Compost Culture

Anything written on organic gardening must begin with making a compost heap. This is the essential recycler that makes it possible to garden without chemical fertilisers.

There are many systems of composting and the oldest and easiest was invented in China some four thousand years ago. Had the Chinese invented water sanitation instead, they would have starved their land of potash as well as humus. Today, we can only hope that they will not take a great `leap forward' to chemical fertilisers for they could still ruin the fertility of their soil by copying our follies rather than developing their own methods towards greater ecological efficiency.

In small gardens some kind of compost bin is desirable to hold the heat in, for tidiness and to avoid the need for turning. Those who have plenty of bricks or breeze blocks can build one like a square cornered `U', with slots in each side of the open end to take removable boards for the front. Wooden ones can be built like topless and bottomless `cold frames' three to four feet high, also with removable board fronts.

If you are making a brick bin, dip your bricks in a bucket of water or soak them with a watering can, so the cement will stick to their surfaces. Set the bricks or blocks so the joints do not come one above the other (any wall provides a model) and leave a few half inch wide gaps at intervals for extra ventilation. Secondhand bricks are good bin-making material, but corrugated iron and sheet asbestos are poor insulators. Wood is excellent and if it is creosoted and then given a coat of black or green bitumen paint, which, unlike ordinary paint, sticks on top of this most preservative undercoat, it could last twenty years.

Start the heap by setting two double rows of brickends running from the back to the front of the heap and protruding under the bottom of the board front. These should be on the soil, for no bin should have a cement floor which prevents the worms getting in, and which makes it impossible to move. Wooden bins (and those made with posts at the corners and inch mesh wire netting with opened out cartons string-stitched inside them to hold in the heat and moisture) can be moved round the garden, leaving extra rich patches wherever your compost heap has rested.

On top of the brick air channels, spread tough refuse such as brussel sprout or cabbage stumps smashed with an axe back on something hard so that they rot eventually. Add herbaceous plants, or tomato haulm, to prevent the lawn mowings or sappy weeds blocking the draught. Then pile on your first eight inch layer of weeds and garden rubbish.

Compost making is like baking bread-there are many methods but all are ways of using bacteria and fungi to make a product we want-compost is as `unnatural' as a flint axe, a loaf of bread, a glass of beer, or a chunk of cheese. An easy way is to pile up your weeds in front of the bin and every morning take down the compost bucket from under the kitchen sink and tip it on your heap, before covering it with two or three forkfuls of rubbish to keep off birds and dogs. Then empty over it a bucket full of what is politely known as `Household Liquid Activator', which is one part of urine to three parts of water.

This is the best activator of all because 'it supplies nitrogen as ammonium carbonate-which favours some highly efficient cellulose breaking bacteria, and contains almost all the potassium we trice in with our food. Analyses of sewage and municipal compost only show a trace of potash, because it has been washed away in the effluent and wasted in growing the algae that cause eutrophication in water-courses, so recycle your potash through your compost heap to feed your soil. There are no disease bacteria carried by urine in temperate climates, though in tropical countries the eggs of the biiharzia parasite are carried.

If everyone used this activator, (also known as `Chairman Mao's Favourite') we should save thousands of tons of potash fertiliser, and make better compost more cheaply than we do. There are, of course, many organic and inorganic activators which can be used according to the directions on the packets that grow more expensive every year, but everyone has his or her private supply that costs nothing. Chemical closet contents can be used as an activator, but the problem is to get enough vegetable waste to go with this in winter.

Many people are working on designs for a methane gas generator that will run on our bodily wastes and kitchen and garden rubbish. Such generators will enable us to use the heat our compost produces to cook our vegetables, and heat and light our homes, yet still have enough left in the residue to `power' the earthworms, soil bacteria and all the life in our soils on which fertility depends. How exactly we shall use our methane residues in our gardens remains to be discovered by research.

A good compost heap should reach 160-170° F during its first ten days, and the heat will then fall as the fungi take over. This temperature will cook weed seeds like grains of rice and kill out the spores of plant diseases. If you wish to improve the compost breakdown, just turn the heap, forking it out of the bin, clearing the air channels and forking it back again, which produces a second heating and better breakdown.

If your heap gets too wet, cover it with a square of old carpet which will hold the heat in and let the steam out; if too dry, cover with old polythene bags so that moisture condenses on their undersides and runs back into the heap, which will also need watering in dry weather. In winter it is easy to waste the potash and other plant foods in rainy or snowy weather, so rig a permanent or removable roof with room to get under for adding the day's contributions.

These can include potato peelings, tea leaves, coffee grounds, and all kitchen wastes other than plastics, nylon, manmade fibres, bones and vacuum cleaner dust. (This last item used to be included, but modern vacuum cleaners appear to include lead alloys, which add lead pollution to your soil, apart from the lead from petrol which blows in through your windows if you live in a town.

Milk bottle tops and the foil some people use round roasts can be.149 parts per million lead, and the lead worn off from type is the reason why the proportion of newspaper in compost should be kept below 10%).

Most gardeners can manage two fillings of a compost heap in a year-one made in summer for autumn use, and an autumn and winter heap for spring. If you have large quantities of grass available from a playing field use this mixed with weeds, and add layers of enough lime to whiten the surface every eight inches. Then thrust stakes down into the air channels while you are building the heap, pulling them out afterwards to give extra ventilation.

But if you have dead leaves available, and these are sometimes delivered free by council roadmen, do not include them in the compost heap. Instead, make a wire netting surrounded enclosure and stack it full of leaves, treading them down, and watering them if they are, in the best place for the stack, which is in dry shade under trees where nothing much will grow. Dead leaves take about two years to decay with the help of woodland fungi, and despite all that is said by orthodox Writers with an eye to the firms that advertise peat, there are no poisonous leaves.

Oak and beech make the best leafmould, but plane and chestnut leaves will rot in time, taking perhaps three years. Leafmould has its plant foods locked up by the tannins and is available in providing the moisture-retaining and soil-lightening power of humus. Use it as well as, not instead of, compost, and those who have sandy soils or clays that bake hard in summer should dig or rotavate all they can into their gardens.

If you have an old garden that is overgrown,borrow or hire a rotary mower like a Hayter and arotavator. You may have to hire the service of theoperator of the latter, too, but it will probably be worthwhile, especially if the garden is on clay or was part of a field.

Clear the rough grass with the mower to use in your first compost heap, then rotavate it three times in dry weather with about three weeks between each. This will kill out the couch grass by letting the air in, and even destroy some of the docks, but before each rotavation go over and pick up any growing root sections for burning.

This clean sweep policy is vastly better than clearing small corners and dotting rose, currant and gooseberry bushes in them, for it uses your one opportunity to reduce weed roots to humus and kill out the millions of weed seeds that are waiting to germinate under the jungle. Never have your land ploughed, unless it is also cultivated and given two heavy harrowings, for ploughing only merely gives a ridged surface through which docks will grow.

If you have a bed of nettles, cut them with the rotary mower every six weeks. They make excellent compost material and you will kill them out in about two years. This policy also kills bracken in time. Those who are short of compost material and have spare space should buy the sunflower seed sold cheaply for parrot food and sow this an inch deep and a foot apart each way, pulling up the plants when they are four feet high, before the stems get too woody to break down easily.

Old gardens are often short of lime. You can check the lime content with a soil tester, which contains a kind of liquid litmus paper and a colour chart to give the `pH' of your soil, which is the unit in which acidity or alkalinity is measured. Neutral, which is what you need, is pH 7.0, and though you can compensate for deficiencies by adding slaked lime to the quantity indicated by the tester, mushroom compost is a better answer.

This consists of straw, dried blood, horse manure and ground chalk, and brings good humus as well as lime to give a good start to a new garden before any compost is ready. Do not buy the more elabourate kind of soil testing kit because these give their ` answers ' in terms of what chemical fertilisers are ` required '.

Potatoes should have the best of the compost which is ready in the spring, because they show the better flavour from compost most strongly. If yours is a small garden, plant Duke of York, because it can be lifted to scrape new when it is in full flower, and left to die down by August when it will keep a long way through the winter.

The best keeping potatoes are Desiree for flavour, and Maris Piper which is not only excellent on taste but resists potato eelworm. This is found in old gardens and allotments and brings small foliage that turns yellow early and tiny tubers. Maris Page is the tastiest of the potato blight resisting kinds, and those who dislike scabby skins (which few gardeners worry about because the skins peel off) can try Pentland Crown and Ulster Concord, for baking in their jackets.

Spacings and quantities, timings and sowing seasons would take too much space to give here, but details are available free for a stamped addressed envelope in Dig for Survival issued by the Henry Doubleday Research Association, Bocking, Braintree, Essex. This Association of organic gardeners also gives away a booklet on safe pest control methods called In Place of Poisons.

As the potatoes are dug, plant cabbages such as Winter Monarch (bred for raw eating in salads as well as cooking) or Christmas Drumhead in August, and from July till the end of August put in leaks. These should have been sown in April and put in by merely dropping a plant, roots down, into a hole about eight inches deep thrust in to the soil with a `dibber' or a pointed broken fork handle.

Fill the hole with water and after perhaps two hoeings to keep the weeds down, they need no more work. Leeks are perhaps the ideal winter crop, for though they only grow about an inch thick from August planting they provide an excellent source of vitamin C in the leaves if these are only shortened by about three inches, instead of being cut to stumps as they are by greengrocers.

Two other good winter crops are khol-rabi and Chinese radish, both sown in July a foot between rows and thinned to six inches apart. Both are left in the ground until about March, for pulling as required, and both are best grated raw for salads. Chinese Rose, the radish, is mild tasting compared with ordinary radishes though with the same flavour, and even though it runs to seed in the spring the roots do not go woody and strong.

Kholrabi has a swollen stem, so it starts by looking like a crazy turnip growing above ground, and its nutty flavour is wasted by cooking, as is the vitamin C, which is 37 mg per 100 gm raw, but only 8.9 after boiling for 30 minutes as directed by orthodox cookery books.

Many vegetarians are organic gardeners, and all vegetarians should be, for they gain most by the flavour improvement from compost cultivation. Parsnips, sown in April or even early May so they are not woody are also nicer raw than cooked, but the finest value for root salads is Cook's Delight beet, so called because it needs no cooking.

Sown in March for summer eating, and in May to store through the winter (between layers of peat in a box in a dry shed like carrots) it will grow more food value to the square yard than almost anything that is easy in a small garden. Each stands up out of the ground for up to a foot and can grow to 41b. without growing woody. It never bleeds, so a large one can stay in the fridge for grating day after day.

Another bargain for space is Sutton's Windermere lettuce, which is a frilly kind for maximum vitamin C, with thick midribs for highest carbohydrate and leaf protein that bring the average specimen up to lib. a lettuce. Their real garden value lies in the fact that they can last for more than a month from a single sowing, if the thinnings are transplanted about eight inches apart each way.

Successive growing from March till August will keep up a supply right into the autumn. In a very small garden a vegetarian who concentrated on Windermere, Cook's Delight, and Chinese Rose, khol-rabi and leeks for winter would probably grow the most food for least trouble to supplement rice, pulses, or pea tribe grains such as lentils or beans.

Another value vegetable is onions from sets (small bulbs) planted in March an inch deep, with care taken to prevent any of the brown skin showing the sparrows where they are, on well firmed soil. They need none of the attention of seed onions and are immune to onion fly. Dig them and dry them in bunches in August with time to plant late cabbages such as January King after them.

Vegetables of the cabbage family, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflowers, broccoli, savoys, turnips, radishes, Chinese radish and khol-rabi should be concentrated together because they are all subject to clubroot disease, for which there is no organic remedy and no completely effective chemical one either. Farmers control it by rotating their crops for it dies out in the soil after~rine years, and by liming and keeping to pH 7.0 it can be kept down. Gardeners can rarely rest their soil this long.

One old remedy is to drop three inch long, sections of rhubarb stem down the dipper holes at planting time, which can be effective, but research continues (at the Henry Doubleday Research Association) to find a better one. Organic gardeners should keep their cabbage crops together so the soil gets some rest, and if they have trouble, grow sprouting broccoli, which has some resistance. Potatoes too should be like lightning-never striking the same place twice, but the onion family, peas and beans, and the beet and lettuce order can even follow each other for five years in succession without a build-up of disease problems.

Whatever may be claimed about pest and disease resistance from compost growing, this is never 100% sure, and caterpillars, cabbage aphids and white fly are problems for all gardeners. Organic gardeners however control them as far as possible by sparing our friends so they may eat our foes.

The best all-round spray is nicotine, made by simmering 2 oz. of filter tip cigarette ends (ask in your local cinema if you are a non-smoker) in a quart of water for half an hour, filtering through a cloth and diluting with six parts of water for aphids, and four for cabbage caterpillars.

This mixture is a powerful poison, but spares ladybirds, their larvae and hoverfly larvae, which are the best aphid eaters, and is spent in twenty-four hours, unlike DDT, aldrin and dieldrin which keep on killing towards Silent Springs. Boil it up as you want it-no child will mistake your tin of cigarette ends for a soft drink, as 80 people so far have mistaken Paraquat for coca-cola and died.

The ideal remedy for blackfly, our commonest aphid, on broad beans, is to sow them in November and take off the soft tips which the aphids attack as soon as the pest appears. Take them up when the crop is eaten in July, then plant sprouting broccoli to enjoy from March to May, and pull out in time for outdoor tomatoes, to ripen mostly off the plants for bottling to last the year round, and after these sow broad beans again.

This is the kind of cropping routine that gets a quart of production out of a pint pot of room in a small garden, which is as important as packing in the words into a tiny space in this book, in relation to all that there is to say and learn about organic gardening.

Lawrence D. Hills.