Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Materials
I'm not going to list all of the materials you can use in your compost. Obviously use
good judgement, but pretty much anything that was once alive can go in there. The more
variety in your raw materials, the more diverse the resulting compost. As you'll see, I don't
use any genetically modified materials (GMOs), or a few others discussed in the upcoming
chapter on supplementing nutrients.
The three most important ingredients in compost are plant parts such as leaves, weeds,
grass clippings, and straw; manure; and food scraps. Useful supplementary materials in-
clude newspaper, cardboard, wood chips and sawdust. You can also throw in drier lint, tea
bags, animal hair, vacuum cleaner dust and so on, but these will make up just a tiny portion
of the pile.
There are dozens of materials out there. Some of them are available only in certain re-
gions. Perhaps you have a beet processing plant or an apple cider producer near your
house. These processes make wastes that can be composted, as does residue from cocoa
beans, coffee, wineries and breweries. I taught a composting class for Gaia College where
we used a nitrogen-rich material called okara, a soybean by-product from the manufacture
of soymilk, tofu and tempeh.
You may not have enough stuff on your property to keep a good pile going. For this, get
food scraps from your friends and neighbors and offer to take their leaves in the fall. Find a
farm or orchard with some spoiled hay or fruit. While you're out there, find a source of an-
imal manure from a farm or stable. This isn't absolutely necessary for the pile, but will def-
initely improve it. If you have many forests in your area, you'll probably find someone
selling or giving away sawdust or wood chips. In the city, find breweries, canneries or other
food processors.
In the long term, a good goal for achieving a more sustainable garden is to use at least
50% of your garden beds to grow this biomass. Some of it can be turned into the soil, and
some of it can be composted. Grasses and legumes are the best for this, and we'll look at
them in the cover crops chapter. To be as close to being sustainable as possible, we should
really be composting our own human manure, too, and maybe even have some of our own
animals that make manure for the garden.
