Book Review, Continued: “Gardening When it Counts” – Chapter 7

On A Continuing Review And Commentary Of Steve Solomon’s Book, Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. Chapter 7 – Compost

Chapter 7 – Compost, is essentially a chapter that explains how the home gardener can produce their own fertilizer. Here’s some of the author’s context for this home production effort:

• “… feedlot manures and composted chicken manure are widely available and seem inexpensive to most people right now, and industrial agricultural wastes like seed meals and slaughterhouse wastes are also cheap. But if present trends — peak oil, climate change, irresponsible monetary manipulation by central banks, competition over resources — result in the least desirable outcomes, then ordinary people will find it ever more difficult to afford to eat healthfully. It seems almost inevitable to me that the real (inflation-adjusted) cost of amendments is going to increase substantially. Composting is the alternative to purchasing. It allows small-scale food growers to make their own fertilizer, to manufacture “well-rotted manure” without the need to own livestock.”

And this:

• “If you can’t afford to have your food gardening efforts fall far short of your hopes, if you can’t afford to shrug off this years catastrophe and hope that it’ll be better next time …I suggest that you read this chapter more than once.”

In PH’s opinion, the author understates both the current situation and the effort you should put forth in mastering this abbreviated treatment of perhaps the key subject in hard-times gardening.

Mr. Solomon immediately moves from composting rationales to composting topics and techniques, such as: “Mulch gardening“. “Carbon to nitrogen ratios (with a great “Carbon nitrogen ratios” for additional clarity)”, “Sheet composting (We‘re working with a slight variation of the author’s stated technique here at PH.)”,”Temperature and decomposition“, to “What is this thing called compost?”. From this last topic, this: ”Composting decomposes organic materials before they are put into the soil so they become instant plant food.” and a very informative chart that provides an “Analysis of various composts”.

The author continues with a discussion of low, medium and high grade compost that is combined with a ten page presentation on “Composting procedure”. This is followed by a short treatment of “Green manure and cover crops” – along with their some of their pluses and minuses- to end the chapter.

Sandwiched in (so to speak) between ‘procedure’ and ‘cover crops’ is a small, one page topic called “Humanure”. After giving the reader an excellent reference on the subject, Mister Solomon reminds us again that this book is a serious treatment of hard-times gardening:

“If times got rough enough that I could not afford to spend a few hundred dollars each year on maintaining the gardens fertility, or if the materials to do so got so scarce that there was little choice, then we would definitely start using humanure.”

This chapter has broken down the complex subject of “compost” into a set of topics, any of which could be a book in itself, that are clear to the layman/lay-gardener and yet extensive enough to offer a short reference. It’s hard to offer praise beyond this.

Until next time; keep your eyes on the horizon as the weather’s changing fast.