Compost fletcher sims

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Be the first to start one ». About Charles Walters. Written in English — pages. Fletcher Sims' compost , Acres U. Not in Library. Libraries near you: WorldCat. People Fletcher Sims. Edition Notes Includes index. Other Titles Compost. Classifications Dewey Decimal Class S54 The Physical Object Pagination xxiv, p. Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Lists containing this Book. Loading Related Books. The well-known soil microbiologist, Dr. Elaine Ingham, has been arguing this for years, and has set up laboratories in a number of countries for testing the levels and diversity of micro-organisms in soils and composts.

And since truly good compost is such a rarity she has popularized the concept of compost tea brewing, which—when done successfully—can brew high populations of diverse soil microbes to be applied in liquid form repeatedly throughout a crop cycle for a fraction of the cost of applying mediocre composts at high enough rates to assure the numbers and diversity for sufficient release of a full array of nutrients.

Time after time it has been shown that repeated applications of well-brewed compost teas can shift the availability of nutrients in soils as long as these nutrients were present in the total test—or in the case of nitrogen if the right mix of nutrients is present for nitrogen fixation and microbial release. Aside from equipment design and microbial food source issues, the difficulty usually is finding a reliably robust and diverse starter culture for successful compost tea brewing.

Essentially one must start with a good compost culture. Although organic farmers often think of composts as NPK inputs, composts should really be thought of as soil micro-organism boosters. Unfortunately, most composts are rather mediocre at doing this, although there are good ones which often enough are biodynamic. Is it just due to the biodynamic preparations?

Biodynamic preparations may help considerably, but I believe the real reason is that biodynamic growers have a greater tendency to understand that lime and silica stand at the poles of the mineral kingdom while clay mediates between the two.

Remember, all the most successful compost makers—whether biodynamic or not—use some form of clay to make compost. Otherwise lime and silica do not have enough middle ground where interaction between these two polarities can occur. This seriously limits both the mineral and the microbial activity of the compost pile and tends to ensure the compost goes off toward one or the other extreme. As far as plants are concerned silicon is the mineral basis for cell walls and connective tissues.

Thus silicon provides containment and transport for all sap nutrients and protoplasm. In other words boron provides sap pressure and silicon provides the transport and containment system. Now we can we consider calcium, which American farm guru Gary Zimmer calls the trucker of all minerals. Calcium, assisted by molybdenum, is the basis of nitrogen fixation and amino acid chemistry. Nitrogen, allied with calcium in the form of amino acids, reacts with every other nutrient element, the most important being magnesium, which is the basis for chlorophyll and photosynthesis.

Chlorophyll traps energy and shunts it via phosphorous into carbon structures, which go where potassium, the main electrolyte, carries them. If, in making compost, we focus on N, P and K we leave out the beginning of this sequence. If we refuse to dilute the NPK content of our compost by adding clay we will make poverty compost that never gets its biochemistry rolling with B, Si and Ca. Thus the micro-organism content will not be up to the task of eating into the soil and fixing nitrogen—which tends to escape during the composting process.

This breeds high populations of the micro-organisms that eat soil. By putting clay—or a rock powder that makes a good clay—in our compost we can breed soil eating microbes in abundance.

Fletcher Sims reckons that 2 to 3 tons per acre 5 to 7. Contrast this with 10 to 20 tons per acre 25 to 50 tonnes per hectare of mediocre compost being barely adequate—a five to one difference in application rates. But understanding the importance of clay as the appropriate medium for culturing the micro-organisms most needed in turning soil into plant food can take a little more understanding than currently prevails—since this is non-existent in the NPK school of agriculture.