How to Grow More Vegetables : And Fruits, Nuts ... - Shroomery

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Cereal rye roots grow to six feet deep.
34 COMPOST
Compost
Goal: Maximize quality and quantity of cured
compost produced per unit of compost built
and maximize microbiodiversity
A “Natural” System
In nature, living things die, and their death allows life to be
reborn. Both animals and plants die on forest floors and in
meadows to be composted by time, water, microorganisms, sun,
and air to produce a soil improved in structure and nutrients.
Organic plant growing follows nature’s example. Leaves, grass,
weeds, prunings, spiders, birds, trees, and plants should be
returned to the soil and reused—not thrown away. Composting
is an important way to recycle such elements as carbon, nitrogen,
magnesium, sulfur, calcium, phosphorus, potash, and trace
minerals. These elements are all necessary to maintain the
biological cycles of life that exist naturally. All too often we
participate instead in agricultural stripmining.
Composting in nature occurs in at least 3 ways: (1) in the
form of manures, which are plant and animal foods composted
inside an animal’s body (including earthworms) and then
further aged outside the animal by the heat of fermentation.
Earthworms are especially good composters. Their castings
are 5 times richer in nitrogen, 2 times richer in exchangeable
calcium, 7 times richer in available phosphorus, and 11 times
richer in available potassium than the soil they inhabit; 1 (2) in
the form of animal and plant bodies that decay on top of and
within the soil in nature and in compost piles; and (3) in the
form of roots, root hairs, and microbial life-forms that remain
and decay beneath the surface of the soil after harvesting. It is
estimated that one rye plant in good soil grows 3 miles of hairs
a day, 387 miles of roots in a season, and 6,603 miles of root
hairs each season! 2
1. Care must be taken to avoid overdependence on worm castings as a fertilizer; the nutrients
in them are very available and can therefore be more easily lost from the soil system.
2. Helen Philbrick and Richard B. Gregg, Companion Plants and How to Use Them (Old
Greenwich, CT: Devin-Adair Company, 1966), pp. 75–76.