Oh dear

Wildfires in the West, powerful hurricanes and flooding in the South, and derecho in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the Northeast has been feeling relatively safe. We’ve had a severe drought, but so far climate change hasn’t turned us into refugees. 

    Well, we might not be immune to strange weather events. This Friday saw an unusually early snowstorm that weighed down tree branches still in full leaf. 

Ornamental plum bent low by heavy snow

This happened once before in my memory, in 2011, when a Halloween nor’easter shut down much of the New England. But it’s still far what we expect for the end of October. We’re supposed to be raking leaves and decorating our front steps with pumpkins, not shoveling snow.

    My garden got caught way off guard. All the tender perennials were still in their beds and containers. Now they’re a soggy mess, as is the basil I’d hoped to harvest. 

A pot of herbs. Rosemary made it, basil didn't

 

I wanted to provide blooms for pollinators through November. I don’t know whether the aster flowers will survive after two days coated with heavy snow. 

 

Will these aster blooms last after they thaw?

 
    All I can do is start the process of closing down the garden for winter, though these tasks are coming a lot earlier than I’d expected. When the potting mix thaws, I’ll bag up the elephant ears and cannas and store them in the basement to repot next year. 

 

The canna season has definitely ended

I’d hoped to pick a few more dahlias, but their tubers too will need to be packed away if I hope to replant them in spring. Today the water barrel holds a block of ice. If the weather warms up later in the week as predicted, I’ll empty the barrel and store it in the garage.

    I’m still hoping for some mild days to move compost into newly built raised beds in the vegetable garden. This will be the place for the compost in those aluminum trash barrels I used for food waste, after noticing that fruit and vegetable scraps on the open piles were attracting rodents. 

Composted food waste for the raised beds

If I can’t lift the barrels into the wheelbarrow, at least I can roll them across the yard. That’s the good thing about their cylindrical shape. I’m hoping these contained beds will boost my vegetable harvest. With 3-foot wide beds and 2-foot paths, I won’t walk on the soil around the growing plants, something I couldn’t avoid with my old free-form design. 

Raised beds for vegetables

 
    The other activity for the next month will be relocating fallen leaves from the front of the house to the backyard. Before the snow, I’d fortunately shredded a few for the perennial bed off the deck. There I find finer mulch preferable as new young perennials emerge and gradually expand. 

     For the rest of the yard, I’ll be keeping the leaves whole. Lots is written these days about the advantages of this system. By letting the whole leaves lie undisturbed through the winter, we provide shelter for important native insects that hide there as adults, eggs, or pupae. Plus, it’s a lot less work than bagging or shredding those leaves.

 

 
 

Bounty from the tree canopy

This week a bewildered neighbor walking her dog saw me out raking the gutter across the street from home and asked whether I was cleaning up the neighborhood. “No,” I said, “It’s for compost. Biomass.” 

Why waste organic material?

     Oak blossoms, called catkins, had piled up on sidewalks and in the gutters. Just about every surface was sprinkled with those lacy brown chains of tiny flowers that had chosen the previous week to drop from the trees en masse. 

They're everywhere

To many, they looked like litter for the street sweeper to deal with. To me, they offered a great opportunity to add some organic material to the compost piles.

    Oaks, like many tall trees, depend on wind for pollination. That’s why they don’t bother making showy, colorful flowers and why they produce so much pollen. 

Strings of male oak flowers, like beads on a chain

The wind carries the yellow dust everywhere, to the chagrin of allergy sufferers and everyone who has to clear it from a windshield. Once their work is done, the catkins drop from the trees. I find the sheer mass of them awe-inspiring. What a vast amount of tree energy went into producing that huge volume of flowers!

     If I swept the oak catkins up and threw them into the yard waste, I’d be interrupting the soil cycle. In the forest, leaves, branches, and tree flowers fall to the ground and decompose there, becoming part of the soil that in turn nourishes the trees. 

Every part of a tree is recycled in the forest

    If those oak catkins were carted off my property to the distant industrial composting site that receives the city’s yard waste, then what my big oak tree drew from the soil to make those flowers wouldn’t be replenished. I’d be sending away nutrients and photosynthetic energy that could be here powering the garden ecosystem. 

Headed for the yard waste composting site

    Of all the compostable materials I cart to the piles in the course of the year, these oak blossoms are a favorite. They’re light and easy to gather with a rake or broom. Loading them into the wheelbarrow is a cinch. And they decompose really fast.

    Bigger pieces of plant tissue that are defended against decomposition, such as tough, leathery oak leaves, take a full two years to decompose in my compost bins. I don’t even try to compost twigs, because it would take too long. I could speed up the process by turning the piles, but I’ve got other priorities for limited gardening time. Tiny, fluffy oak catkins break down much faster, because they’ve got lots of surface area relative to their size. If I dug through the piles this fall, I’d find that soil organisms had already blended the catkins into the half-made compost.

Oak catkins break down fast into usable compost

    Another thing I appreciate about oak flowers is that they don’t come with seeds. Maples drop a bounty of organic material in spring too, those winged samaras that twirl to the ground, each carrying two seeds. I don’t compost those because so many germinate in the piles. Acorns won’t be viable until fall, so I can compost oak catkins and not worry about inadvertently planting trees.

Maple seeds-best kept out of the compost

Thanks, decomposers

With the May Day spotlight on under-valued workers, I’m grateful for the work of decomposers in the garden. Last fall I lamented my depleted compost supply. Now I’m rejoicing to see lots of fresh compost in my bins. This strengthens my impression that compost is like sourdough starter, full of what’s needed to reproduce itself. Once you’ve got the process going, it gets easier and quicker over time.

Under a layer of fall leaves in the bin, I found new compost

    That’s despite my lazy woman’s composting approach. I just pile on the garden waste as it comes. I don’t turn the piles or bother balancing the amount of “brown” high carbon and “green” high nitrogen materials. Compost still happens.

Adding fall leaves to a bin I emptied last fall

    Composting is central to my garden. With a renewed supply of compost, I’m ready to add some oomph to the perennial beds by improving soil from above—no need to dig in that extra organic material, because soil organisms will incorporate it.

Things go better with compost

    I’ll also save some compost for making homemade potting mix. By mixing it with coir, or coconut fiber, I make peat-free potting mix that works just as well as the bagged stuff I used to use for container plants.

Peat-free potting mix: because harvesting peat contributes to climate change

    In 2011, I had my compost tested for biological activity by Soil Food Web, a lab in New York. I highly recommend this experience. The lab reported the populations of the types of organisms in my compost sample: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes. They calculated the ratio of fungal to bacterial biomass and observed that the compost was mature, bacterial-dominated, and becoming more fungal. 

     I even got a note, “One of the better compost samples I’ve seen in a while. Keep up the good work.” The only caveat: “Need to work on nematode diversity a bit more.” To that end, they recommended inoculating the pile with forest duff, the mix of half-decomposed material that lies on the forest floor. You can bet I did that right away.

Beneficial nematodes thrive on the forest floor

    Looking out at the thick layer of fall leaves I left on the beds last fall, I recognize that the whole garden depends on the same work these small organisms do in the compost pile. It’s often said that without the work of detritivores--animals such as earthworms that take in, break up, and digest dead stuff—and decomposers--bacteria and fungi that absorb nutrients from dead materials--we’d be living on top of huge piles of dead animals and plants.

    I don’t just count on these small organisms in the compost bins. They’re also hard at work building soil and turning fallen leaves into leaf mold. The wood chips that I spread on paths and around trees and shrubs last a long time, but they too are broken down, predominantly by fungi that can digest lignin, the polymer that makes wood rigid and resists rot. Without those fungi, I’d have everlasting mulch, but it would do a lot less for the underlying soil.

Wood chips would be around forever without decomposing fungi

    Composting is just a half-domesticated way of speeding up what’s happening all around us, thanks to those unseen workers.

As soil organisms break down fall leaves, they make good soil for spring flowers

Compost shortage

Once my composting operation settled into a routine, I could count on having two of my four bins produce a good supply of fully made compost every year. Every fall I spread a thick layer on the vegetable bed, where organic matter is used up fast by food-producing annual plants. 

Food compost from the closed bin will enrich the soil of the vegetable bed

When I planted new areas, I spread compost on the soil surface before starting to dig. When I learned that harvesting (really mining) peat contributes to global warming by releasing carbon, I started mixing finished compost from the bins with coir (coconut fiber) to make homemade peat-free potting mix.

     This year I haven't produced as much compost as I used to, and I'm going through it faster. Last year I gave away so many potting mix samples that I ran short of finished compost. 

Cute, right?

The reason for the samples was to interest garden club members I met in making their own peat-free mix. I thought if they tried mine, they'd see how easy it is to make a mix that looks, feels and functions a lot like commercial products based on peat. 

     Last year too I piled fewer fall leaves into the bins. I used to heap up leaves on the bins at the end of the gardening season, knowing the fluffy mounds would flatten during the winter, gradually decompose, and become part of the compost. But last year I went big on piling the whole leaves on beds to provide winter shelter for native insects.

Collecting leaves from the sidewalk to pile on garden beds

     Another call on my compost supply last year was the sheet composting project I started last March. The majority of the material for this composting-in-place soil improvement mound came from thick layers of wood chips and fall leaves. Thinner layers of compost were needed, though, to introduce soil organisms that would do the decomposing. I can see that they're doing their work. Already this fall the mound has sunk to about half its original height.

The sheet composting mound is sinking and starting to look like soil

     These extra demands on my compost economy have left the bins nearly exhausted this fall. Cutting down vegetable plants and emptying summer containers, I've started the process again in two of the four bins. According to the old system, though, the other two bins should be full of year-old developing compost. They're not.

The cupboard is bare

     In the past, I've just waited two years for the compost to be finished. Usually I make a point of adding garden waste to the compost as it comes, with no recipe. But I don't want to go through next summer with no finished compost. I may have to adjust my lazy-woman's composting method this year. 

     To get back on track, I can mix shredded leaves with the dead plants in the bins. 

Shredded leaves will decompose faster

Combining "brown" high carbon and "green" high nitrogen components will speed up the process. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Sheet composting begun

Blood meal came in the mail (sounds ominous, doesn’t it?), enabling my grand-dog Felix and me to start the sheet composting project. As you’ll remember, this is a technique for converting some lawn to expand a planting bed. We’d be applying layers of compostable materials to smother the grass and make rich soil for new native plants.

Purple coneflowers will be able to spread into the enlarged bed

    The first step was to mark off the grass section for execution. I did this using short stakes and some stretchy orange plastic surveyor’s tape. I can re-use the tape when this project is finished.

    After moving the stakes around to see how the edge of the new bed would look, I settled on a straight edge parallel to the nearby rectangular vegetable bed and 10 feet from the rabbit fence that protects that area. The ends of the new bed would curve into existing planting areas.

Orange tape marks the edge of the future planting area

    Next I sprinkled a dusting of blood meal on the grass and followed it with layers of newspaper. To pile them several sheets thick, I had to combine sections of the paper, overlapping them so no grass was showing. I avoided glossy supplements that might contain problematic inks. The paper wanted to blow around in the spring breeze but subsided with a generous sprinkling from the watering can. I laid down newspaper in three stages, weighing it down with the next materials before moving on so that the paper wouldn’t dry out and blow away.

I watered the newspaper to keep it from blowing away

    On top of the newspaper I spread a layer of composted cow manure. I had two bags left over from last fall, both open. Some of the contents were frozen, and I couldn’t break them up. I stood the icy parts in the sun to melt. 

Cow manure popsicle warming in the sun against the rabbit fence

In all, it took most of four 50-pound bags to cover the 120 square foot area with an inch of cow manure. I was treating the sheet composting recipe more like instructions for a stir fry than a fine pastry—just adding what looked about right.

A section of newspaper covered with cow manure

    Admonishing Felix not to dig through the manure-covered newspapers, which seemed to be an alluring possibility, I next turned to hauling wood chips from the big heap in the driveway. After many wheelbarrow trips, I’d dumped an 8-inch layer on top of the newspaper. 

Wood chip layer

I added a few inches of fall leaves that I raked from nearby beds, anchoring them down with more wood chips. That’s where the project stands as of Saturday afternoon: a long foot-tall mound of compostable layers, widest in the middle and tapered at both ends.

It doesn't look like much now. Give it two years.

    The next stage will be to pile on a layer of compost, which will boost the population of soil organisms to start the decomposition. The icing on the cake will be a topping of weed-free straw.

    Moving the wood chips wore me out, but the initial investment of time and energy seems like a small price to pay for what should become an area of great soil in a couple of years.

Abetting the soil cycle

I’ve learned something new from ecological garden designer Larry Weaner: soil can be too rich. In Garden Revolution, Weaner describes telling contractors that he doesn’t want to add topsoil, compost or fertilizer before he plants a meadow. They think he’s crazy to turn down traditional first steps for establishing a new landscape. His point is that the plants he’s going to be growing can outcompete weeds in lean soil but not in soil that’s full of nutrients and organic matter. Those will only jump-start invasive weeds.

Northeastern meadow plants such as goldenrod thrive on lean, dry soil

    Weaner and other ecological gardeners aim to restore and imitate natural processes. When he plants a native meadow, he works with the soil that’s present and the plants that are adapted to grow on it. How does this principle apply in my garden setting, which becomes more like a woodland every year as the trees grow taller?

The yard is starting to resemble a clearing in a forest

    Last fall I doubled down on my strategy of letting fall leaves lie on the garden through the winter. Some of those will be raked off to mix with wood chips in the sheet composting experiment. The rest will stay where they are under trees and shrubs. 

    Bagging up and sending away those fall leaves would deplete my own soil, because what the trees drew from the soil to make leaves wouldn’t be replenished through decomposition. Trees have their own recycling operation going, if we just stay out of the way. I want those leaves on the ground, and not just to provide shelter for native insects in various stages of development. They’re also there to build soil that will nourish plants and sequester carbon.

Leaves on the ground serve important purposes

     But is it possible that the leaves and the compost I spread around will make my sandy soil too rich? Not for the woodland plants I want to grow. 

     A neighbor told us that our yard was once part of a gravel quarry. That’s easy to believe when I dig through a thin layer of topsoil and hit sand and gravel. If this were an unsettled area, it would probably be an oak-hickory woodland, the most common plant community for the region. The ground would be covered with forest duff—fallen leaves and twigs that would gradually break down and become part of the soil.

What the yard would look like without human intervention?

    In my garden I want to foster this soil cycle that converts leaves to humus and back to leaves again. The natural system will maintain the right nutrient balance.

    Over the years I’ve focused hard on making compost, and I still love the idea that you can turn garden waste into something great for your soil and plants. But by moving dead plants and fall leaves to the compost piles, I’ve been taking them away from where they’d otherwise decompose in place. Then I have to load compost into the wheelbarrow to replace organic material in the spots I removed it from. That’s starting to seem foolish.

Why carry compost ingredients to the pile and back?

    By letting the leaves compost where they fall, I hope to imitate the natural process more closely—and save work, too.

Witch hazel is blooming. Can spring be far off?

I'll be away for two weeks. See you the week of March 18.

Fungi at work

Although we can’t see it, we live in a microbial soup. I just learned that there may be a Milky Way of viruses that floats on air currents around the globe and that trillions fall to earth every day. We know our guts are inhabited by billions of bacteria that we can’t get along without. A teaspoonful of soil contains up to a billion bacteria.

    Some of the most important players in this microscopic world are fungi. This summer has produced a particularly handsome crop of mushrooms and other fungal growths in woods and shady gardens in my area.  Walking woodland paths this month, I can’t resist stopping to snap photos of new, colorful fungal growths that seem to pop up almost every day.

Wet, rotting wood displaying a fungal bonanza

    The mushrooms I’m admiring are just the tip of an underground iceberg, the fruiting bodies of vast networks of thread-like fungal hyphae in the soil below. Compost couldn’t happen without the work of soil fungi. Bacteria, fungi, nematodes, insects and protozoa all work together to break down the organic material we throw on the compost pile into nice black compost.

Microscopic view of fungal cells

    I was amazed to learn a few years ago that experts can customize the balance of fungal and bacterial content in compost by choosing the right mix of ingredients. This is when they make compost on the scale of tons, moving giant mounds of material around with backhoes. 

At large-scale composting operations, piles are turned by machines

High-carbon, tough woody materials are what soil fungi like, so our yard’s endless supply of oak leaves predisposes the compost I make to have high fungal activity. I once had my compost tested for its biological content. The report came back showing excellent fungal presence.

    That’s just as well, because shrubs, trees and perennials—what my garden is mostly made up of—particularly like soil and compost with lots of fungi. By mulching with fall leaves and wood chips, I give the fungi even more to chew on.

Shredded leaf mulch

    Not only are these organisms hard at work in the soil. They actually create an underground architecture in the rhizosphere, the top few inches of soil where there’s the most oxygen and the most biological activity takes place. Roots and soil fungi have evolved to work together, exchanging nutrients. 

A stump in my yard is hosting this impressive mushroom bouquet

     This justifies the lazy woman’s approach to soil amendment: layering compost and good stuff such as composted manure on top of the soil and letting the soil organisms do the work of mixing them in. Tilling the soil, or even turning it with a spade, breaks up those underground networks that fungi have labored to create. That makes it harder, not easier, for plants’ roots to obtain the nutrients they need.

Let soil organisms do the digging

    As the beans and tomatoes in the vegetable garden finish producing and start to wind down, it’s almost time for me to play my part, spreading some compost on top of the bed. By spring, those fungi will have made the soil ready for another season’s planting. I appreciate their beautiful above-ground creations, and I’m even more grateful for the work they’re doing underground.

Nature or "all-natural" products?

There’s a thriving market for organic lawn care in my town. These contractors offer periodic fertilizing and even pest control with certified organic products. 

Organic lawn service

Intrigued, I met with Jim Agabedis of Minuteman Landscaping in June 2013 to see about switching to lawn care on sustainable principles.

    Jim had a lot of sensible advice to offer. Some was about switching to better-informed practices, such as letting clippings compost in place on the lawn, changing mower blades frequently so they cut rather than tear the grass, weeding by hand instead of spreading weed killer, and aerating sections of lawn where telltale plantain indicates compaction. 

Could the lawn benefit from organic methods?

Another part of his advice was about “product.” That’s where I started to feel ambivalent.
 

    Jim had a compelling story of how he decided to switch from conventional to organic lawn care. He started his business while he was still in college and built it up to 360 accounts. Then an acquaintance shared a one-page article on lawn care without chemicals, and he had an epiphany. 

     Most of his clients didn’t make the transition to organic, but he fought his way back. He said it’s worth it to avoid practices and products that could make people or pets sick. 

Not the approach Jim was aiming for

The lawns his company cares for testify to the effectiveness of his method.

     I didn’t end up hiring Jim’s company. I was looking for weekly lawn mowing informed by organic principles. He was offering something more ambitious: a commitment to a beautiful organic lawn. For me, it’s not worth the money, and it's not the direction I'm heading.
 
    I could see that Jim’s approach was better than conventional lawn care, but I balked at the idea of a lawn, or any other garden area, depending on application of lots of purchased products for health or survival. Jim proposed to apply benign products such as compost pellets and compost tea. 

Spreading compost on a lawn

That’s the organic approach I’d pursue if I had enough time, motivation, and compost to get serious about lawn care. 

     Ideally, though, the compost I’d apply to our lawn would be made up of decomposed materials from our own yard. That way I’d be imitating the natural soil cycle, where organic materials such as leaves and branches decompose on the ground and build soil. 

Organic material cycles back into soil

    I have a problem with replacing chemicals from the garden center or big box store—weed killers, pesticides, synthetic fertilizer—with pricey organic products purporting to fill the same roles. It’s better than the old way, but it’s still a paradigm we should be moving away from.

     Now I see the garden as a community of plants and animals. I aim to enrich and protect it by letting natural processes do their work freely, 

Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) blooming this week

rather than just by replacing synthetic products with store-bought “natural” ones.


This is SEG’s 100th post! Thanks for reading. It’s great to know that we share the same gardening pleasures and concerns.