OMG...
I'm finding it hard to believe there's no
compost entry here yet... So let's remedy that.
I just ran into
PRAXXUS55712's vid on composting that i found really informative, insightful and entertaining [watch the dog...!]
Not to plug my own forum or anything, but i've gone into composting
there and it contains the best vids and posts i was able to find at the time.
Why is composting interesting?
Well, first of all, it's just about copying
Mother Nature's systems and using them intelligently to our own advantage. If ya don't wanna be cutting down forests all the time (as people have been doing for millennia to acquire good soil [
thereby committing collective suicide...]), ya gotta be about achieving what forests do without relying on them in some unsustainable way.
There are tricks [like
drunken composting (grass)] but the basics are
real simple:
- 1 part
greens [nitrogen-rich]
- 1 part
browns [carbon-rich]
- innoculant [bacterial culture, usually: a small part of your previous heap]
- moisture [out of the Sun; keep it from drying out]
- aerated [heap must not be compacted and must have access to air; turn around once in a while and/or get holed pipes running through it]
- not too small, not too big [too big leads to compaction, too small dries it out too quickly]
Will there even
be soil in the aftertimes...?
When megaquakes and megagales have carried away all surface soil, there will be heaps and heaps of it
somewhere, but not necessarily anywhere near you. [I draw this idea from Paul LaViolette's
Earth Under Fire in which he explains that modern 'coal reserves' are really nothing other than masses of organic materials that were once carried away by floods and collected at certain points where they started to decompose.]
You may, therefore, be called upon to
create soil [i.e. something popular culture considers impossible which is why they consider soil something to be mined]. And the quickest way of doing this is through the natural
shortcut that is composting.
