The rule of three …

The leaves are indicating that autumn is around the corner. It has been a super dry summer here and the farm is looking parched. Our place is usually quite late to turn, but perhaps the long dry spell has prompted some of our trees and shrubs to show their autumn colours early.

Quercis palustris (Pin oak) 

 Berberis thunbergii

 

 Pyrus ussuriensis (Manchurian pears)

With the coming of autumn thoughts immediately turn to refreshing our veggie beds after the bumper harvest of late summer. While we still have a couple of beds with our last crops of potatoes and tomatoes still burbling away, many of the others are in need of emptying and refilling. This includes those in our greenhouse, where the tomato plants are starting to die back quite fast. 

Tomato plants starting to yellow but the basil is still flourishing

Regenerating the garden beds is a task that requires mountains of organic matter, but my understanding of composting, that powerful practice that transforms kitchen and garden waste into nutrient-rich soil, is pretty limited.  My research did not lead to much enlightenment concerning the correct balance and layering of green material (kitchen scraps, fresh plant clippings) for nitrogen and brown material (leaves, straw) for carbon. Indeed I felt a little like Harry Potter in his first potions class. Those familiar with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry will recall Severus Snape's classic introduction “There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class. As such, I don't expect many of you to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is potion-making.” Substitute `composting' for `potion-making' and you can understand my dilemma.

I scoured a variety of ancient texts in search of enlightenment. In the end, I found inspiration in the teachings of the ultimate guardians of truth and wisdom in the universe, the management consultants.  As a young man with a newly minted degree in economics from Oxford and believing that the world was my oyster, I was interviewed and ruthlessly cut by several well-known management consultant firms. This rather abrupt end to my aspirations was galling (to put it mildly) at the time, but ultimately it did save me from making a catastrophic career choice and it also provided me with one particular gem of wisdom that surfaces every now and again.

Here I refer to the advice of a friend who, until very recent retirement, inhabited the rarefied environment of the top echelons of a major management consultant firm. The gist of the advice was that it was important always to identify and elucidate only three key messages concerning any particular problem, no more and no less. I have therefore applied this algorithm to composting and come up with the following three tenets.  

1. Use three bins
 Go full management consultant and take the rule of three to the next level by going for a three-bin policy. My three bins are loosely labelled “under construction”, “cooking” and “ready”. Of course, this does mean that marital disharmony is a real possibility as the attribution of bins can easily be called into question in order to justify the incorrect placement of material. But the probability of this acrimony lurching in the direction of the divorce courts is minuscule when measured against the acceleration of the decomposition process brought about by rotating the material from one bin to another. By the time the material reaches the “ready” bin it should be fully cooked.

2.    Celebrate contradiction
The most memorable line I received while being shown the door by the management consultants all those years ago was that I was “too broad but too focussed”.  Okay, so as you can see, I still haven’t quite got over that one yet but I’m working on it. Composting is proving very helpful in this regard. On the `broad' side, as far as the size of the pile is concerned the rule is “go big or go home”. The bigger the pile the greater the heat generated and the more effective the decomposition. On the other hand, being `focussed' requires that you shred larger bits of material before adding to the pile. You don’t need an expensive machine to shred – although using one is lots of fun. You can always lay the green waste down and run the mower over it. 

3.     Embrace the dark side 
Do not denigrate the suburban black compost bin. Kitchen scraps can attract all sorts of creatures and so it is useful to contain this waste, at least in the first instance, in one of those ubiquitous black compost bins that are for sale in all hardware stores.  Adding a bit of brown material to the bin controls odours and after a few months of initial composting you get a heady mixture that can be added to the “under construction” bin. This keeps the big piles smelling nice and earthy and helps to avoid attracting vermin.

 

 Three bins made from off-cut timber

 

 The levellers at work

These three rules applied in a three-bin system relegates the exact ratio of green to brown material or the correct layering thereof to secondary importance, at least it has done in my experience.  It does help if you can befriend a coffee roaster because the husks left by the beans after roasting (known colloquially as “honeys”) make a superb brown addition to the compost. We keep a bag of honeys close by and add a handful or two every now and then (particularly to the black kitchen scrap bins). It is also useful to have a few free-range chooks on hand to jump into your bins and root around – they are great levellers. The outcome so far has been reasonably successful; the veggies seem to like our compost better than any of the commercial stuff we have tried. 

Progress on the farm will be in abeyance for the next few weeks as we are in the process of packing our bags for a 10-day family-reunion trip to Japan. Seeing the cherry blossoms of the Japanese spring should provide massive inspiration to get stuck in on our return ...