Of Corn and Compost
Bed Transformation
In an hour and a half this morning, a 20’ long by 3’ wide bed of spired, aging corn stalks morphed into a bed of succulent, young greenery in the form of endive and Chinese cabbage transplants.
Before beginning this job I harvested what ears were still ripe on the stalks. The yield from this first corn planting was small, both in quantity and size of ears. Old fashioned Golden Bantam, as told by its name, normally yields small ears — but not usually as small as the 3 to 5 inch long ears I harvested. 
Planting in “hills” (clusters of 4 plants) usually provides for adequate pollination, but poor weather at a critical developmental stage might have thrown pollination awry.
At any rate, with ears harvested, I lopped each stalk in half with my Hori-Hori knife, then dug straight down right around the base of each hill to sever the main roots so I could jerk the cluster of stalks up out of the ground. I also cleared away from the bed any weeds, and then carted everything over to a compost pile.
For the return trip from the compost pile, I loaded the cart with finished compost from another pile. An inch depth of compost slathered on top of the old corn bed had it ready to receive the endive and Chinese cabbage transplants I had waiting in the wings. The 40 transplants had grown up during the month of July in a seedling flat and were just ready to outgrow their individual cells. Each went into a quickly made hole jabbed into the ground, the holes 15” apart in each of the two rows running down that bed.
The refurbished bed will provide good eating beginning in early October and, with some covering for protection, on into December.
Compost Discoveries
Besides merely compost, the compost pile often yields some interesting and forgotten objects. (Some annoying things as well, such as those fruit labels glued to the skin of almost every piece of commercial fruit.)
For years now I’ve had trouble bringing myself to tossing anything compostable into the garbage for eventual burial in a landfill. It seems so wasteful of materials and disrespectful to the soil to use it as a dumping ground for cast-offs. Soil is a limited resource so eventually there will be no more acreage to bury trash.
Much of my clothing is cotton, wool, or leather — natural products that would eventually decompose to enrich a finished compost. So I sometimes compost such garments, forgetting that I did so until an uncomposted piece of the garment makes an appearance as I turn the compost pile or shovel out the finished material.
Partially composted Levi jeans
The distinctive zipper and fly snap from my Levi jeans, for example. After three compost cycles, except for the zipper and fly snap, those jeans are surprisingly intact but look more like sheer polyester slacks than Levi’s jeans. In contrast, my daughter’s non-Levi jeans were threadbare after merely one cycle.
Composted (almost) non-Levi jeans
I came upon a not immediately identifiable object today as I shoveled out finished compost for spreading on the endive/Chinese cabbage bed. It was about a half inch thick, almost flat except for some bends, and spongy. What could it be? Aha! The cushioning from my sheep skin booties. Most of the leather portion had decomposed.
My guess is that the bootie was transformed as far as it would go in the near future so I’m not returning it to the new pile for another cycle.
Worms in My Ears (Some of Them)
My ears, now, are relatively large. Corn ears, that is.
Since writing about the diminutive ears from my first planting of sweet corn, I’ve harvested a few ears from my second planting. That second planting went in 2 weeks after the first planting but is ripening close on its heels. Warmer weather earlier in the season compressed those ripening dates.
Just about every ear in this second batch of ears is large (for the variety Golden Bantam) and well filled with kernels. I occasionally find a corn earworm feasting on some of the kernels at the tip of the ear. 
That’s the nice thing about home-grown sweet corn — it’s not nice having the earworms but it is nice not being bothered by them. Corn farmers don’t have that luxury. I just break off the tip with the worm and enjoy the rest of the ear.
The earworms got inside the husks by eating their way down the corn silks. Spraying the corn with the benign biological pesticide Bacillus thurengiensis (sold under such friendlier names as Thuricide), or cutting off or squirting some of mineral oil into the silks right after pollination is complete (3 to 7 days after silks appear) could control this pest. But why bother for an occasional pest that is so easily ignored or removed?
Waste Not, Want Not
Two Reasons to Compost
With weeding, harvesting, watering, swimming, kayaking, golf, and biking to do this time of year (not that I do all these), why would anyone spend time making compost? For one or both of two reasons, that’s why.
First, as an environmentally sound way to get rid of so-called “garbage.” Landfilled, the valuable nutrients and organic matter locked up within old broccoli stalks, rotten tomatoes, even old cotton clothes are taken out of our planet’s nutrient cycle almost forever. Landfilling, to me, also disrespects the soil, that thin skin over the Earth that supports much of life here.
Once Levi’s, now almost compost
This leads to the second reason to make compost now. I require plenty of compost for my gardens so need to scrounge every bit of waste organic material as it becomes available. Even go out of my way to haul it in. Or create it.
Sustainabilityness
Having oodles of compost goes a long way to make a garden or farm truly sustainable. Even though relatively low in nitrogen, as far as plant needs, compost can do away with the need for any other fertilizer.
For years, just to make sure that my compost-fed plants were not going hungry — for nitrogen — I spread soybean meal on the ground just before laying down the compost.
Soybean meal provides an organic form of nitrogen but is hardly a sustainable way to nourish the soil. That meal comes from soybeans grown on fields who-knows-where, fed with fertilizers needing fossil fuels for their production, tilled by fossil-fueled tractors, processed in fossil-fueled factories, and transported by fossil-fueled trucks. The same could more or less be said for any fertilizer, organic or otherwise, except compost.
Years ago I made a computation, based on an estimate of how fast nitrogen is released from compost and average nitrogen needs of vegetable plants, of the amount of compost needed to provide all the nourishment a garden would need for one growing season. The amount is about one cubic yard per 300 square feet or, (if you’re a farmer, you should be sitting down), about 70 tons per acre. But these figures are for planted areas, so compost need be applied to only the planting beds.
Also, compost has a residual effect, with only a portion of nutrients being released each year. Yearly additions build soil fertility and nourish a healthy soil life.
On my farmden, a one inch depth of compost provides all the nourishment needed for intensively grown, healthy and healthful crops for an entire season. I just lay the stuff on top of the ground to get the most out of it nutritionally and biologically, and provide a weed-quelling mulch and seedbed.
Self-Analysis
Is making compost truly a way to sustainably nourish the ground? As with so much of agriculture, a balance is sought. Let’s check what goes into my compost piles.
The usual, of course: carrot peelings watermelon rinds, egg shells, old bread, and other fungal and bacterial treats from the kitchen compost bucket; cabbage stalks, old lettuce, and weeds (all even if pest-ridden, diseased, or otherwise) from the garden. I also throw in old cotton or wool clothing, even leather shoes and gloves. Because of noncompostable components such as elastic bands and synthetic cloth parts, they all yield very interesting products staring out in the finished compost.
Occasional, light sprinklings of soil add bulk to the finished mix. Occasional, sprinklings of ground limestone keep planted ground, final stop for the compost, in the right pH range.
Two feedstuffs make up the bulk of the compost. One is horse manure, the most questionably sustainable part of the whole mix. The horse manure is an abundant waste product of a nearby horse farm.
Fashionable
The other feedstuff is hay that I scythe from a one acre field here on the farmden. In mowing hay and composting it, then using the compost to feed my gardens, I am, it seems, “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” But given time, soils regenerate nutrients on their own so I try to rotate which portions of the field I scythe.
Not for You? Then . . .
Making compost isn’t, for reasons of time, space, and inclination, for everyone. In some regions, you can deposit your compostables at a recycling center for composting. And an increasing number of companies are popping up that, for a fee, will pick up your organic waste for recycling. Check web listings for town and county offerings.
I like to make compost, finding it interesting, useful, even enjoyable. And my plants love it.
Midsummer “To Do” List
Maintenance, Pruning
For many gardeners, spring is the critical gardening season, what with preparing the soil, starting seedlings, setting out transplants, pruning, watching and staying prepared for late frosts and . . . In my view, right now is just as crucial, and for an equal number of reasons.
True, a 90 degree day with high humidity doesn’t exactly pull you out to the garden to putter around in blazing sunlight. But early mornings around here are mostly cool, calm, and beautiful.
Much of what needs to be done is regular maintenance. Pruning tomatoes, for instance.
I train my tomato plants to stakes and single stems, which allows me to set plants only 18 inches apart and harvest lots of fruit by utilizing the third dimension: up. At least weekly, I snap (if early morning, when shoots are turgid) or prune (later in the day, when shoots are flaccid) off all suckers and tie the main stems to their metal conduit supports.
Espalier is the training of trees to two dimensions whereby the tracery of the stems is as decorative a plant feature as are the leaves, flowers, and/or fruits. To maintain that tracery of branches, my espaliered Asian pears need frequent pruning. 
I lop wayward shoots either right back to their origin or, in hope of their forming “spurs” on which will hang future fruits, back to the whorl of leaves near the bases of the shoots.
The response of the pear trees depends on the weather, which is unpredictable. Dry sunny weather is conducive to spurs. Rainy weather coaxes, instead, new shoots pop out right where I cut back old shoots. I think.
Maintenance, Water
Whether or not the weather is dry, rampant growing plants quickly suck the soil dry. So I also keep attentive to watering this time of year. The vegetable garden and potted plants are the neediest in this respect; fortunately, they demand little from me to do because a timer turns its drip irrigation system on and off automatically. All I have to do is to periodically check to make sure drippers are all dripping. 
Newly planted trees and shrubs are another story. This first year, while their roots are spreading out in the ground, is critical for them. I make a list of these plants each spring and then water them weekly by hand all summer long unless the skies do the job for me (as measured in a rain gauge because what seems like a heavy rainfall often has dropped surprisingly little water).
A one-inch depth of water is needed to wet a soil about a half a foot deep. I provide this with 3/4 gallon of water per estimated square foot spread of the roots.
Fall preps
Sowing seeds and setting out transplants isn’t only a spring gardening activity. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, and other summer vegetables peter out during the shorter, cooler days of late summer and early fall. But there are plenty of vegetables that enjoy growing conditions that time of year.
Some of the fall vegetables need to be sown now to be large enough to mature in fall. No need to provide space for them by digging out tomatoes, peppers, or any other summer vegetables. I sow endive, kale, lettuce, Chinese cabbage, and, if I could stomach it, cauliflower seeds in midsummer in seed flats. Once they sprout I “prick them out” into individual cells of automatic watering GrowEase trays for later transplanting. 
Not only vegetables get this treatment. Buy a packet of seeds of delphinium, pinks, or some other perennial, sow them now, overwinter them in a cool place with good light, or a cold (but not too cold) place with very little light, and the result is enough plants for a sweeping field of blue or pink next year. Sown in the spring, they won’t bloom until their second season even though they’ll need lots of space that whole first season.
Cuttings are another way to propagate plants this time of year. Early this morning, when cells were plump with water, I made cuttings of hardy kiwifruit and begonia.
And, Yes, Weeds
Weeds can make all this pruning, watering, and seeding for naught. Clear ground is needed in which to eventually set my cabbage and kale transplants. Weeds stealing water and nutrients, even sunlight, won’t let plants grow at their best. They’ll also promote disease by preventing free flow of air; fungi fester under damp conditions. 
Every time I look at a weed, I’m thinking how it’s either sending roots further afield underground or is flowering (or will flower) to scatter its seed. Much of gardening isn’t about the here and now, so I also weed now for less weeds next season. It’s worth it.
