend the area of the mature root system seeing as how much wider it is than the foliage.) Often the roots fail to make it out of the well-amended hole and merely circle around in the loose planting medium, rendering the trees likely to blow over during a storm. The trees most tolerant to wind are those with the widest root systems. Or, as the photo shows, not spreading the roots when planting can allow the tree to simply pop out of the ground when hit by a car or pulled out by hand.

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Rant - Is it Compost or A Dump Heap?

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Remember composting? Remember those innocent days when Arlo was trying to take some stuff to the dump, not the "sanitary landfill"—and before we found out the dump's seepage was poisoning the town's water supply? Remember thinking that compost would transform the world? Perhaps not. Compost didn't even rate a background mention in that "thirtysomethng" nostalgia flick "The Big Chill".

Seen many cookin' compost piles lately? While some plain-ole' heaps of garden refuse are hidden away in the dark corners of many gardens; well-formed, hot, or active, compost piles (the ones that achieved temperatures of 140^o F, and decomposed even the starchiest corn stalk within four to six weeks) are an increasingly rare garden fixture. Active composting has slipped rapidly into obscurity. It has been replaced by dump heaps.

Some ardent proponents of composting have survived in the gardening backwaters of the times—but many former "Captains-of-Compost" have let their active piles go dry.

In the  ‘70s I was, alas, an outspoken proponent of the virtues of, the magic surrounding, the healing properties of, and the essential need for Compost—capital "C". I began my career as an organic gardener convinced that compost was the Queen-of-Panaceas for my garden—and all gardens. I loved to make compost. Watching the four foot high piles begin to steam in the brisk early-morning air was fascinating and very gratifying. Turning hot, steaming, "fragrant" compost piles (to the compost purist, the pungent odors of decomposition--tinted with ammonia, sulphur, musk, and wet dirt—is a sweet, delicious aroma) was a mystical, if not religious, experience. I made compost almost every month of the year during this reign-of-fiber period of my gardening history.

Not only did I make literally tons of compost for my garden, but I persuaded, through sheer enthusiasm, nearly every ornamental and edible landscape client I had in the ‘70s to have me build a neat, tidy set of compost bins for their own "cookin' compost

I had expected my clients to gather up their daily kitchen waste, layer it with sawdust in a 30 gallon garbage can, and construct a hot compost pile in one bin with alternate layers of garden clippings, manure, straw, and the stored kitchen scraps. Furthermore, in my heady idealism, I expected the client to turn the first bin's actively decomposing compost into the adjacent bin within a week or two and to continue to stir or turn the pile very week or two until the temperature of the pile began to drop—some four to six weeks later. I gave them copies of articles on the importance of compost and recipes for the well-layered pile. I even, in my deepest enthusiasm, expected them to enjoy, if not revel, in this onerous, odiferous task. Ha!

Alas, in a few short years, all but one of the four or five bin systems I made had been turned into short, little tool sheds. The only bin system still used for “composting” was merely a place to heap piles of landscape clippings and let nature take two to four years to slowly rot the refuse to a fibrous, yet nutritionally insipid, pile of mulch—a dump heap.

I had made two fundamental errors. First, I misjudged the entire sociology  of the "system". The biology of composting is relatively simple, elegant, and easily implemented by the right, enthusiastic person. But, what's important about hot composting is whether-or-not it fits into one's lifestyle. The most important elements in an ecosystem, from a practical, ethnocentric point of view, are the people, the homeowners, and gardeners.

Secondly, defining a "system"; no matter how clever, thoughtful, elegant, or practical, is to set one's self up for potential failure. So often, the circumstances of each household are different from the theoretical "norm". By having a predetermined "system", I ignored special situations that made composting impractical or ineffective. Thus, the ecology of composting must embrace and mesh with each gardener's unique social ecology—with respect for the practical reality of their personality, lifestyle, and the local resources.

There are three levels of compost thermodynamics: cryophlic (cold-tolerant bacteria), mesophilic (bacteria growing only at mild-temperatures) and thermophilic (bacteria for hot compost). Any pile of garden refuse will eventually rot, but I prefer to call these piles heaps—not true, thermophilic compost. With the passing of time, the busy gardener's heap will have a high-fiber material for use a mulch or soil amendment. But I don't treat such material as having any significant  nutrition for the soil since subsequent rainfall leaches valuable nutrients while the heap sits around. I think of a dump heap as merely a soil amendment to improve the texture. This is a form of decomposition that easily fits into the active lifestyle of many of todays gardeners. One significant drawback of heaps is their inclination to provide habitat for critters of the rodent persuasion—rats and mice. So, I usually place a cylinder of chicken-wire on stakes far away from the house, behind a screen of shrubbery, and cover the top of the cylinder with a wire "lid".

There are a number of products on the market that I consider either totally bogus are certainly not worth the money to an accomplished composter. If you are using any fresh material at all, especially fairly fresh manures, there are plenty of bacteria and many types of bacteria and fungi available for free. Buying supposedly complex blends of beneficial bacteria and fungi is like throwing fiber into the wind. My favorite book in the subject, Composting, A Study of the Process and its Principles by Clarence Golueke, puts it very clearly: "In University of California studies, [using horse manure, "rich" soils, composting material, and two commercial preperations] the composting process was neither accelerated nor the final product improved in those runs in which inoculums were tested, even though the inoculums were rich in bacteria."

In other words: The raw material comes with the seeds of its own destruction.

Please post a comment - I want to know what you think.

Hi Folks, I somehow lost the usual selection "Post a comment". To leave a comment simply click on the area/button that says "___ Comments". Or, click on the title of the post under Blog Archive. Robert

All rights reserved. Copyright 2008