Compost Challenge: What’s wrong with this article?

Talk about going out on a limb. On Tuesday, I rashly announced that prizes would be presented to those who could suggest things missing from my extremely long article on compost. I haven't even put up the official rules yet, and already I've been presented with a composting question I didn't cover. (Thanks, Heather.) The question, a quite reasonable one about manure, can be viewed, by those of you who are eager to witness my come-uppance, in the comment section of Tuesday’s post.

But of course, you don't have to merely witness my humiliation; you can participate! You can contribute! And all under the guise of helping me improve the article!

(You know that expression "Rue the day?" I suspect that my own passing acquaintance with it will shortly deepen to intimacy.)

The owner of PN, Eric Vinge, who commissioned this article and who put it up on his Composter Connection site in record time, has agreed to sponsor the contest referred to a couple of days ago. So here's what you do: Think of something that should have been included in  “Compost: in the Bin, in the Garden, and in the Environment” but isn’t, or locate what seems to you the most trivial fact in the wole article, or devise an argument for including a highly un-compost-like item, and win a $25 gift-certificate at Planet Natural.

To those of you who have been breathlessly awaiting the official contest rules, I can now say, Breathe!

Tuesday's post mentioned only one category (“What’s Missing”), but three days on bread and water while being allowed to listen only to Herman’s Hermits convinced the judges to add several others. Here, then, are the official rules, as agreed upon by the board of international judges:

What’s Missing?

Point out a compost issue not covered by this article, or ask a question about composting that’s not answered or at least addressed anywhere in the Composter Connection site, and win a $25 gift certificate from Planet Natural.

(The “or at least addressed” is meant to cover stuff that’s unanswerable or information for which I refer people to other sources or sites.)

Oh—just to take all the fun out of it—Compost Tea doesn’t count. We’re doing a separate article on that. Sorry.

Entries in this category can range from standard-issue to glaring.

--standard-issue omission: The “duh,” category. This is the one that will make me smack my forehead and cry, “I can’t believe I left that out!” while everyone around says, “Well, duh.”

--most glaring omission: This one—oh, when I realize I left this one out, my numbed lips will shape no words save these: “The horror—the horror,” as everyone else at the cocktail party moves away from me, muttering to each other, “She wrote an article on composting and didn’t mention that?” —the mutters growing gradually to a dull roar until the crowd as one moves to toss their drinks in my direction, but just as they draw back their arms,

  “Wait!” a voice cries, and,

  “Saved!” I think; “a voice of kindness and reason at last—”

  “—why waste good liquor?”

  And to cries of “Right!” and “Right on!” they all turn their backs on me and drain their glasses, giving rise to the “anti-toast” and simultaneously proving once again that there actually is something worse than having an entire roomful of people toss their drinks in your face.

For the creatively inclined, we offer the following whimsical category:

The Kitchen Sink

--most tangential omission: What is the least relevant item that I “should” have included? Can you somehow make a case that the Empire State Building should have been in the article? Or pencil erasers? Why? Where?

This category presents contestants with the task of establishing a connection, however tenuous, between compost and—something.  Let us know where you think this item belongs.

ON THE OTHER HAND, some might think that the last thing this site needs is more—well, of anything. For those, we offer the following category:

Enough already!

Name what you consider to be either the least likely or the most trivial fact, story, graph, or photograph in the whole site.

--most trivial: Name what you consider the most trivial fact in the article, the one that made you clutch your hair and cry, “Why this? With wars raging, seas rising, the Dow in the negative numbers and Small Beetle still missing, she bothers with this?”

--least likely: This is the Kitchen Sink turned on its head—the item in the article that out of context, you’d be never think came out of an article on compost.

I’m hoping to get enough of these so that readers can vote for the winner.

Finally, there’s this:

Up for Grabs

This lets the judges grant an award to an entry that may not fit into any of the above categories but that clearly deserves recognition, if only because its author has taken the judges hostage and is once again threatening them with a diet of nothing but Barry Manilow.

JUST TO CLARIFY:

•    The contest refers to the composting article only, not to the items for sale. The article appears in the left side-bar in green type.

•    Multiple entries are encouraged. (The more the better.)

•    A prize will be awarded in each category.

•    We’re not sure what we’ll do for international winners, but we’ll work something out. (Some items can’t be shipped overseas, at least legally, and Eric prefers to remain on the right side of the law at present. His daughter is only seven.)

•    Entries will be accepted through May 17th. That's this year, 2009.

Post entries in the pages on the right sidebar; they're labeled by category, which should make things easier.

Have at it, people.

Contest on the way--try it if you dare

  

Having spent the morning in a mind-numbing fury while trying to print two pages of an IRS document necessary to report the income (ha-ha) from my business (hee-hee) over the past year, I have probably burnt out my two remaining brain cells, as well as ensuring that I will return to earth as a nematode, and probably not the beneficial sort. A quiet acceptance of the world's vagaries was not demonstrated by moi.

On the other hand, THE COMPOSTING ARTICLE IS UP, all hundred and fifty pages of it, looking quite well-behaved and tidy for something so sprawling, even voracious. Amazing, how Eric has reduced the monster that dominated my life for months to a meek little sidebar. (The mysteries of translating a Word document into a website are beyond me; I use “translate” here in its old theological meaning of “to transport to heaven without natural death.”)

Eric by the way is Eric Vinge, of Planet Natural who asked me to write an article on compost. So I did. (If I'd had any idea.... Then again, if he'd had any idea....)  Anyway, now it's got a name ("Compost: In the Bin, the Barden, and the Environment") and a home site (The Composter Connection) and one of those nifty pictures done by Eric's artist, whose name I cannot find, but I promise that when I do, I'll put it up.

This article has got everything, and if you think it doesn't, I dare you to prove it. Come on, put 'em up; let's see your footwork. All that talk don't mean nothin'. Meet me in the alley, and we'll see what you're really made of. Just be sure to bring whatever it is you think you know about composting.

You’re feeding them WHAT? Well, antibiotics, hormones, and — HEAVY METALS?

Source: Bloody Brilliant!

It’s spring, time to dig in the composts and pile on the mulches, so the blogging world is full of advice and debates about manure. Stuart of Gardening Tips and Ideas has just weighed in on the side of sheep manure, while Elizabeth and Michelle of Garden Rant defend manure against all comers.

Me, I can hardly bear to think about the stuff. The minute I hear the word “manure” I start to twitch and moan; observers report having heard mutterings of  “No, no,”  and “Tell me it isn’t true.” I wanted to post on this topic (the manure, not the moans) weeks ago, but after the incident with the broken blood-pressure cuff, my doctors warned me not to write about it for at least a month.

It’s all about the stuff they add to animal feed. I stumbled over it when researching the compost article (how else?) and haven’t entirely recovered. Here’s what happened.

Plant Power: Phytoremediation (Arsenic in soil, Part III)

Chinese brake fern (Pteris vittata L.) Source: Brake fern remediation

Today I get to write about one of my absolute favorite gardening topics, and for once I’m not being ironic. Phytoremediation isn’t going to make it onto most people’s gardening hit lists, and it’s not a fad that’s going to take the nation’s gardens by storm the way a new rose or hellebore might. But for me it’s proof positive of the extraordinary power of plants; it’s hope in a polluted world; it’s a spot of green in the brownfields of industry; it’s good sense in the midst of madness.

Compost vs. Arsenic: And the winner is--compost!

Several posts back I mentioned in passing that compost can help fix arsenic in soil, and it seems reasonable to explain what the hell I was on about there. To "fix" arsenic is get it to bond with other, stable molecules so that it can neither leach from the soil into the water supply, nor migrate into your vegetables, and thence into you.

I got onto this originally because the news articles about the great Tennessee coal ash spill of '08 kept mentioning arsenic. Arsenic, I learned, occurs in several different forms, but the one that turns up most commonly in coal ash is arsenate(V), the same form that leaches into soil from telephone poles and fences treated with copper chromate arsenate (CCA).

And yes, at least one recent study conducted at the University of Florida found that when carrots and lettuce are grown in soil that's contaminated by CCA, both vegetables absorbed less arsenic when the soil received plentiful treatments of compost. 

Er--coal ash as a soil amendment?

I always knew the Brits were crazy.

Given the justifiable panic over the Tennessee fly ash spill here in the States, it’s almost impossible to believe that people might put anything remotely resembling coal by-products in their gardens on purpose, but they do.

Sounds nuts, I know, but experiments have been ongoing in experiments have been conducted in India, Australia, China, and the United States, Poland, Thailand, and who knows, maybe the North Pole, growing vegetables (or in China, trees) in soil amended with bottom ash. Since ash is almost always quite alkaline (pH>9), this only makes sense in soils that have low pHs, but in those it can raise pH, improve water retention, improve mineralization, and increase nutrient availability. And at normal agricultural application rates (20 tons or more (!) or so on each hectare, which is about 2.5 acres) virtually all of experiments I’ve looked at show that these unlikely amendments are not accumulating at dangerous levels in plants.

For arsenic-free water, pull up your compost socks.

I realize that this post-title sounds as if I'd lost both my remaining marbles, or else as though I were trying to imitate the inimitable off-the-wall titles of the great Blogger from Blackpitts, James A-S himself. But no. As you will see.

Let us begin with the subject of spreading compost. Easy, right? All you need is a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Well. Check out the photo below.

Source: Compost: Completing the Cycle
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TECQ), 20

That, folks, is how they do it in Texas. Apparently, when they go for compost there, they do it big-time. (Why am I not surprised?)

Compost blankets like this one reduce runoff, making reseeding disturbed soil far quicker, more successful, and therefore economical than it is when using what are disparagingly referred to as "traditional methods." But that's not really the point here. The point is the machinery, which I'll return to in a minute.

Compost to control plant diseases (revised)

Field tomatoes stricken with P. nicotianae Breda de Haan
USDA Forestry image fr. Division of Plant Industry Archive
Florida Dept. of Ag. and Consumer Services

So a day or two ago I was innocently researching away about compost and just for fun, hit the Google ‘scholar’ option to see what came up under the wide-open search term “compost.” (Toe surgery confines me for the moment to whatever I can find on the Internet; even the University library six blocks away is too far).

Lo and behold, I found myself looking at a number of articles dating back to the eighties and continuing right up to the present day about managing diseases with compost. Slap my ass and call me Judy, but I never heard of such a thing. Like a good metaphor, however, it makes sense as soon as I hear it: so many plant diseases are soil-borne that changing the soil balance would reasonably affect disease contraction, severity, and so on.

Soil + sand = cement? Not so much.

They say adding sand to clay soil yields cement. Maybe sometimes. But based on a highly unscientific experiment in my back yard, not always.

The warning about sand pops up here and there all over the internet, often coming from university Extension offices. The one in Colorado for instance, says flat out, “Don't add sand to clay soil,” predicting a consequence that would make any gardener quake in her gardening boots: “this creates a soil structure similar to concrete.” A specialist with Ohio State University goes even further, saying that the result is usually “a disaster.”

Bindweed, garden enemy #1

This is the first of several posts on bindweed, scourge of the gardener's life. I'm hoping to hear from plenty of people about methods and tactics. After all, it all started when a woman in the north-east corner of Montana sent me these pictures of her garden:

Those are bind-weed sprouts there against the bare ground and bindweed climbing the tomatoes. (I think those are tomatoes.) Now take a look at this one: