Animal manures can also be added to the composting material, but unless the urine as well as the faeces is present, the nitrogen content is much lower. Droppings from battery-kept, pellet-fed hens are not worth as much as deep litter from free-range birds, where straw or some similar material absorbs their urine as well. Animal manures are only as rich as the diet and general health of the animal concerned.
I like blood and bone as a companion for compost. Dug through the loosened soil when originally preparing it for perennial planting, it provides what would have been found in untampered with Nature, a slowly releasable reservoir of bone, hair and decomposed “innards” and tissue, deep in the soil. It is rich in phosphorus, too, as well as having concentrated nitrogen and other trace elements.
Composting eliminates the so-called “waste” accumulated in the kitchen from vegetable and fruit peelings, eggshells, and remnants from herbal tea brews; it uses all soft garden waste, leaves from deciduous trees, spent annuals, and herb tops of all kinds. If you dry your own herbs, don’t keep them on the shelf longer than a twelvemonth. Tip them through your compost, and put up another batch.
When you see the good results obtained by using organic compost, you will wonder why man has spent so much time and effort trying to improve on Nature’s existing completeness. At one English garden showplace, Arkley Manor, an area of 7 1\2 acres has for the past ten years been neither forked, spaded or dug, but organic compost has been spread over the surface of the soil at regular intervals. The results should convince even the most hardened champion of “Super” and constant back-breaking work with surface cultivation.
Natural dolomite, organic vegetable material, animal bone and hair, and the added powers of herbs, will give your garden or vegetable patch the life and vitality Nature intended.
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