Stu Campbell - Let It Rot!

The Gardeners Guide to Composting

STU CAMPBELL

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Edited by Kathleen Bond Borie

Cover design by Meredith Maker

Cover photograph by Kevin Kennefick

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Line drawings on pages iv, 1, 5, 11, 13, 16, 20, 25, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 43, 45, 47, 84, 89, 94, 96, 101, 103, 106, 117, 121, 126, 129, 136, 140, 141, 142, and 145 by Jean Loewer, on pages 53, 65, 73, 85, 86, 93, 99, 119, 132, and 137 by Alison Kolesar, and on pages 67, 75, and 77 by Susan Berry Langsten

Indexed by Hagerty & Holloway

1975, 1990, 1998 by Storey Publishing, LLC

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Campbell, Stu.

Let it rot! : the gardeners guide to composting / by Stu Campbell.

[3rd. ed.]

p. cm.(Storeys down-to-earth guides)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-58017-023-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Compost. I. Title. II. Series.

S661.C35 1998

631.875dc21 97-36405

CIP

To Gregory
May he, like his father, have the chance
to pursue what interests him most.

One aker well compast, is worth aker three

Tusser (1557)

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless succession of diseased corpses,
It distills exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Walt Whitman, This Compost

Somewhere, thousands and thousands of years ago, some hairy and slouched cave dwellers who groveled in the dirt with sticks and who managed to grow some food may have discovered that seeds grew better near the place where they piled the apparently useless refuse from their cave. Most of this waste material was organic matter.

I doubt very much that at the moment of discovery they had either the wisdom or the inclination to shout Eureka! But they must have passed the word along, because the idea of putting human, animal, vegetable, and mineral wastes on or into the soil, to make it better, spread to all corners of the world.

In the beginning, there was manure. Humanity has known for a long time that animal excrement is valuable stuff when it comes to growing things and has apparently always made efforts to save it. But shortly after early humans became friendly enough with animals to be able to persuade a few of them to live at home with them in a more or less peaceful relationship, they must have realized that there was never quite enough manure to go around. So they began to devise ways of stretching it and started to think about ways to make synthetic manure. They didnt know what they were doing, really. They probably just took a look at what was going on and then began trying things. Composting had begun long before our ancestors discovered it.

Decomposition is at least as old as the soil. The earth itself, as the poet Walt Whitman suggests, is something of a compost pile. It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. Long before there were people around to observe it, composting was going on in every forest, every meadow, every swamp, and bog, and prairie, and steppe in the world. As Richard Langer says, Composting is a natural process that began with the first plants on earth and has been going on ever since.

Ancient people were the true discoverers of organic gardeningin spite of whatever valid claims people like Sir Albert Howard or Rudolf Steiner or J. I. Rodale may have to the modern title. Whoever they were, they were artists, not scientists. Only by trial and error were they able to learn what worked when it came to making synthetic manure. They didnt have anyone to guide them or to give them good advice because there was nobody around who knew very much. Things like psychrophylic bacteria and the relationship between carbon and nitrogen in the process of decomposition were the furthest things from their mindsand at least thirty centuries away in terms of time.

All they saw, maybe, was the forest floor where leaves fell, turned dark, and gradually disappeared to be transformed into the dark, fertile soil gardeners were someday to call humus. They must have realized that in time many things rot whether we try to do anything about it or not. Leave everything to Mother Nature, and eventually the conditions that encourage decay will establish themselves. We can be thankful that this is something that has been going on since shortly after the beginning of time.

Allowing nature to take its course, however, may take more time than we have. The modern practice of composting is little more than speeding up and intensifying natural processes. Thats all it is. When you come right down to it, finished compost is no more than treated or predigested (rotted) organic matter, which usually has undergone a natural heating process and which is very valuable stuff to incorporate into your gardens soil.

For too long there has been an air of cultist mysticism surrounding the art of composting. This is the kind of nonsense so many people find objectionable in a lot of composting literature. It is easy to get confused by gardening magazines and gardening books that describe the science of composting in such narrowly defined terms that you get the distinct impression that there is one, and