Compost

Farmers love this stuff.
Everyone should love this stuff. Mix it with your house plants, load it into your garden, spread it on your lawns...better yet turn that lawn into a garden and add compost.

I got a load of compost delivered today from Toad Hollow Farm, which is right down the road from my farm site. It is dark, rich, and moist...and has a great smell to it. Compost not only adds organic matter and nutrients to a soil, but it can break up clay soils and improve water holding properties to sandy soil by improving a soil's tilth. It also feeds the microorganisms that live in our soil and without them the soil would be dead.

I will be mixing the compost into the beds this week one wheel barrel at a time. I would have preferred to spread it before tilling, but I needed to till when the ground was dry enough after a rain but not hardened from too dry weather. I had a pretty small window when I thought the conditions would be right, and I did not have time to get the compost.

I hope to be able to generate enough compost on my farm one day, that I will not have to rely on off site fertility. It is important to close the circle of nutrient transfer. While I know there are some things that the soil and farm will need that it cannot produce, composted manure or composted garden/food waste is one way of returning nutrients to the very soil they came from.