Composting to rebuild soil and get closer to zero waste

Composting is easy and we all need to start

This page is primarily designed for those looking to start gardens on dead soil in new subdivisions, but the techniques are universal and will work for fields killed by industrial/chemical Agriculture, or just to improve your yields if you are looking to shift from Miracle Grow Gardening to Organic. Feed the Soil, not the Plant! Thanks to Emily for the idea to put this together.

I live in a new Subdivison. Besides good insulation and resale values, I also got a denuded yard with no topsoil. I am no different than hundreds of thousands of households out there. Growing things organically on what starts as essentially subsoil takes some doing, but it is very possible. Here are some of the things I learned in the past 3 years getting my gardens to produce 500#’s + on 500 sq ft in Zone 5 on what what started as soil that not even weeds grew on.

The micro organisms in the soil are alive, feed them..

First off the main difference between “Topsoil” and “Subsoil” revolves around two critical aspects: Organic Matter and the Soil Ecosystem. Organic Matter creates air channels and holds water between rains, but most importantly it supplies the raw materials that the Soil Ecosystem (bacteria, fungus, nematodes, protozoa, worms, etc) use to make nutrients accessible -be it from minerals or dead plant debris- to plants. Subsoil is essentially dead -Organic Matter levels below 1% and virtually no soil life to speak of. Luckily it often has rich levels of minerals and trace nutrients, so all is not lost. To make Top Soil from the Subsoil (or dead denuded soils post industrial Ag) you will need to restore both Organic Matter and foster a thriving soil ecosystem.

A home made compost bin from recycled materials, inside and out

Organic Matter

Here at our home we have trucked (ok, trailered) in literally TONS of organic matter. If you want to build soil, you have to find the raw materials. Here is a short list of things I have scrounged here on the fringes of Suburbia:

* Coffee Grounds from local Coffee Shop
* Resturuant Waste
* Woodchips and Compost from the Municipal Yard
* Straw Bales from garden shops and local farmers
* Leaves from ALL my neighbors
* Grass Clippings and other yard waste

The thing to remember is that the soil isn’t picky, in fact a diverse mix is better than one particular source. But SOMETHING is better than nothing. Some of the above list should be composted first-notably any animal manures, and kitchen and resturaunt wastes. The others can be applied to the soil as mulches to feed the soil from the top down, as nature intended. More on that in a bit. Wood chips are for my numerous paths which I rebuild annually -the bottom 25% of each path decomposes nicely providing me with almost a yard of compsot annually -with very little work and no bins!



When we started our gardens, just three years ago, I double dug the beds ala John Jeavons’ Biodynamic techniques. This was necessary as the soil was horribly compacted from the Heavy Equipment used in the home construction. As I went to turn the “top” soil back in, I added compost in with the original soil in a 1:1 ratio. This took ALOT of compost-more than I had, but our Village has a compost pile the size of a small house. This also innoculated the soil with a living batch of decomposers to get things going-more about this later as well. I also mixed in a few bags of grass clippings to give the critters something to munch on. Careful to mix it well -large clods of grass will spoil in the soil due to lack of air. Once this was mixed in I planted the gardens, but as the soil was still pretty dead it wasn’t a great year. As my compost batches finished (I turned them very aggressively to speed it up to about 2 months) I side dressed the rows 1″ thick with the compost.



After the growing season, I added chopped leaves (run them over with a power mower with a bag on) and composted manures/kitchen wastes in a thick 4-6″ blanket for the winter. By May the next year, this was about 50% composted and I turned it in with a single pass with a garden fork and then topdressed with whatever compost I had ready from the fall piles -even if it was only 75% done, it goes on. After seedlings are up, more straw mulch between the row to feed the soil. Rinse and Repeat!



Soil Ecosystem

The truly depression thing about my subsoil was it was dead. There was almost no life in it at all. Topsoil is a living thing- actually it is hundreds of trillions of livings things, but you get the picture . It (they?) needs air to breathe, water to drink, and food to eat. A compacted soil effectively removes the first two, and as I already discussed, without organic matter you don’t have the third. To fight compaction, I double dug the beds to aerate them down 18″ which opens the soil to air and water passages. Adding the organic matter gets food into the cycle. But you still really don’t have many critters at this point. Given time, simply having air, water, and food will be enough to attract a thriving soil system, but we are a frenetic society and have issues even waiting for a You Tube movie to start let alone giving our soil 2-3 years to begin to wake up.



So to speed things up: innoculate the soil. If you noticed above, I added compost… alot. In fact I added about 3″ of compost per sq ft per year for 3 years now. That is about a cubic yard of compost annually per 100sq ft. That may seem excessive, and I have toned it down now as it served its purpose. See, compost is alive. That is not some Earthy Granola Get-in-touch-with-your-Mother talk …it is literally true. When your compost heats up it is due to the metabolic heat from bacteria reaching critical mass. In the cooler sections of the pile are billions of protozoa, fungi, and thousands and thousands of larger critters like pill bugs, worms, millipededs, etc that are all doing their part to decompose your kitchen and yard wastes. When you load your finished pile into your barrow and trundle it into your beds, all those buggers come with and they will continue to decompose the wastes of your garden soil and multiply in the process. Congratulations! Your soil is now alive! Now lets keep it that way:

The dying roots of your garden plants each season supply some of this food, but continual mulching will help even more. Nature feeds the top of the soil, and immediately under your mulch the soil will be alive with the Front Line decomposers that take some sustenance, and in turn break down the material further to allow even more and varied critters to further complete the work. In time the material will be completely broken down and distributed through the top 6-12″ of the soil by worms and other animals. This is how all the leaves in the forest are gone by the time the next season’s Fall approaches. The previous year’s leaves have fed the soil, which in turn fed the trees and allowed them to make more leaves… which in turn feed the soil. Perfect and Beautiful. Since we harvest much of the surplus of our gardens we must insure we add back those nutrients in the form of compost or mulches.

It should go without saying that spraying and “-cide” on the garden -plants or soil- will take you back to Step #1 in a very real way and is to be avoided like the plague. A Dairy Farmer would never take a shotgun to his herd and hope to stay in business. We are all ranchers, it is just that the Vegetable Garden’s herds live underground!

3 years ago I had to water my “soil” to even be able to get a sharpened spade into it, and ended up using a pickaxe (literally) to break it up. Now I can stick a 2×2″ stake in 6″ by hand when I string my pea trellis and I expect fertility gains for at least 3-5 more years. Nature wants healthy soil, and has a gazillion tools to help create it. All you have to do is rebuild a suitable environment, and either wait for the magic, or help it along with compost. Re-Building our soils is perhaps one of the most important legacies we can leave to future generations. Be the Change!

Good luck and Great Gardening!

Thanks to one straw for the post and

Enter the house of pain

Jean Pain worked during the late 60’s and through the 70’s in the Provence region of France caretaking a large track of dry land forest. This forest, as much of the Mediterranean rim was very prone to fire and Jean worked to remove brush to cut down the risk of catastrophic fire events. Leaving the brush piles in the forests here in temperate Wisconsin would allow it to decompose readily, but in the very dry conditions in his area, carbon is cycled more readily by fire than biological decomposers. Being a tinkerer and rogue spirit, he then sought ways to use that “waste” wood for something useful and began experimenting with methane gas production and composting.



Jean would make MASSIVE compost piles – up to 80 cu meters! – of water soaked shredded brush built around a 10′ tank filled with a slurry of compost and water that he would use to produce methane gas.



Temperature in the methane digester was regulated by wrapping coils of tubing around it and then another several hundred feet of tubing laid in coils throughout the pile. Water would be pumped through the tubing cooling the tank, with the “waste” heat being used for space heating of the Pain’s home, greenhouses, and for their household hot water – average temps in these massive piles was 140 degrees!



These piles would then produce methane gas and 140 degree water for up to 18 months – in enough quantity for him to heat his 1000 sq ft home for 2 winters and produce enough methane gas for all their cooking and transportation needs.


I am still digging for more information on the Pains, and it seems you can get 90% of the availible information digested in about 90 minutes. If anyone has a line on Jean Pain’s 88 page handbook “Another Kind of Garden” you have found a buyer…

Start with the You Tube videos which are low on quality due to their age, but super high on content:

Part 1


Part 2



Then go to my perrenial favorite storehouse of Information to Save the World:

Journey to Forever

And end up at:

The Permaculture Activist, Mother Earth News

and finally Wikipedia.

Put it all together and it is no wonder why I am so in love with this guy: using waste wood to save the world by a beautiful mix of applied forestry, some Grade A tinkering, gardening, commercial scale composting, methane digestion, wrap it all up in a permaculture design 10 years before the word was coined, and add a healthy mix of military surplus trucks and wheel barrows for good measure. Jean tracked his methods with a true scientific rigor – measuring inputs of petrol, liters of water and the rate, size and weight of the compost piles, and constantly worked to improve his designs.



Here are some questions that I hope to answer in my studies and through those that know more about Jean’s work:

* How the heck did he get a pile to heat to 140 that has a C:N ration of 80:1?
* How the heck did he keep it there for up to 18 months?
* Why doesn’t the pile go anaerobic due to its size?
* Where can I get a truck like the one in the opening shot of Part 1?

Is one of these in my future? I think we found yet another reason that a commercial grade chipper may be making it into the Hoop House Business Plan…

Be the Change!

Thanks to One Straw for the excellent post

Farms, Worms, Cash and the Space Time Continuum

Grain silos on a wheat farm

It’s no secret that farming is a largely thankless occupation. The hours are relentless, the work often alienating (sitting for hours on end in a tractor in the drizzle with a pair of ear defenders on must be a recipe for dark thoughts) and the rewards paltry.

Tragically, given the extent to which we all depend on the above for our literal daily bread, the suicide rates of those working in the agricultural sector clearly reflect the tribulations of those in this troubled line of work.

Oxford University’s Centre for Suicide Research has pointed to financial and health problems, the effects of legislation and regulations, exposure to organophosphate compounds, and social isolation as just a few of the contributing factors.

The thing is, modern farming is often immensely destructive as well as immensely productive, and not just to farmers themselves. The so-called Green Revolution of increased chemical pesticide and herbicide usage, improved seed varieties and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has caused production to soar over the past 50 years, but there is growing evidence that many of the gains bought were short term, as biodiversity faces a massive assault, water tables fall and the land becomes exhausted.

All the above seem to point to the fact we are thinking about land and farming in the most hidebound, mechanistic way. There must be other ways of going about things:
A woman picks what's left of her failed crop in Gujarat, India. AP photo

A woman picks what's left of her failed crop in Gujarat, India. AP photo

How, for example, about an integrated, zero-waste highly productive farm that maximises the use of renewable energies and turns ‘wastes’ into food and energy resources? Not only that, but one that counters the paradigm of infinite competitive growth with a zero entropy model that makes a fundamentally deeper use of the space-time continuum.

(Yes, I just wrote that. No I’m not stoned: bear with me).

And how about using derelict buildings and delinquent kids in a rundown city as two key components in building an urban farm that produces affordable meat, fish and veg for one of the “food deserts” of America, “where the only access to food is corner grocery stories filled with beer, cigarettes and processed foods” and provides meaningful work for hundreds of people?

What about getting Wall Street and venture capital firms to invest in 20 million worms that can effectively recycle the organic waste of a small city, producing rich compost at the same time? Or to fund the conversion of forests and wetlands destroyed by logging or pollution into fish farms that use no pesticides, require no cultivation of land, no forest clearance and no discharge of polluted water. And that produce renewable energy at the same time?

All of the above are happening or in the pipeline in micro-projects dotted around the world, that could and should provide a blueprint for the future of agriculture and dare I say it, a remedy for many pressing social ills including crap processed food, obesity, a detachment from nature, urban decay, environmental havoc and suicidal farmers. (It’s good to be optimistic!)



But first, that space-time continuum thingy:

Biologist Mae Wan Ho of the excellent Institute of Science in Society, is keen on developing the notion of sustainable systems as organisms, or more explicitly, how to extend her “theory of sustainable systems as organisms to include growth and development explicitly.” In the model of a farm she’s nicknamed Dream Farm 2; “a microcosm of a different way of being and becoming in the world” she’s set about putting theory into practise.

Some background on the idea and sustainable systems as organisms:

The ‘zero-waste’ or ‘zero-entropy’ model of the organism and sustainable systems predicts balanced development and growth at every stage, as opposed to the dominant model of infinite, unsustainable growth. This immediately disposes of the myth that the alternative to the dominant model is to have no development or growth at all.

The dominant model of infinite competitive growth can be represented as the bigger fish swallowing the smaller ad infinitum… A person grows at the expense of other people; a company grows by taking over other companies, laying waste to the earth’s resources in the meantime.

There is no closed cycle to hold resources within, to build up stable organised social or ecological structures. Not surprisingly, this is totally unsustainable, which is why we are faced with global warming and the energy crisis.

In contrast, the archetype of a sustainable system is a closed lifecycle, like that of an organism, it is ready to grow and develop, to build up structures in a balanced way and perpetuate them, and that’s what sustainability is all about. Closing the cycle creates a stable, autonomous structure that is self-maintaining, self-renewing and self-sufficient.

In order to do that, you need to satisfy as much as possible the zero-entropy or zero-waste ideal. In this ideal, no waste or disorganisation (entropy) accumulates in the system. Even the waste (entropy) exported to the outside is minimised towards zero in a healthy balanced system. The more we approach that ideal, the better the system can develop and grow, and remain young and vibrant.

The system’s cycle contains more cycles within that are interlocked to help one another thrive and prosper… The farmer prepares the ground to sow the seeds for the crops to grow that feed the livestock and the farmer; the livestock returns manure to feed the crops. Very little is wasted or exported to the environment. In fact, a high proportion of the resources are recycled and kept inside the system. The system stores energy as well as material resources such as carbon. The extra carbon is sequestered in the soil as the soil improves, and in the standing biomass of crops and livestock.

The farm can perpetuate itself like that quite successfully and sustainably, or it can grow.

And here is where it gets all Stephen Hawking, only with algae:

Organic growth is always done in a balanced way by engaging more cycles, units of devolved autonomy that help one another do better.In the old paradigm, organisms are predominantly seen to compete for resources and for space. But we’ve got three space dimensions and the time dimension too.

We’ve got space-time that we can fill up more thickly with life cycles of different sizes that occupy different space-times. That is exactly what organisms in a naturally biodiverse ecosystem do to maximise the reciprocal, symbiotic relationships that benefit all the species. So you can add fish, algae, poultry, worms, mushrooms, etc., turning the ‘waste’ from one cycle to resource for another.

The more lifecycles incorporated, the more energy and standing biomass are stored within the system, and the more productive the farm. It will also support more farmers or farm workers.

Productivity and biodiversity always go together in a sustainable system, as generations of farmers have known, and recent academic researchers have rediscovered. It is also the most energy efficient. Why? Because the different life cycles are essentially holding the energy for the whole system by way of reciprocity, keeping as much as possible and recycling it within the system.

Industrial monoculture, in contrast, is the least energy efficient in terms of output per unit of input, and often less productive in absolute terms despite high external inputs, because it does not close the cycle, it does not have biodiversity to hold the energy within, and it ends generating a lot of waste and entropy and depleting the soil.

Pretty theory dense, but there are others who are putting similar ideas into practise, and involving a social dimension too:



Will Allen has been getting a lot of attention since the New York Times ran a glowing report on his project in urban Milwaukee. As the paper wrote, Allen has the makings of an agricultural dream packed into “two scruffy acres in one of Milwaukee’s most economically distressed neighborhoods.”

His Growing Power organization has six greenhouses and eight hoophouses for greens, herbs and vegetables; pens for goats, ducks and turkeys; a chicken coop and beehives; and a system for raising tilapia and perch. There’s an advanced composting operation — a virtual worm farm — and a lab that is working on ways to turn food waste into fertilizer and methane gas for energy.

“I’d like to see Growing Power transform itself into a five-story vertical building being totally off the grid with renewable energy, where people can come and learn, so they can go back to their communities around the world and grow healthy food,” Mr. Allen, 59, said in an interview at the farm.

Having just secured a US$500,000 grant, Allen looks in a good position to make his project really take off. Meanwhile, in another corner of America, Yale graduate Janine Yorio is looking to get Wall Street interested in fish and worms. Formerly a specialist in structured loans and boutique hotels in the finance sector, she opted to get out and pursue an industry with “real underlying growth prospects.”

As the Atlantic reports, after studying what was happening in the underworld of sustainable agriculture, Yorio reached a novel conclusion: there’s gold to be found off the grid of conventional agriculture and set about trying to make some money from some pretty left-field enterprises with her own advisory firm.

Yorio started NewSeed Advisors in early 2009. The company works with niche producers to transform innovative ideas into organized industries capable of attracting venture capital.

(Yorio’s) relationship with the company TimberFish Technologies reveals what she’s up to. TimberFish pioneered a complex process that transforms forest material into fish feed within a recirculating ecosystem…

It gets pretty technical: talk to the venture capital guys about “terrestrial-based flow-through configurations” and all you’ll see is the exhaust pipe of their Maserati as they roar off for greener pastures. But as Yorio knows from her background in high finance

Reframe TimberFish as THE solution to THE largest pollution problem for an active industry with global dimensions, however, and ears suddenly prick up.

Yorio’s work with a vermiculture company called CSR Plus Vermicast presents the related challenge of expanding a company’s scale. The company converts organic waste into soil additives using earthworms.

Yorio’s goal is to commercialize this model through a blueprint that aims to attract big municipal contracts. “It takes 20 million worms to recycle the organic waste of a small town,” she explains, adding that there’s no reason why CSR could not scale up to “process organic waste at the municipal level.” With many large cities contemplating, or even enacting, composting laws, one can see how a savvy investor might find a re-conceptualized CSR to be an appealing investment.

Between Mae Wan Ho, Will Allen and Janine Yorio, there appear to be several alternative models of agriculture that — although still in their nascent stages — could provide a fascinating blueprint for further investment down the road.

As urban decay racks many large cities, predictions of further oil spikes in the future pose troubling questions about food security and industrial agriculture devastates the countryside, driving everything from larks to bumblebees into near-extinction, the above examples prove their are exciting alternatives out there that can involve the community, be sustainable and not destructive; involve, not shut out, the mavens of high finance and yes, that involve life cycles that occupy different space-times.

Thanks to Jamblichus