How to Spend a Lot of Money

Friday, May 17, 2024

A good friend of mine has decided to start gardening. I have pushed her into it by attacking her with daffodil bulbs and tulip bulbs and beetroot seeds and she has purchased a raised-bed kit from Amazon.

The model is 3’x5’x1’ so 15 cubic feet capacity, and will cost something between $75 and $100. Me, I would have used scrap timber, but then, I’m cheap. The bed will sit on a patch of lawn somewhere, and so needs soil.

Soil can be purchased for $6 or $7 per 70 litres outside the supermarket. My mathematics tell me that a fifteen cubic foot raised bed will need about 425 litres of bagged soil, but that volume will compact with watering to about 2/3 the size, so we need about 640 cubic litres of bagged soil, at a price somewhere between $6 and $7 that comes to about $60.

Add to that the cost of a raised bed kit from Amazon and you find yourself in the $150 range for a bed of 40 beetroots. We can argue that it is cheaper to buy beetroots at the store, but the bed will last many years, as will the soil.

Why Not Compost?

Well, you know my views, but let’s look at the most recent article to pass my eyes: How to get started with composting, and the surprising things you can throw in

A good article as it encourages people to think about composting.

(1) “Compost is a nutrient-rich, organic material …” I agree. Compost is better than bagged soil if only because bagged soils is sieved; you get soil. With compost you get small roots and twigs, worms and their companion biomasses. A readable article is here , but remember that worms, beetles, and all small animal life helps plants by making channels for fluids (water) and gases (air) through the soil in their nightly travels.

(2) “Items suitable for composting … include …”. My experience suggests that ANY form of biomass works. Certainly anything that lies along the path from our shopping bags to our mouths; that includes bones, fats, gristle. You may not want to eat it, but the bacteria will welcome it.

Include material that once was part of a living thing, so sheets of paper (books, even!), cotton garments, wood shavings.

(3) “The main thing is you chop it up small and mix it up so it's diverse — that's key,” but I demur. Chopping it up increases the surface area it is true, and increasing the surface area increases the availability of food for bacteria.

There was a time in my life when I passed all my food scraps through a blender, and all my paper scraps as well. But now I figure that the bacterial film will cover the item and the worms will eat the bacteria freeing up a fresh surface, and that over time the material will be consumed.

As for mixing it, I say “that’s what worms were invented for”. Worms and small insects on their travels through the heap will spread bits of whatever clings to their outer surfaces, so bacteria and viruses and fungi bits and what have you will be distributed through the heap in the same way that humans spread virus, bits of chewing gum, and candy-wrappers around the world.

(4) “Tea bags, nail clippings, hair, and toothpicks can also go into your compost.”. Parts of this statement are debatable. For starters, you need to prove that the tea bag is not composed in part of a plastic mesh (but see “plastics” below). Nail clippings and hair are basically too small to worry about anyway. I have a feeling that hair in a buried coffin is the longest surviving evidence of a human; I could be wrong.

(5) “domestic pet poo is compostable” No doubt about this. See as one example my September 4, 2006 article Faeces.

I remain unconvinced that we face a mortal danger from parasites in pet faeces. I agree that there are parasites in the faeces of some pets, but that being so, what happens when your dog or cat comes inside from the garden? Don’t they tramp stuff in on their paws? What are your chances of brushing material from your pet onto your skin, compared to the chances of a parasite surviving the journey through the compost heap, into the garden soil, through the carrot, and surviving the boiling-in-water process and still being in a fit state to devour you?

When you stoop and scoop then bury pet poo in a hole at the other end of the yard, the ecology of your yard will migrate parasites all around. That’s what an ecology is – a place of sharing.

And even if you bag your pet poo and send it to the landfill site, the ecology is always migrating between your neighbours lots and your lot.

‘Twas ever thus.

Get used to it.

(6) “She also recommends burying it 15 centimetres below the soil so local wildlife can't eat it and become sick or die.” Local wildlife includes, as if you didn’t know, worms and other micro-life, whose stated mission to Spread The Word.

(7) "Even the takeaway coffee cups that look papery but have a plastic lining, you can't compost those.". Of course you can. If it makes you feel good you can rip a paper cup open to expose the cardboard layer. (but see “plastics” below).

(8) “"At the very least you can get a compost bin, or a worm farm, …”. This is not true. At the very least you can stop hauling grass clippings out to the landfill site. Dump them in a quiet corner and spread one or two shovels of soil atop. Your ecology will do the rest. Each time you mow your lawn, you add a layer of clippings and a thin layer of soil.

I can not yet think of less that that. There is no NEED for a bin or a worm farm.

Now if like me you to like to play with stuff, by all means have a bin for pet poo, another bin for vegetable scraps, and so on. Build a heap of small twigs (they will take longer to break down, but break down they will!)

(9) “She says you need the right ratios between nitrogen (such as fresh green material and good scraps) and carbon (brown stuff like straw, old leaves or shredded office paper).”

Not true. If you want to optimize your composting to reduce the time taken for breakdown (“I’m young, and I’m in a hurry”) then maybe you should determine the best chemical/molecular mixture for beets (it will be different for parsnip, carrot, turnip, …) and then carefully measure that composition of my compost (it will vary month by month as breakdown progresses) and how will you determine that the compost is completely broken down? In my opinion it never is.

Just add the compost to your vegetable bed and gently till it in as soon as the ground is thawed; the compost will continue to break down the grass clippings, even as your vegetables reach out for nutrients. Prêt-à-porter is the phrase that comes to mind.

"You want 50/50 carbon to nitrogen ratio. Every time you add one bucket of food scraps, you add two buckets of carbon."

And herein lies a problem with quoting numbers: you can confusauser. A 50/50 ratio is equivalent to a 1:1 ratio. How is that equivalent to a 1:2 ratio of food scraps and carbon? Don’t the food scraps contain carbon (they are after all composed of hydrocarbon molecules) and wouldn’t that affect the carbon ratios? And from whence the nitrogen? Cardboard? Leaves? Twigs?

Toss it all in, I say, and let nature do what she was doing so well, well before we humans came along 20,000,000 years ago .

Plastics

There are large bits of plastic, such as 25-litre pails, and then there are small pieces of plastic, such as the thin-film that you peel off that tub of gourmet cheese from Denmark.

Don’t confuse the two.

Especially when find plastic such as adhesive tape or sheets covered with chunks of food, I toss it into the compost.

Yes, the plastic will survive the composting process, but you will probably be sieving your compost anyway, and the plastic shards will be separated quite easily then, long after you have added biodiversity to your composting facility.

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