Mar 11, 2007

Poor Organic Compost

We were confused! Our garden suddenly seemed to lose all fertility and the vegetables their vigor

We had brought in what seemed to be beautiful, organic compost – rich smelling and dark to put over the top of new no-dig, raised bed gardens we had made.

During the first season, all went well and we had beautiful silver beets and aubergines and a good crop of snake beans. Then it all went wrong – even though we had added some compost.

All the plants were stunted or weedy or a paler green than they should have been.

It was the “beautiful” compost. It has been made by grinding down wood chips to a small particle size and mixing this with the composted material. The result was that the nitrogen in the mix was used up in the first season and then in the subsequent season the micro flora and fauna attacking the wood needed nitrogen to do their part and pulled it all from the garden, depleting it and leaving nothing for the plants.

This is a typical case of nitrogen draw-down.

This will have to be redressed with applications of blood and bone. We have had to pull back this layer and lay the new nitrogenous material underneath it – it would be wasted on top.

We tend not to use stable manure much anymore because of this. The bags on sale locally of stable manure come mixed with a lot of sawdust and needs careful composting. Adding directly as mulch could (not necessarily) cause the difficulty we experienced