Tuesday, February 10, 2009

World’s Best Compost

We don’t have soil where we live, we have sand – pure, white, make-a-sandcastle sand. We have salt winds that shriek through the garden, UV rays that will burn holes in your shirt, and rain that comes in infrequent tsunamis -- when it rains, it pours! Oh, and the occasional hurricane or two. That’s the downside. The upside is a long growing season, plentiful sunshine that just needs to be moderated, and rainfall that can be collected and stored.

I figure the first task is to create a growing medium amenable to more than sea scrub. I have a compost maker, one of those that tumbles. I spent a lot for that compost maker and there are a couple of problems with it – first of all, when it is full, it doesn’t much like tumbling. I took it off the base and now just roll it around the yard. Still not easy, but easier. Second problem is that I am continually adding new kitchen garbage, weeds, etc to the tumbler, so I never have finished compost! I need another way of making compost – something fast.

I found a website that promised the world’s best compost in one day. Sounded too good to be true, but I plunked down $34 to learn the ‘secret’ all the same. First of all, the compost isn’t finished in one day (I knew that!) -- it takes one day to make the compost pile and three to six months for the compost to happen. All you need is a truckload of fresh cow manure, preferably from grass-fed cows, quite a lot of straw, some herbal concoctions (not necessary but recommended) and the space for a heap five feet high by five feet wide by six and a half feet long. At some point in the process, worms are supposed to appear in your pile, coming up from the ground, I guess. So what happens if you can’t get a truckload of manure, don’t have the space for huge compost pile, and your sand is a worm-free zone? This technique may well produce the world’s best compost, but it isn’t going to happen in my garden. Time to rethink.

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