Building Good Compost — Taught by Sam Parker Davies

And one is high nitrogen. Sorry? High nitrogen. We got carbon, we got nitrogen, we got high nitrogen. Carbon material, in a really broad sort of patony sort of sense, is material that's been dead for a while. Leaves that are no longer green and fall to the ground brown, they're high in carbon. Leaves that are on the tree fresh and green, they're nitrogen. They got a, quite a bit of nitrogen. When I concentrate those those leaves, I get an animal that eats those leaves, a goat eats all those leaves and then poops it out, that's a concentration of nitrogen, that is a high nitrogen material. Is this making sense? Seeing the pattern? In order to make a compost pile, we need a few simple things. To start, it's nice to have a pitchfork, a pitchfork. It's good to have a shovel. It's good to have a tarpolin or a waterproof blanket in which to cover your compost. It's also very beneficial to have a metal rake. You'll stood over there. That's the starting tools we need for our compost. Now we need to build our compost, and to build our compost we need 3 ingredient types. So we need materials that are high in carbon, and those things are things that have been dead for a long time. So the heartwood of a tree, has been dead for a long time. It's just the cambium layer, the surface layer of the tree that's alive. The bark has also been dead for quite a while, funny enough. Brown leaves, after they've lost all their green and they've fallen to the ground. Wood shavings, hair, nail clippings, and these sorts of things, they're things that don't have the vitality of life inside of them. But green leaves do. Green shoots do. Green grass does. Food, food waste does. These things are nitrogen components. We've got our carbon components, our dead stuff, our nitrogen components, our living stuff. Then we've got high nitrogen components, which is those nitrogen things compressed into something like manure. So if a goat eats lots of green foliage, if a cow eats lots of eats green grass, its poo is like condensed grass, and its body, if it was to die, like if we had a dead chicken, we had a dead animal, it would also be high nitrogen. So we've got manure, we've got dead bodies or meat or animals. I'm going to draw an interesting distinction that starts to explain a little bit about the chemistry of life. Hay and straw Straw. They're different. So hay and straw are different things. Horses eat hay, they don't eat straw. Straw is used for horses' bedding, not hay. Hay is, um, hay's what burns. Hay's what gets hot in those farmers' barns, the stories that we heard. Not straw. Straw doesn't do that. You make a house out of straw bales, you don't make them out of hay bales. So At different times in the year, at different life cycles, different things will be different amounts of nitrogen and carbon, which is the deciding factor of our materials. And at those different life cycles, we have to determine if something's high nitrogen or high carbon. Animals. We also have high nitrogen plants, so leguminous plants. Nitrogen-fixing plants have a lot of nitrogen in their body, more than the average plant, and we can use them as high nitrogen materials. Yeah, so there are plants that are high nitrogen. Yeah, so you get the foliage and the seeds of leguminous plants, they are high nitrogen as a product. So you can make a vegan compost, you don't need animal products to make a compost. So what's that, comfrey? Compost is a mineral accumulator, not necessarily high in nitrogen, but like if I got a cover crop, if I grew cowpea, or I grew vetch, like we're doing up at mine at the moment, and I came in and harvested all that and bagged it and then put it in the compost, it would be the equivalent for me putting in mineral. So we can grow foliage and seeds That's the bigger amount kind of thing, is it? No, no, it's not even the— it's just the quality of the plant. Yeah, quality. Foliage and seeds. And that's us. That's more or less like— there's always going to be other bits of things here and there that you find and figure out as you get into different scenarios. But like, even different parts of the same plant, you know, you know, you can disassemble a plant into a compost pile using the different parts of it at different ratios. So like, you could use the wood of a leguminous tree and the seeds and the leaves of the leguminous tree and assemble a compost pile using all those things. You could just do nitrogen material and make a balanced compost pile. You wouldn't need to add in these other aspects, but you would need these missing out on a diversity of minerals. Yeah, and you would make a really boring pile. Like, you could just make a compost out of lawn clippings, but what a lame-ass compost pile. We're carbon-based by forms, like you said, and all these things that were alive are carbon-based. So they— all of them have more carbon in them than nitrogen, except for urine. The only thing it doesn't have more carbon in it than nitrogen, equal, 50/50. So, when I write the ratio, and the ratio is going to look like, say, let's take an example of straw as a carbon material. Straw is going to be 60 to 40. 1. So 1 nitrogen to 60 carbon. If I get, um, cow manure, I'm going to have something like 18. If I get fish, like this dead fish, I'm going to have something like 8 or 6. No, I think 6. 6, 1. So that's 6 parts carbon, more carbon than nitrogen. But because it's for every 6 parts of carbon there's 1 nitrogen, that makes it high in nitrogen. So is it kind of like a guide as to how much you should put in of that product? Yes, so what we're aiming for is between 25 to 30. Really? That's the balance? Yeah. 1, which is most of this stuff. Most of that stuff lands in that category. Like, grass clippings would be like, um, I think like 30 to 1. And then most food waste in bed would probably just be on the slightly, um, higher area in nitrogen, be like 23 or 22, like around that side. And then you start getting into the poop realm, which is like, that's probably the least nitrogenous poop. Horse poop a little bit higher in nitrogen, I think 16. Um, goat poop I think is 14. Chicken poop is like 8— no, pigeon poop is 8, and I think chicken poop is like 12. Um, small, small animal poop, like bird poop, really high nitrogen. That's why the guano, the bat guano, was a big deal. That's why it was really important. Um, and it's because of the nitrogen ratio. Like, there's all these other minerals and stuff that get in the evolve when you start using different animals, poop from different animals, different plants, those sorts of things, because they accumulate different minerals, and that's why the diversity is really important. I use different, um, different things, different poos, but the process of it breaking down and turning into usable compost is very specifically to do with carbon and nitrogen. If we don't have this balance, all sorts of issues stuff for rice. Don't let this burden your mind. This is just a way to understand, just understand it through math. You will never ever ever use this unless you get into professional composting. It will never be relevant to you. If you start doing professional composting, it will be relevant, um, but you'll be sending them to a lab anyway. So with all that, now we need to assemble the compost. The compost needs to reach 1.2 meters to 1.5. That's about 1.5, that's about 1.2, so that's 4 foot to 5 foot. That's the range that we're looking for, for you Americans. So the way we're going to figure it out is we're just going to get carbon, nitrogen, and high nitrogen products, and we're just going to group them together in a ratio of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Um, yeah, so our pile of What we're going to do, we're going to go 1/3 crab carbon.

I've been teaching permaculture for 6 years now. It's been a life-changing experience and a great pleasure to be able to pour into other people what I've learned. I remember when I first saw this YouTube video of this crazy Australian turning the desert green. Not only was I hooked from that video, but there was purpose that was planted in me. I'm from a coal miner's town in McDowell County, West Virginia, so I was surrounded by a landscape that looked like it couldn't be used again. And I always wondered why I lived here. I love the people, I love the small town feel, but as a young person, like many, I was looking for purpose. What permaculture did for me was it planted purpose. Not only could I really fall in love with my hometown, but I could be influential in putting it back together. Now we're hosting our first in-person PDC. It's a permaculture design course. This course will teach you how to implement permaculture systems and philosophy on small-scale spaces to very large spaces. What makes this course different from all the others that you can take? We focus on reclamation. We focus on harsh landscape. I've been a part of designing, reclaiming, and implementing systems on, on thousands of acres of strip mine land in Appalachia. I know a thing or two. Being a part of our first cohort is a special opportunity. You want to learn how to design, you want to learn how to consult, if you want to learn how to reclaim— learning these reclamation skills, I guarantee this investment that you're going to make in this course, it's going to change your life. It's going to bring back a return 20, 30, 100-fold of what you can accomplish. I am honored to be joined by many friends that will help teach this course, including some that you know from the homesteading community, as well as Geoff Lawton and Sam Parker-Davies having a special Zoom session all the way from Australia. So what are you waiting for? Sign up! Spaces are limited!