Compost; A Love Story..

So by now you've probably worked out that I really like compost. I know it's a weird thing to say, it's a bit like admitting that you're a fan of collecting toe nails, but if you've never dug your bare hands down into a pile of thick, dark, well decomposed, sweet smelling compost, well, you simply haven't lived!

Below is a fairly recent pic I took of the 2 compost bins we've been using here on the property for a number of years. We have a solid supply of good quality ingredients to add to the piles but as I've spoken about before in my post about experimenting with the Berkley Method Of Hot Composting, they just weren't making the grade. The stone slabs look beautiful but they don't allow for air to enter via the sides and air is crucial for the decomposing process. If oxygen cannot penetrate the pile then it becomes anaerobic (meaning that the microorganisms responsible for decomposition process can't survive and thus decomposition grinds to a halt) and unless you want to engage in anaerobic composting (which is possible but not desirable given our circumstances) then the stone slabs simply weren't the ideal way to go.

Last year we left the bays filled with a variety of good things for almost 6 months and came to the end of that period only to discover that they had become so compacted that the majority of the ingredients simply failed to decompose at all. Now one incredibly simple way to counteract this is simply to get in there with a pitch fork and turn the pile a couple of times a week so as to allows air to reenter in amongst all the ingredients, however we have the problem of being a rather small and therefore time-poor community; meaning that we have plenty of responsibilities and not much spare time, let alone enough to dedicate to turning a compost pile every other day. So I began to dream of different ways that we could improve our set up that would give us better results without having to invest more time into it on a regular basis and ended up stumbling into an incredibly simple, extremely cheap and super effective method that could be reproduced anywhere by anyone.

The above photo is the area we're dealing with. The existing stone Compost bays are straight a head, there are piles of broken bricks and stone slabs everywhere, and even though it's all but invisable in the picture, much of the ground is actually paved with smaller stone pieces which have become buried under years of dirt and leaves. We spent a couple of hours clearing the space (which required some serious heavy lifting) and then drove four metal poles into the ground, roughly 1.5m wide and 1.8m long, which would act as the front corners of the new Compost bays. 

I chose to use a reasonably thick gauge wire for the frame as this would have the strength to support the weight of everything we would want to throw into it whilst still having plenty of space to allow as much air as possible to penetrate in from the sides. We drilled this into the brick wall at the rear and linked it with strips of wire to the post at the front and at that point had a very simple compost bay setup.

One thing to consider is that I could have chosen to use only 3 posts for the front so that the middle wire would have acted as a central dividing wall for both bays, but getting air into the pile was the main objective and so using 4 post means that there is a 30cm gap between both piles and thus plenty of room for air to have access.

Next up my dear Aussie brother Nelson and I spent a long and hot summer afternoon drilling hundreds of holes in lengths of PVC pipe. I had given lots of thought about how to try and increase air flow to the center of the pile (the most likely place to become starved of oxygen) and had decided that one option would be to run a couple of lengths of pipe from the outside, straight through the center of the pile. This way oxygen can always be moving through those hard to reach places and keep those microorganisms partying. We lined the pipes up and attached them in a roughly even fashion so as to get air flow through the four quarters of the piles, but my advice today would be to scrap having any pipes up high and instead have them all in the lower half of the pile as that's where it will become the most compacted and the natural airflow will be the most restricted.

I had intended to attach another wire section to the front of each bay, but the guy at the store who sold me the wire did the dirty and charged me for 10m but only gave me 8m, so I didn't have enough wire to complete it on that day and figured I would get back into it soon. However, as time got further and further away from me, I found that it hasn't really been necessary to have a front as we haven't had enough going into the piles for them to spill out onto the path in front but instead they've easily grown higher and higher without having any problems.

We initially set up these new Compost Bays in late August 2013, it's now 3 months later and as you can see the new bays are doing pretty darn well. Some of the pipes broke during this time due to a problem which I doubt many of you will experience (ie; Monkeys jumping up and down on them!), but it is worth trying to make sure that the pipes are resting on the compost in the center without significant gaps beneath them so that they're not trying to support the weight of all that is above it as I suspect this would also cause them to break.

 

To the best of my knowledge, not once during these past three months have either of the piles been turned or aerated by any other means than that which we initially designed. Just this week I finished building my final Vegie Plot in the Resurrection Garden and was keen to pump it full of compost so I pulled out the pipes through the sides of the 2nd bay, racked back the top layer of leaves and other recently added ingredients and was blown away with what lay beneath.

Only 3 months after first building these new bays, the rear one gave out 10+ wheelbarrow loads of gorgeous, gregarious, glorious Compost! All of which went straight into our organic Vegetable Gardens and means that the leaves, grass clippings, food scraps, garden waste, etc. etc. etc. which would otherwise go onto the side of the road, the incinerator or the Ganges, is now enriching the earth, helping feed humanity with nutritious and healthy food and investing back into nature. I really couldn't be happier with how it's turned out.

So if you have a compost pile somewhere out back and the thought of turning it every other day doesn't seem to appeal to you, would it be worth revamping your existing Composting system with any of these brainlessly simple ideas? When compared with last year's stretch of 6 months composting with virtually nothing to show for it, well, it's as my sweet Winnie Wild Flower likes to say, "The pudding is in the cake!"

Signs Of Life..

So I'll admit it, I've been enjoying writing these posts about the Resurrection Garden - but I'm also a tad over it. Not that I want to stop sharing about what's been going on with it, not at all, I'm just over looking backwards!

For a while it really was enjoyable for me to be looking over old photos and thinking through how far it's all come, but now I just feel like there's so much exciting stuff going on that I'm chomping at the bit to share, and so that's why this post is great! Because by the end of it I'll hopefully have covered all the worthwhile parts of the journey of the Resurrection Garden that will lead us up to the present! And then we can really hit off on some recent developments!

 

Freshly sowed and watered experimental plots in late November 2012

So in late 2012 I began taking the contents from my Berkley Method Compost Heap (which you can see the remains of against the wall in the back of the above image) and started dishing it out. I was already way behind the ideal time to be planting and so I decided to wait for the next year to lay the garden out the its final form of the way I had dreamed it could be. Also, I knew I didn't have enough compost and aged manure to fill each beds with as much as would be ideal and so I decided to make use of the opportunity and do some experimenting.

I began digging some long trenches, some individual holes, 3 larger plots (roughly 4x1x1 feet) that I completely cleared of soil and then 2 long rows right against the back wall. I filled all of the holes with only the compost and manure except for one of the larger plots which I mixed in 50% of the old soil that was already there. I was interested to see what changes would occur in the quality of the soil in each of the different plots over the coming months now that there had been such a good influx of freshly decomposed organic matter and hoped that would give me some more direction for the next years.

New growth in early December 2012

I planted some seeds in punnets to be transplanted out but the vast majority I simply sowed direct where they were to grow with a fairly high strike rate of germination. I only had a relatively small amount of space ready for planting (compared to the long term vision, we're really only talking 15-20%) but I managed to fill it up with 6 different types of lettuce (something which you can't often buy around these parts), Pak Choi, Spinach, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Cucumbers, Snow Peas, Sugar Snap Peas, Tomatoes, Rainbow Silver Beet/Chard, Carrots, Radish, Basil and Garlic.

Interestingly Garlic has turned into a bit of an obsession for me lately. Here, Garlic are these pitiful little things which taste fine, but are so small that you'll need 4-5 of the little fellas just to equal 1 average clove from back in the West. And considering Garlic is in so many Indian meals, I imagine the local women must be stuck on the kitchen floor for hours each day just pealing those things which is why you'll often hear Shoonkdedi Bloom shouting out the windows and across the landscape "Indian Garlic is a form of female oppression!" So now every time I see a Garlic Walla pushing his cart around I find myself eyeing off his produce trying to find a decent sized bulb or clove so I can plant it and start a process of growing some decent sized Garlic.

A happy garden in January 2012

Growing Subzi (Hindi for 'Vegetables') in the Resurrection Garden isn't without its fair share of relatively unique problems. I've already spoke about the state of the soil and all my efforts to clean it up but sadly those efforts didn't translate into my neighbours ceasing from tossing their rubbish over the fence. Each morning there would be a new bunch of rubbish; everything from broken shoes, unwanted plastic items, last weeks homework, last nights dinner, all the way up to plastic bags filled with human feces were daily left there for me to clean up. Shoonkdedi Bloom helped me to come to terms with this one morning when I was feeling particularly frustrated when she quite helpfully pointed out that "When we gardened in Australia we had to pull the weeds out of our garden and that was just normal, now when we garden in India we have to pull up the weeds as well as our neighbour's rubbish, and that is just the new normal."

Another problem I'm facing is trying to come to terms with the different growing season. Up till around August-September it's simply too hot to grow anything (or do any work in the garden) and the monsoon rains make it difficult for many seeds/seedlings to not get flushed out. But when it hits late September and the temperature starts coming down then you have the problem of wanting to plant none-winter crops in the lead up to Winter. In Australia I'd be planting many of my crops as soon as it hits Spring and things start warming up but here once it 'warms' up everything's just going to die, so I'm doing a bit of research at the moment and trying to understand better how to plant during this completely different set of growing seasons to what I'm accustomed too.

 

Some locals checking on the buffet

 
And then there's the greatest problem of all. I have looked around for advice and even turned to my trusty copy of the Gardening Australia book but for some strange reason Peter Cundall doesn't seem have any advice on how to deal with Monkeys in your Garden! Now look, I know what you're thinking, "Oh monkeys, that's so cool, they're so cute!" But you'd be wrong. It's more like how you'd feel if a pack of wild dogs came into your backyard every couple of days, not so exciting. Not only are they carrying all sorts of wonderful diseases, but they love to destroy things and at certain points of the season when they became particularly bad they'd come every few days and start ripping whole plants out of the ground or pulling up the radishes and taking a single bite then tossing it away. Sadly it's an on going problem with no real solution. However the acquisition of some decent slingshots (care of Oodbilav) has served to level the playing field somewhat!

Little Feather, Wild Flower & Fräu-Clau helping harvest for Sunday Lunch at the River Ashram

During January and February I was fortunate enough to have a number of people lend a hand to dig new plots and sift out rubbish from parts of the garden I was yet to get to and for this I am still EXTREMELY grateful (you know who you sweet folk are!). I happily managed to plant a number of things in those later months which I knew I would never see the fruits of as when it hit February my sweet Winnie Wild Flower was 8 months pregnant with Little Foot and so we left Banaras and started making our way south to Kerala where he was to be born. Because of this, all my work in the Garden was finished for the season and so I had to be content to wait and scheme for the next season before I could get back into it.

The Resurrection Garden from August 2012 to January 2013

All things considered, I feel like in just 5 short months the transformation that you can see in the above image is pretty immense. You only have to look at the drop in the ground level against the back wall to get a feel for just how much rock, brick and rubbish we pulled out of this thing (check out the drop between the 1st and 2nd brick pillars in the above two images) and that literally every brick that makes up my paths or little garden wall that you can see in the 2nd image was pulled out of the ground when I first started cultivating the garden beds.

And not only did I get to improve this little patch of earth and visually transform the space, but I was able to feed my family with fresh organic produce (something I'm growing more and more passionate about) and even had enough to be able to feed the throngs of sweet Hippy travelers that came each week for our Sunday lunches at the River Ashram. 

My resurrection project has both eyes on the long term, but I have to admit that even after just one season I'm already super excited about the amount of transformation I was able to achieve and am still feeling hugely excited about what the future will bring!

Composting Hendrix..

 

When I last left off talking about the Resurrection Garden I'd been sharing about the terribly poor soil condition and all the hard work that went into clearing it of rubbish and non-organic debris. That same day after paying my day labours I stood in amongst the (kinda) freshly tilled soil and there was one thing was glaringly obvious; if I wanted this garden to become a thriving slice of paradise then it was going to need an influx of organic matter, and plenty of it!

At the time, we had 2 large compost bins on our community that were each built out of beautiful stone slabs that all up were about 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5m in size and were pretty much full of good composting materials. We have a couple of very large trees on the property that give off a never ending supply of dried brown leaves, also plenty of grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden refuse, coffee grinds, eggshells, cardboard and the list goes on. It was monsoon and so the piles were getting a decent soak from time to time and to my mind they should have been plowing along nicely, turning all those rich nitrogen and carbon based goodies into a sweet smelling, rich black soil which would be 'so good you could eat it' (ala Peter Cundall). 

However it was not to be. They were Cold Compost piles and none of us on the community had the time to turn the piles to aerate them with any sort of regularity, and so they were progressively becoming more and more compacted and thus anaerobic; completely shutting down the decomposition process. Shoonkdedy bloom is my gardening buddy and it was to both our surprise that even though the compost bays had been filled for between 6-8 months, the deeper we dug down into those compost bays the less and less things had decomposed. This was a rather deflating discovery to make.

Knowing that it wouldn't be long till monsoon ended and that it would soon be the perfect time to plant all my crops, I wanted compost, lots of it, and I wanted it now! I began devouring any articles on speeding up the composting process that I could get my hands on (and during this time I began to realise that the Gardening Australia website/TV program essentially do the exact same story on compost every other month, just with a different host. I guess there really is only so much you can say about throwing kitchen scraps into a pile hey!). But in all my scouring of the web I did come across one very interesting article that was set to change everything, it was called 'Hot Compost; The Berkley Method.'

Little Feather helping Papa Bear gather leaves for the Berkley Pile

This article outlined the method of Hot Composting developed by the University of California, Berkley, which promised to naturally turn 1.5m³ of raw materials into a rich, highly fine, pathogen free compost in just 18 days. That's right, 18 days. Initially I was super skeptical to say the least, but as I read over the process a number of times it seemed to make a good deal of sense, so I figured why not invest some hope into it and give it a try.

I won't bore you with every step of the process in full detail (that can be done here), but the basic premise is that by getting the right sized pile, stacked in a specific way, comprised of a specific balance of high Carbon materials and high Nitrogen items, getting the right amount of moisture, then exchanging the outside of the pile for the inside (and vise versa) every 2nd day, you'll have created the perfect environment for the bacteria who are responsible for the composting process to pretty much go nuts, and 18 days later you'll be in compost heaven.

Day 1 (Still with about a foot or two of raw materials to be added)

I had desired to be really specific with the whole process and really test the '18 day' claim, but being married with a 2 year old, adapting to a new culture, learning a new language, having only a small window of opportunity to work in the afternoons when the heat isn't too intense... well, I'm guessing you get the point.

Day 4 (Fairly noticeable change already occuring)

Building the pile took around 4 hours (hauling everything around in 8L water buckets as we didn't have a wheelbarrow) and I was quite specific in following the details. Turning the pile turned out to be a much bigger task than first anticipated and all up would take roughly an hour and a quarter each time. In the first week I did great, turning the pile exactly as instructed, but in the subsequent weeks I could only managed to find time to turn the pile at least once every 4-5days and it didn't take long before I could no longer be bothered turning it the time consuming way by exchanging the inside for the out (and vise versa), and so the process was definitely thrown of track and clearly effected the outcome.

The process itself is quite remarkable though. The pile heats up so much that you are able to put pretty much anything in there and it will break down (including weeds with seeds, pathogens/diseased plants, roadkill, etc.) and I discovered on around day 8 that when a section of it falls on our foot you actually get burnt! I've since read all sorts of things that people do to utilize this naturally generated heat - my favourite being building your pile around a coiled pipe that is connected to your water system that you can feed water through in order to take a naturally heated hot water shower. I love this kinda stuff!

Week 4.5 (The final product)

When it reached the 18 day period it was clear that my Berkley pile was not the glorious mountain of humus I'd dreamed of, but there was no denying that those lil bacteria had found a great place to be getting it on as a tremendous amount of decomposition had taken place. I kept the pile going, turning it as often as I could and somewhere around the 4.5 week mark monsoon ended and it was time to put some seeds in the earth and so I began shoveling out the compost. As you can see in the above image, there's still a little ways to go before it would have been completely done, but to make this quality of compost in just 1 month.. Shabaaash! ("excellent" in Hindi)

So if you have the garden, the time and most importantly the desire, I would most definitely encourage you to give the Berkley Method a crack. It was a lot of hard work, but the benefits of this style of Hot composting Vs. Cold composting are obvious and numerous (apparently you can even Hot Compost your old cat!). And the change that adding this much organic matter to the soil made was instantly noticeable (you can see the difference in soil quality in the above image between whats on the shovel and whats beneath it!) and led to a far superior growing season. But I'll be saving more about that for next time!

* The title of this post 'Composting Hendrix' kinda gives away a bit how my brain works..
To this day I can't hear the word 'Berkley' without immediately associating it with this moment and this guy!