Composting is one of the most unexpectedly satisfying things to do. Don’t even need to throw food in it (vermin bait). Just cut greens and carbon. As a bonus you can pee on it. You can also go to Starbucks and ask for their used coffee grounds, which they’ll happily prepare for you. Couple weeks and you have earthworms everywhere. Several more weeks and all those damn boxes from Amazon are nowhere to be found.
The bonus is that you start to go down a regenerative rabbit hole that’ll turn you into a mycorrhizal fungi maximalist.
While I welcome your enthusiasm I would urge anyone not to contaminate your soil with toxin laden printed paper (or its even toxin denser derivative of recycled packaging). At least if you're going to grow food on it you have a responsibility for the mouths fed with it.
With regards to the article: It's inconsistencies like these shown in the article, where there's a detailed list of sciency arguements about why no tilling makes sense but then the same Harvard PhD continues to cover her whole garden with toxic old newspapers which loses me.
Could be that I'm biased since I inherited a garden from similar lassez-fair style "gardeners" and had 20 year old trees collapsing without any storm due to their pest-infestation...
You can throw food in covered worm bins, or you can bury the food in your compost pile and have a farm cat that likes to sleep near the bin. Both work pretty well.
Not worth the risk, imo. The second order headache from that is having neighbors complain about your pile.
I think the best way to handle foods is to let it ferment Bokashi style, and then dump everything into the compost. It speeds up the decomposition without attracting rats. I also like to make weed tea with some EM, molasses, and water and dump that into the compost after a couple weeks.
It’s not beautiful, but it’s how the heap loves it.
My god, it’s all so satisfying. I once started a pile on top of a 3 ft stash of brush that was being an eyesore for three years, seeded with a heap of ugly smelly weeds and some earthworms. I only composted over a third of the brush to A/B test the results and within 8 months you could see a bald spot where the brush dissolved under the compost.
You’re doing something wrong if your worm bin or compost pile starts to smell enough for your neighbors to notice. (namely, you probably need more carbon to cover it with for the amount of stanky material that is present, or it is anaerobic, or too wet, or too dry.)
I live in a duplex with a backyard and have 100s of gallons of worm bin that don’t bother anyone’s noses.
Ah, I meant you don’t want neighbors complaining about rats coming around because of your pile. The weed tea stuff does stink. Some people say aerate but it’s tolerable and quickly gets buried.
I regret not getting a tumbler for my compost, turning it in a 5x5x5 bin in a small backyard is challenging. I think that’s also why my compost loses activity in the colder months. I have a supplementary kitchen-sized heated tumbler compost bin on my deck for winter which does a great job but too small.
I have a tumbler, but for 2 years in a row the composting just wouldn't start. I added the starter pellets to it, and would maintain it just like in previous uses of tumblers. When I'd empty it, it was just stored cut grass.
I've now just started a pile in the spot next to the tumbler where I emptied it. The pile is amazing. I just turn it with a shovel and you can see the progress. I stopped using the tumbler all together. I only use the trimming from yard work and add plant based leftovers from the kitchen, and it breaks things down much faster than I was expecting. It doesn't have a rodent problem. It doesn't stink. In fact, quite the opposite. I enjoy the smell of fresh turned up soil instead the expected rotting smell.
Ow, reading your comment is making my back hurt. Yes. I feel your pain. That said, I don’t use a bin. I’ve succumbed to the lazy boy way of handling my compost, which is to make a haphazard pile and then use a rake to mix it up by toppling it and rolling it. It’s made my life a ton easier, back doesn’t hurt anymore, and my results are great.
Gardens need infrastructure and they need time to evolve into a system that works and is productive.
Start by building compost bins. Use your mower (if you have a rotary one that bags) to mince up clippings from woodie plants (not actual bits of wood as that will kill the mower) and obviously to collect grass clippings. Start composting this down. Obtain a bag of good live compost or muck full of worms (you can see them) and use that to dope and infect your heap, loads of worm eggs will be in the muck and as the compost gets going the worm population will get going too.
Start your veg patch small and simple. If you have the space eight 3m * 1.2 m beds will be a big challenge to look after at first, but will provide more opportunities to grow things than you will be able to take advantage of (effectively). Remember, growing veg isn't just about preparing the soil, throwing seed on and waiting.
You will need to fence and net against pests. Pigeons will eat all brassicas in short order. Rabbits will eat most stuff, mice and rats as well. Good plants to get going with in the UK are: courgettes and other squashes (pumpkins need lots of room but can be a fun hobby plant), beans (broad, french and runners), peas, potatoes (blight is... a blight), celeriac and cellery, lettuce, broccoli (Calabrese), kale, beetroot, chard, carrots, corn, cabbage. You must net cabbage, broccoli and kale. You will also need to feed - organic seaweed feeds are good for this. Most importantly remember plants grow because of light and water and constant protection and pest management.
Once you are going and learn about the plants then get a green house and expand. The green house and cold frames are essential to get seedlings going - this is when you can move from paying more to grow than it costs to buy to saving money. You can also grow veg that only thrives under glass in a cooler climate. But, be warned.. commercial farmers are very clever and very efficient. You will always struggle to compete with them on a value basis. But it is very satisfying and the food often tastes better than shop bought.
This has not been my experience at all. Yes to get optimal compost at an optimal speed you have to carefully manage the ratios of browns to greens, moisture content, turning it, etc.
But if you don't care about speed, you can just throw stuff in a bin (or a pile) and it will eventually compost. I never do anything to mine except turn it as I'm taking the finished compist out once or twice a year and I make great compost. I use the geobin compost bin. $30 and it has lasted my mom for over two decades now.
Another trick to increase the volume is to go around and pick up all your neighbor's leaf bags and throw them in your compost bin.
Indeed. I've had very productive compost piles that were very easy. I didn't even use a bin; I just piled on organic stuff (from the yard, or from the kitchen, or whatever) in a convenient spot that wasn't in the way of anything..
I spent almost as little time on it as possible. Every now and then, if I felt like it, I'd give it a bit of a toss with a shovel or a pitchfork. If it had been very hot and dry, I'd water it a bit. It wasn't fast, but by the time I wanted compost for the garden in the spring there was always plenty of it for me to use.
As I understand it, this method is called cold composting. The idea is to provide an environment that worms and insects like to hang out and do their stuff in, which is easy enough to imagine and simple to accomplish satisfactorily with minimum effort. They just want a place that is damp, full of food, and not too hot (they leave if it gets too hot).
This is in contrast to hot composting, which is a more intense method -- both in the effort that goes into it, and the speed of production.
Hot composting has huge advantages in speed and the materials that can be composted (PLA plastic can disappear in a hot compost pile that is working), but I don't feel like I want to spend that much effort on it and the lazy method gets results that I like.
Seconding this. This is my second year using compost, and this year I tried to only use the composted soil from last year, made from grass clipping and mostly-mulched leaves that over-wintered in the pile.
There is crap sprouting up everywhere because my pile did not get hot enough to kill the seeds. Tomato plants are sprouting up in every single place I've put down the compost.
Last year, it was pumpkins - I left some compost on a tarp to dry out, and forgot all about it, and when I came back, mystery plants sprouted up - so I replanted them in the front yard, and was rewarded by pumpkin plants that completely took over. And I do mean rewarded - it looked great, passers-by would comment on our pumpkin patch, and we got something like a dozen pumpkins out of the deal for halloween.
I'm basically just throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks; the money investment is basically zero, aside from occasionally watering the pile. And the time I spend on it is time spent outside, in mostly pleasant weather, working with my hands.
> improved soil health, improved ecosystem health, better water retention, less erosion, more carbon sequestered in the soil.
Regarding carbon sequestration, I think it is worth pointing out that Freeman Dyson, in one of his conferences, mentioned no-till farming as one land management methods that could be used to absorb the carbon emitted in the atmosphere by human activities.
"The point of this calculation is the very favorable rate of exchange between carbon in the atmosphere and carbon in the soil. To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land."
engineering wise I can't see why it wouldn't be possible to selectively genetic-engineer some kind of plant or algae or something that sucks up tons and tons of carbon that you can then sequester manually by compressing it into, I don't know, artificial peat or something.
I have no idea why massive factory growing operations for produce aren't everywhere. Every city should have one by now, growing produce locally and shaving down the price of transport and waste to almost nothing.
There’s really no need. Ever heard of an algal bloom? Also happens with jellyfish. On freshwater plants like duckweed do similar things.
Given the right nutrients population explosions happen. Environmentalists usually treat these as bad things but they certainly could be good ways to sink carbon. They could be triggered by fertilizing some of the more barren sections of ocean selected to minimize ecological effect. Quite a lot of the biomass simply falls to the ocean floor and gets buried, it could also be harvested and sequestered another way or used as a biomass fuel.
On freshwater lakes you could grow and harvest duckweed.
Investigate the biochar process as an alternative. You can also buy biochar for your houseplant needs [0]. Creating that much artifical peat in a small area would be a massive fire hazard but probably could be managed.
"Vertical" or indoor farming is one of those silicon valley tropes. VC lost billions during the last decade and I don't know of a single success story that is still going / profitable. I'm sure after enough time passes people forget and will try again.
I'm all for gardening - there's something therapeutic about seeing a plant grow and evolve over time. You can see something tangibly change over time as a result of your work, something quite rare in today's world where we spend our time on computers producing ephemeral things like files.
That said, I'm completely opposed to urban food gardening (including chickens) because the land you're growing in is likely poisoned by years of urban pollution. Whatever you grow in those areas is going to bring that bad stuff along with it, which means your backyard tomatoes probably wouldn't pass FDA approval.
Chickens are even worse, because they'll eat whatever's on the ground and that stuff gets into the eggs. So while it looks great on Instagram, your backyard eggs are probably full of rubber, asphalt, gasoline, plastics, and all the other stuff that's wafted into your property over the years.
So anyway, by all means garden and have fun doing it, but if you haven't had your urban soil tested and verified as safe, don't eat anything that comes out of it.
That depends on the area and there are methods to mitigate that.
One group out in New Jersey that has a community garden in heavily polluted land uses clean straw bales as the grow medium. Those only last for two or three years. But you can grow stuff.
Regenerative and permaculture methods includes soil remediation techniques for rebuilding soil. For heavily polluted land, Dr John Todd has some remarkable methods that can remediate even places such as superfund sites, though that might not be something to DIY. Dr Todd also has a quick method for testing that doesn’t involve a lab; not comprehensive, but will get you the observation you need.
Finally, as you see from other articles including the current front page of HN — leafy veggies have been found to have tire additives. Micro plastics are found in rain amd in animals in the wild. Our planet has been so broadly polluted, and our industrial agriculture will not necessarily be safer. For those with an interest in stewardship, you have to start somewhere.
Do you have any links that support these statements? Surely, some areas are contaminated, but claiming that urban land is "likely poisoned" and passes it on seems suspicious.
Come to think of it, I've never had my chicken feed tested. Rather than test every sqaure meter of my backyard periodically and also have every bag of feed tested, it seems more practical to do constant sampling of the eggs. Can you recommend a lab for me? How can I get an FDA inspection of my tomato? Do you have any data on the failure rate of such inspections?
"According to RIVM, the total PFAS intake of Dutch consumers is too high. This excessive exposure is therefore irrespective from eating home produced eggs."
Yes, but the previous paragraphs confirms that “The weekly PFAS intake through the consumption of home-produced eggs exceeds the health-based guidance value (i.e. the maximum safe intake). This means that the weekly PFAS intake due to the consumption of these eggs over a longer period of time can lead to health risks. Consumption of eggs from the supermarket (commercial eggs) does not lead to excessive PFAS intake and can therefore be eaten safely”.
> That said, I'm completely opposed to urban food gardening (including chickens) because the land you're growing in is likely poisoned by years of urban pollution. Whatever you grow in those areas is going to bring that bad stuff along with it, which means your backyard tomatoes probably wouldn't pass FDA approval.
Very much this. Those who live in very rainy areas like the PNW know all too well about all the rain gardens and other suburban filtration needed to keep the water from turning disgusting from surface oil and particulates coming off roads, shingles, etc.
Not to mention the oil content of the dressing I pour onto my lettuce and tomato just before I eat.
Ok, bad joke. But I am reminded of the fellow who was cited for dumping his used motor oil along his fence line a week before the DOT did a chip and seal on the road next to the fence.
Sometimes, that pollution can be beneficial. I knew of someone that lived in an area where there was once a battery factory. Their tomatoes--grown in the ground--where simply amazing. It turns out, their soil is pretty acidic due to that battery factory.
I tried adding cat waste to a compost pile (we used cat litter made of organic materials, not clay.) The result was horrific odor. I didn't do that again.
the amount of land and effort required to grow meaningful amount of calories is far beyond anything you can do in a city. if you own a parcel anywhere near any city in the western hemisphere, just selling it outright would yield more money than all the produce you could grow in ten lifetimes.
Careful, its important to avoid newspapers with colored inks, glossy finishes, or any coated papers, as these can contain harmful chemicals that might leach into the soil.
You want to lay cardboard over tall green stuff, then mulch that. The improvement in fertility compared with tilling and laying cardboard over soil is huge.
Sheet mulching is amazing for eliminating ivy and other invasive species as well.
It’s often better not to compost under a new plant because it encourages it not to spread its roots. Instead mulch with it and the rain and worms will bring the nutrients down.
I know a lot of people have praised cardboard and I've used it too, but after sniffing some particularly smudged boxes from an Amazon order, I'm pretty hesitant now.
I'm less nervous about things like pizza boxes (if not too greasy). Even if there are contaminants, they are already in my food.
I just use 'plain' cardboard in my garden - the brown stuff with text printed in one colour. It's pretty easy to get hold of from supermarkets. The multicolour stuff I send for recycling.
The ones in Ireland are basic cardboard. You can tell from the way the grease soaks through and the cardboard goes all limp. The constraint for recycling them here is that the items up for recycling must be "clean and dry", and a pizza box is neither after it has been delivered with pizza in it.
The microbes and fungi in the soil act as remediators for most organic compounds. Shouldn't be an issue, but you can always grow perennials in the bed that take time to grow rather than fast growing annuals if you're concerned.
I came here with the same question -- the ink. Why do you feel that the ink is an organic compound? Not sure if there is an easy answer here but this site: https://home.howstuffworks.com/pen4.htm seems to suggest colored inks are inorganic and contains heavy metals.
But if you just compost the fungi, you are just back to where you started. With phytoextraction you have to incinerate the plant material afterwards. I know fungi aren’t plants, but similar principle.
The fruiting body of a mushroom often represents only a fraction of total biomass. It depends on the species, but what we see above ground is more analogous to a flower than an entire plant.
A colleague of mine recently introduced to the idea of no-till gardening/agriculture and was very convincing about it but I started to have some doubts when he started claiming incredible yields yadi yada, too good to be true was my reaction.
I am thinking here must be the perfect place to get interesting opinions about it : So, is no-till useless, good or incredible ?
I once planted a few spinach plants. When they matured, I would go out almost every night and cut enough for a side dish for family dinner.
I didn't rate it good or incredible. I was surprised how well it kept growing back. I didn't bother doing a cost analysis, either.
If your goal is economics, it's dubious. If your goal is pleasure, it's subjective. If your goal is lifestyle, it's incredible at facilitating a particular lifestyle. Give it a small try and decide for yourself. Start as small as one square meter as an experiment. You have very little to lose.
I prefer mulched raised beds. They're easier to maintain for me and I get good results. I build them out of cedar fence slats to keep the cost down and start the first year with a Hügelkultur-inspired base. The mulching keeps weeds down (they're already low anyway) and helps retain moisture.
Even “organic” soil that you might use to fill containers is full of crap. I’ve filled beds with this from several brands and all of them had a significant amount of pieces that were clearly previously painted wood, chunks of metal, etc. Probably still better than what’s in the ground. I recall seeing beautiful black, organic rich, loose soil when planting things 25/30 years ago. I haven’t found anything remotely resembling that here in CA in the last few years.
Your assertion may be region specific. The organic compost I get in Ireland is based on worm castings, and has never had "painted wood, chunks of metal, etc" in it.
Yup, I was thinking about the Cedar Grove compost (Seattle area) which is post-consumer comparing and yard clippings. Then I've been reading about most "compostable" packaging being laden with PFAS and also getting clippings from the Ruston smelter zone. I'm not sure one can even get clean, safe soil spare hiking out to national forests and stealing some.
Ceader grove is garbage suitable for landscaping… maybe but not much else. Even if you ignore the high plastic and glass content it’s incredibly hydrophobic when dry and is terrible for vegetables.
My solution to this was to start with store bought organic soil and start to amend it with compost. I have built more and more soil over time, and now I have so many red wiggler worms that I generate a significant amount of compost and castings.
> Tilling and plowing are almost synonymous with land cultivation, aren't they? Yet they actually destroy soil structure, create compaction, and kill the very soil biology that's the basis of fertility, like fungal networks and all those earthworms that make the soil nice and squishy.
I read it, missed this too, hmmm'd at your comment, but went back because usually these amateur communities are nerds enough that there's usually a reason behind this kind of thing. :)
"Hmmm" is a great reaction. It made me dig deeper and learn something.
Tiling is defined as "preparing and cultivating the land". Cultivation is defined as "breaking up the soil in preparation for sowing or planting". Aeration will absolutely break up the soil. That's kind of the whole reason for doing it. It is cultivation, and therefore associated with tiling.
Aeration is not by the same mechanical process as the tool known as a cultivator, if that's what you were thinking of, but that specific tool is not what tiling/cultivation refers to specifically.
Tilling, in gardening, usually refers to lifting spadefuls of soil up and out of the ground, turning them over and breaking up the clumps. It's like a kitchen aid stand mixer on your soil.
Aeration with a broad fork doesn't lift the soil out of the ground and definitely doesn't break it up and redistribute it. It just creates a few pockets of stretched space by inserting a fork and wiggling a bit. Yes, small pockets are disturbed by the fork but mostly the soil stays as it was.
> Tilling, in gardening, usually refers to lifting spadefuls of soil up and out of the ground, turning them over and breaking up the clumps.
I expect you mean that lifting spadefuls of soil up and out of the ground is usually referred to as tiling, rather than the other way around. Which stands to reason as that is perfectly consistent with the dictionary defection.
> Aeration with a broad fork doesn't lift the soil out of the ground and definitely doesn't break it up
Aeration does not lift the soil, but it absolutely breaks it. That is why one would consider practicing aeration – to break up soil compaction that may be present. Cultivation, and therefore tiling, says nothing about lifting or redistribution, only breaking. Aeration is also tiling if done for the sake of ground preparation.
Have you use a broad fork? It's like 4-6 blades spread across ~4 feet. The mechanism of action is totally different, and no, it does not break up the soil in the same way tilling with a spade or rototiller does.
If you are here only to argue semantic and prescriptivist use of language, you can stop responding. I'm not interested. You might be right according to some dictionary definition of these terms. In practical use by gardeners, however, these two techniques have different names and achieve different goals and only one is called tilling.
>Have you use a broad fork? It's like 4-6 blades spread across ~4 feet. The mechanism of action is totally different, and no, it does not break up the soil in the same way tilling with a spade or rototiller does.
Aeration is not conventional tillage. Conventional tillage sees soil lifted and mixed as described earlier. A lazy speaker may leave out "conventional" in casual conversation about the mechanical practice where it is understood by context. Such context was not found here, but is that, perhaps, the source of your confusion?
You keep saying it's my confusion. My friend, there is no lazy speaker. It is merely the accepted and understood use of the term in casual conversation.
I understand your semantic argument, there is no confusion, I simply believe language is not prescriptivist. If people use the words in a certain way, then that is an acceptable way to use the words. No argument from a position of "well actually, the dictionary/professional jargon says..." will sway me because I just don't care.
> If people use the words in a certain way, then that is an acceptable way to use the words.
Of course, and luckily for us the original link explicitly states that no-till is being used in the farming sense, so we know exactly what certain way the words are being used. No-till in farming comes with a precise definition.
Even if you are right that there is some alternative reality in gardening where tillage commonly means something completely different, that clearly doesn't apply here. In farming, aeration before seeding/planting would not be considered a no-till practice. Such an act would normally fall under what is known as minimum tillage.
> I simply believe language is not prescriptivist.
Ironically, the thread went off the rails only because you tried to prescribe an alternative, incompatible, definition onto the communication that had already taken place. Credit to you for at least recognizing the error of your ways, even if you do seem to want to sweep the initial confusion under the rug for some reason.
Huh? Clearly you won – you got to learn something. I am the one who lost. Respectfully, thinking things through isn't your strong suit, is it?
> I'll go tell all my gardening buds that the no till practices are "um actually, that's tilling".
Whatever floats your boat, but let me warn you: Unless your gardening buds are high on the "gardened bud", they are not going to buy into your idea that no-till means "to perform tillage" any more than we have, even if you are perfectly free and able to hold that view. No-till is literally the abbreviation of "no tillage".
Yeah, I don't get the no till. The soils in my area are so compact that your % of successful seed germination will be much lower without that effort. I have a small plot that I manually till up a couple of inches deep each season and then mix in the compost I've been making all year. My germination success rate is much much higher that way
Seems like tilling might be counterproductive long-term then:
> Tilling and plowing are almost synonymous with land cultivation, aren't they? Yet they actually destroy soil structure, create compaction, and kill the very soil biology that's the basis of fertility, like fungal networks and all those earthworms that make the soil nice and squishy.
> According to the Michigan State University Extension, compaction is also a common side effect of tillage – at the soil surface, the plow layer and the subsoil.
The point is to build, over years, the kind of soil that fosters germination. You can mix in additives every year and till, or you can build a small ecosystem over time.
Maximizing the ecosystem health of what's underneath the surface is the point.
The bonus is that you start to go down a regenerative rabbit hole that’ll turn you into a mycorrhizal fungi maximalist.