Email this page
Print this page
del.icio.us
digg
One half of a plant’s mass is below ground—out of sight and often out of mind—a situation that is loaded with significance for Maine gardeners. We dwell in the realm of light and air, but the plants that we love to grow live equally in the dirt beneath our feet. But what do we know about our soil at our spot along the 45th parallel?
Apparently, gardeners from many latitudes have been ignoring the topic for a long time. Leonardo da Vinci noted sometime in the 1500s that “we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.”
There’s a good reason we 21st-century Mainers shy away from thinking about dirt. The sad truth about most local soils is they are not great. When the glaciers retreated, they left behind gravels and clays, and not a lot else by way of good soils for gardening. Building Maine’s so-so soil into the highly productive beds most home gardeners dream of is hard work, can be a big investment, and is a complicated project that is often slow to show us rewards for our labors.
Yet any landscaper will tell you that 90% of a new landscape job is in the unglamorous work of soil preparation, especially when it comes to making new lawns. Ron Austin, owner of Austin’s Landscape Service in Old Town, recounts tales of both disaster and success. When soils are damaged by construction, he says, they need serious rebuilding—tilling compost into the top eight to 10 inches, for starters. But not everyone is willing to go the extra mile, and his suggestions often fall onto deaf ears.
“What’s the worst,” he says, “is when contractors spread an inch or two of loam over a hard-packed construction site. The lawns always fail.” The problems don’t show up right away, by which time people have forgotten that they missed the opportunity to build a soil that would have supported a carefree lawn.
Austin appreciates the times when his clients see the wisdom of giving their lawn a proper foundation. “We did one awesome job,” he remembers. “We hauled truckload after truckload of compost to this home—tilled it in and put more loam/compost mix on top.” The investment paid off. “The lawn there is still perfect. No weeds, doesn’t need water.”
Compacted clay soils are only one of the challenges facing Maine gardeners. Some of us struggle equally with droughty gravel soils. But there is good news, as organic matter—the magic substance that turns clay, silt, and sand into life-supporting soil—is abundant in Maine.
So, what, you may ask, do we mean by “organic matter”? What is the difference between organic matter and compost and humus? Which one should I use? How do they work? Short answer: Think of these three materials as stages in the decomposition process.
Organic matter is anything that was alive and is now dead. Grass clippings, leaves, wood chips, shredded newspaper, and manure all qualify as organic matter. There are two basic categories when using organic matter to make compost: carbon sources and nitrogen sources. Carbon sources are dead plant fiber, such as pine needles or brown leaves. Nitrogen sources are items such as grass clippings, food scraps, and animal waste.
Compost is what you get when dead stuff has decayed to the point that it no longer resembles what it started out as, and has become dark, crumbly, and sweet-smelling. Dug into your garden, compost works as a water sponge, an aerator, a source of nutrients, and a boost to all the life forms in the soil.
Composts with manure and other animal wastes are richer in nutrients than decayed plant remains, but ready availability should probably be your first priority. Get plenty of whatever compost is available locally, and get it into your soil, where decomposition can progress until the truly magic ingredient—humus—emerges.
Humus is the stable end-product of decomposition, a brown, gel-like substance that can absorb 90% of its own weight in water, hold nutrients in the soil, and cause all those sand, silt, and clay particles to get together in interesting little agglomerations that give a healthy soil its tell-tale crumb structure.
Magriet Vanheiningen is a home gardener who definitely understands the power of decomposition. Vanheiningen’s small yard sits on some of the worst clay in the Penobscot Valley—unyielding blue stuff better fitted for making pots than gardens.
Converting her wet, weedy lawn into a productive garden has involved a two-fold approach. For starters, no organic matter leaves her property. The large compost pile she tends every year takes up a whole corner of the yard and a good deal of labor, but the results have paid off. Now, she says, “My garden is fantastic. I have flowers and birds and frogs all around, and the vegetables grow like crazy.” Originally from Holland, Vanheiningen is particularly pleased with the giant savoy cabbages that she grew last year. Building soil has been hard work, she says, “but you can do it pretty fast if you get good compost. Now only the lawn is still poor.” A drastic lawn soil upgrade is planned for the future.
Mark Hutchinson, the Extension educator who oversees the Maine Compost School at the University of Maine’s Highmoor Farm in Monmouth, finds that more and more Maine gardeners like Vanheiningen are catching on. “We are starting to turn the page,” he says, noting that “even casual gardeners are beginning to understand the value of adding organic matter to their soils.” Graduates of this program (weeklong courses in June and October) are responsible for starting as many as 50 new operations that are turning waste into compost.
Municipalities in Maine have also climbed aboard the composting bandwagon, recognizing that their need for soil-building organic matter can be met from their own backyards. At the Bangor Public Works Department, Gerry Hughes describes the soil-making program that the city runs. Frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining good quality loam for landscaping jobs in the city, they set about solving the problem. Leaves and chipped brush are gathered in their yard by the airport, then spread and tilled into two open fields. There they are left to mature—a simple inground composting operation—until the improved soil is needed. “We collect as much plant waste as we can,” Hughes says. “We ask people to bring us their leaves and yard waste. They can haul it here in bulk—no need to bag it. It works for everyone, and you can see the results in our landscaping projects.”
Compost is not just the business of private citizens and municipalities. Compost is made in Maine in large commercial quantities by a number of businesses, and we might be surprised at some of the ingredients that go into these piles. Lee Kinney, with his father, Wes, and a “really big payloader,” makes Kinney Compost on the family farm in Knox. Their ingredients include fish guts, food waste from schools and hospitals, along with innocuous plant material like leaves and spoiled hay, plus, of course, plenty of manure. Technically, this can only be sold as compost after it has met rigorous standards of heating (to 130°F for three days, repeated three times) and turning (three times, between each heating period), thus ensuring that all human pathogens from animal wastes are destroyed. Even after that, it sits for a while. “We wouldn’t dream of selling a green product,” Lee Kinney says, referring to the extra time they allow for their composts to mature and lose that tell-tale scent that could offend your neighbors and give the stuff a bad name.
Compost making in Maine has also been an ongoing part of the mission of MOFGA—the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association—for decades. The “healthy soils, healthy plants” mantra is the foundation philosophy of the organic movement, and MOFGA has been showing the way since its beginning in 1971. The Common Ground Country Fair is MOFGA’s big fall event. It has grown like an overfed rutabaga, drawing in excess of 50,000 visitors over three days, all of them hungry for Maine-grown delicacies supplied by the huge array of food vendors. Even at the fair, MOFGA practices what it preaches: An astonishing 90% of all waste generated at the fair is composted and returned to the poor, stony soils that underlie the grounds. The effect can be seen in the demonstration and trial gardens, where the soil has become rich, dark proof of the power of composting.
Garnering compost is not so easy for Maine’s island dwellers. Eileen O’Connor is the owner of Islandscape landscaping services on North Haven Island—where soils are poor and the demand for lush gardens is great. O’Connor has to depend on bags of compost shipped over on the ferry. “It’s a ritual,” she explains. “Every spring we book spaces on the ferry and get two whole loads over.” One source they use is Coast of Maine Compost—a mix made in Washington County from fish and blueberry processing wastes plus sawdust and wood chips—whose bags are, appropriately, adorned with paintings by Eric Hopkins, one of Maine’s celebrated artists and a native of North Haven.
The squeamish gardener may choose to leave the composting of animal wastes to the experts, but good “vegetarian” compost can be made at home. It is an ancient art that is a lot like baking bread. To make compost you need to blend ingredients just right, then allow time and bacterial action to cook it up into compost.
Here’s the basic recipe: Mix a carbon source (wood chips, sawdust, straw, old leaves) with a nitrogen source (fresh grass, food scraps, blood meal, alfalfa meal). You only need about one part nitrogen to 20 to 30 parts carbon.
Add water and oxygen. No matter how perfect your carbon-nitrogen ratio is, you need water and air in the right amounts for compost to happen. A dense, soggy mass with no air becomes anaerobic and stinky.
Incorporating coarse material like twigs or tough, curly oak leaves helps keep the pile open, but regular turning is the best guarantee that your ingredients get well mixed and aerated.
Rotating compost makers work beautifully, though decent-sized composters are not cheap. Slower, low-budget methods work, too, though it takes about a year to get compost from piles. Four pallets corralled together with bungee cords are a good way to keep compost neat and separate younger piles from more seasoned ones. One simple pile, turned throughout the season and spread the following spring, works, too. The key is to get those ingredients together and let them cook.
This done, you can leave the rest to nature. If conditions are right, microorganisms will go to work on their decomposition mission, generating heat as they go, killing pathogens and weed seeds. Once the whole thing has become a sweet-smelling black substance, invaded by earthworms, it is ready for use. Compost has happened.
Apparently, gardeners from many latitudes have been ignoring the topic for a long time. Leonardo da Vinci noted sometime in the 1500s that “we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.”
There’s a good reason we 21st-century Mainers shy away from thinking about dirt. The sad truth about most local soils is they are not great. When the glaciers retreated, they left behind gravels and clays, and not a lot else by way of good soils for gardening. Building Maine’s so-so soil into the highly productive beds most home gardeners dream of is hard work, can be a big investment, and is a complicated project that is often slow to show us rewards for our labors.
Advertisement
Yet any landscaper will tell you that 90% of a new landscape job is in the unglamorous work of soil preparation, especially when it comes to making new lawns. Ron Austin, owner of Austin’s Landscape Service in Old Town, recounts tales of both disaster and success. When soils are damaged by construction, he says, they need serious rebuilding—tilling compost into the top eight to 10 inches, for starters. But not everyone is willing to go the extra mile, and his suggestions often fall onto deaf ears.
“What’s the worst,” he says, “is when contractors spread an inch or two of loam over a hard-packed construction site. The lawns always fail.” The problems don’t show up right away, by which time people have forgotten that they missed the opportunity to build a soil that would have supported a carefree lawn.
Austin appreciates the times when his clients see the wisdom of giving their lawn a proper foundation. “We did one awesome job,” he remembers. “We hauled truckload after truckload of compost to this home—tilled it in and put more loam/compost mix on top.” The investment paid off. “The lawn there is still perfect. No weeds, doesn’t need water.”
Compacted clay soils are only one of the challenges facing Maine gardeners. Some of us struggle equally with droughty gravel soils. But there is good news, as organic matter—the magic substance that turns clay, silt, and sand into life-supporting soil—is abundant in Maine.
So, what, you may ask, do we mean by “organic matter”? What is the difference between organic matter and compost and humus? Which one should I use? How do they work? Short answer: Think of these three materials as stages in the decomposition process.
Organic matter is anything that was alive and is now dead. Grass clippings, leaves, wood chips, shredded newspaper, and manure all qualify as organic matter. There are two basic categories when using organic matter to make compost: carbon sources and nitrogen sources. Carbon sources are dead plant fiber, such as pine needles or brown leaves. Nitrogen sources are items such as grass clippings, food scraps, and animal waste.
Compost is what you get when dead stuff has decayed to the point that it no longer resembles what it started out as, and has become dark, crumbly, and sweet-smelling. Dug into your garden, compost works as a water sponge, an aerator, a source of nutrients, and a boost to all the life forms in the soil.
Composts with manure and other animal wastes are richer in nutrients than decayed plant remains, but ready availability should probably be your first priority. Get plenty of whatever compost is available locally, and get it into your soil, where decomposition can progress until the truly magic ingredient—humus—emerges.
Humus is the stable end-product of decomposition, a brown, gel-like substance that can absorb 90% of its own weight in water, hold nutrients in the soil, and cause all those sand, silt, and clay particles to get together in interesting little agglomerations that give a healthy soil its tell-tale crumb structure.
Magriet Vanheiningen is a home gardener who definitely understands the power of decomposition. Vanheiningen’s small yard sits on some of the worst clay in the Penobscot Valley—unyielding blue stuff better fitted for making pots than gardens.
Converting her wet, weedy lawn into a productive garden has involved a two-fold approach. For starters, no organic matter leaves her property. The large compost pile she tends every year takes up a whole corner of the yard and a good deal of labor, but the results have paid off. Now, she says, “My garden is fantastic. I have flowers and birds and frogs all around, and the vegetables grow like crazy.” Originally from Holland, Vanheiningen is particularly pleased with the giant savoy cabbages that she grew last year. Building soil has been hard work, she says, “but you can do it pretty fast if you get good compost. Now only the lawn is still poor.” A drastic lawn soil upgrade is planned for the future.
Mark Hutchinson, the Extension educator who oversees the Maine Compost School at the University of Maine’s Highmoor Farm in Monmouth, finds that more and more Maine gardeners like Vanheiningen are catching on. “We are starting to turn the page,” he says, noting that “even casual gardeners are beginning to understand the value of adding organic matter to their soils.” Graduates of this program (weeklong courses in June and October) are responsible for starting as many as 50 new operations that are turning waste into compost.
Municipalities in Maine have also climbed aboard the composting bandwagon, recognizing that their need for soil-building organic matter can be met from their own backyards. At the Bangor Public Works Department, Gerry Hughes describes the soil-making program that the city runs. Frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining good quality loam for landscaping jobs in the city, they set about solving the problem. Leaves and chipped brush are gathered in their yard by the airport, then spread and tilled into two open fields. There they are left to mature—a simple inground composting operation—until the improved soil is needed. “We collect as much plant waste as we can,” Hughes says. “We ask people to bring us their leaves and yard waste. They can haul it here in bulk—no need to bag it. It works for everyone, and you can see the results in our landscaping projects.”
Compost is not just the business of private citizens and municipalities. Compost is made in Maine in large commercial quantities by a number of businesses, and we might be surprised at some of the ingredients that go into these piles. Lee Kinney, with his father, Wes, and a “really big payloader,” makes Kinney Compost on the family farm in Knox. Their ingredients include fish guts, food waste from schools and hospitals, along with innocuous plant material like leaves and spoiled hay, plus, of course, plenty of manure. Technically, this can only be sold as compost after it has met rigorous standards of heating (to 130°F for three days, repeated three times) and turning (three times, between each heating period), thus ensuring that all human pathogens from animal wastes are destroyed. Even after that, it sits for a while. “We wouldn’t dream of selling a green product,” Lee Kinney says, referring to the extra time they allow for their composts to mature and lose that tell-tale scent that could offend your neighbors and give the stuff a bad name.
Compost making in Maine has also been an ongoing part of the mission of MOFGA—the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association—for decades. The “healthy soils, healthy plants” mantra is the foundation philosophy of the organic movement, and MOFGA has been showing the way since its beginning in 1971. The Common Ground Country Fair is MOFGA’s big fall event. It has grown like an overfed rutabaga, drawing in excess of 50,000 visitors over three days, all of them hungry for Maine-grown delicacies supplied by the huge array of food vendors. Even at the fair, MOFGA practices what it preaches: An astonishing 90% of all waste generated at the fair is composted and returned to the poor, stony soils that underlie the grounds. The effect can be seen in the demonstration and trial gardens, where the soil has become rich, dark proof of the power of composting.
Garnering compost is not so easy for Maine’s island dwellers. Eileen O’Connor is the owner of Islandscape landscaping services on North Haven Island—where soils are poor and the demand for lush gardens is great. O’Connor has to depend on bags of compost shipped over on the ferry. “It’s a ritual,” she explains. “Every spring we book spaces on the ferry and get two whole loads over.” One source they use is Coast of Maine Compost—a mix made in Washington County from fish and blueberry processing wastes plus sawdust and wood chips—whose bags are, appropriately, adorned with paintings by Eric Hopkins, one of Maine’s celebrated artists and a native of North Haven.
The squeamish gardener may choose to leave the composting of animal wastes to the experts, but good “vegetarian” compost can be made at home. It is an ancient art that is a lot like baking bread. To make compost you need to blend ingredients just right, then allow time and bacterial action to cook it up into compost.
Here’s the basic recipe: Mix a carbon source (wood chips, sawdust, straw, old leaves) with a nitrogen source (fresh grass, food scraps, blood meal, alfalfa meal). You only need about one part nitrogen to 20 to 30 parts carbon.
Add water and oxygen. No matter how perfect your carbon-nitrogen ratio is, you need water and air in the right amounts for compost to happen. A dense, soggy mass with no air becomes anaerobic and stinky.
Incorporating coarse material like twigs or tough, curly oak leaves helps keep the pile open, but regular turning is the best guarantee that your ingredients get well mixed and aerated.
Rotating compost makers work beautifully, though decent-sized composters are not cheap. Slower, low-budget methods work, too, though it takes about a year to get compost from piles. Four pallets corralled together with bungee cords are a good way to keep compost neat and separate younger piles from more seasoned ones. One simple pile, turned throughout the season and spread the following spring, works, too. The key is to get those ingredients together and let them cook.
This done, you can leave the rest to nature. If conditions are right, microorganisms will go to work on their decomposition mission, generating heat as they go, killing pathogens and weed seeds. Once the whole thing has become a sweet-smelling black substance, invaded by earthworms, it is ready for use. Compost has happened.
