Enriching Soil With Compost

Mike just came in as I was writing this post to say that we have another calf born!  It is too dark for a picture, but hopefully I get a chance to get one before I post this.  Update:  Here is the picture of our newest baby on the farm.  We have decided to start with the farm tradition where you name your breeding stock with a letter of the alphabet depending on the year they were born.  So 2015=A names. My kids have picked the name Anna (with a Scandinavian accent of course.)

Spring on the farm is a really busy time of year.  This week we have chicks hatching, beehives to finish, gardens to make, dig and plant and make compost.  When we purchased our property two years ago it had been grazed for many years without a rest or added nutrients.  Last spring after we moved in, we hastily built some raised beds and also tilled a section of the field by our house to use for vegetable gardens.  After picking tractor bucket loads plus wheelbarrows of stones and adding a few bags of purchased composted manure, we got the garden planted just in time (well probably a little late if I am completely honest).  We learned several things last year.  One that our soil does not drain as well as we had hoped because of the high percentage of clay so we need more organic matter.  Also that our soil is very infertile so we need to add nutrients.  We had an okay harvest of some things like potatoes, carrots and green beans, but most things did poorly.  Enter compost, free nutrients and organic matter that we can access just by doing a bit of work.

There are a lot of instructions all over the internet on how to properly compost so I won’t get into all of it here.  The basic idea is to breakdown organic materials by using the right proportion of greens to browns (in our case manure to hay and leaves).  The mixture to aim for is a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 25:1 to 40:1.  The pile is kept at about 40% moisture (like a wrung out sponge) and is turned or aerated regularly to ensure enough oxygen for the microorganisms to do their job.  The decomposition process should result in temperatures high enough to kill the weed seeds present in the manure and hay.  We are experimenting with several different methods and recipes.  In one we just piled manure that was already mixed with hay into a windrow about 4 feet tall.  We are turning that with the tractor.  Another one is made from leaves (that city people very kindly raked and put in bags at the end of their driveway for us) combined with cattle manure.  We are turning that one by hand with a pitchfork.  We are also experimenting with ‘lasagna gardening’ which is basically static composting right in the garden bed.  I layered sawdust, manure/hay mixture and leaves into one of my raised beds.  I then soaked it down and topped it with a mixture of soil/peat moss and wood stove ashes.  The idea is to create compost and add nutrients with as little labour as possible.  Also, the heat from the composting process should, in theory, warm the soil in that bed.  My main concern is that it won’t get hot enough to kill weed seeds, but since I am not turning the soil and the manure layer is quite deep I am hoping most of the weeds won’t germinate.

Last fall we planted a bed of garlic and mulched it with leaves (free again!) and the leaves are just starting to peep through.