Master gardener in training: the finer points of composting

In the UC Extension Master Gardener class I'm taking, we’ve heard that 50% of landfill-bound garbage is organic and that 70% of that can be composted at home. The payoffs can be huge, not only for the plants but for our water bills. With compost in the soil (and mulch on top), I should be able to cut my watering by one-half to two-thirds. If there’s one message that is repeated by speakers in class or at landscapes we visit, it’s that composting and mulching are the essentials of successful gardening.

Next week, I'll talk about mulching. This is composting week. I have my fertilizer factory going in my worm bin, but the first harvest is still more than a month away. In the meantime, my seedlings are getting impatient to get into the ground, so it’s time to check my composts: a tumbler, a Smith & Hawken half-cubic-yard BioStack box and a ragged heap of branches, vines and sticks that haven’t been cut up enough to go into either container.

Composting may be referenced on 4,500-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablets and may hardly seem like a new idea to many gardeners, but there are tricks to doing it right. You'll find at least a dozen different techniques, from cold “lasagna” sheet mulching to hot bin composting.

At its most basic, composting is the reduction of complex things into simpler components that then can be deployed as soil nutrition. Lots of life contributes to this process — worms, beetles, ants, cutworms and, overwhelmingly, microbes.

There are four phases of composting, the most dramatic being the third. That's when the temperature rises above 104 degrees and the thermophiles, the heat-loving microbes, take over. Some think thermophiles were the first forms of life on Earth 4 billion years ago, inhabiting hot, dark, oxygen-free places such as hot springs and volcanoes. When I pay attention to my composts --  especially the bin -- I can get my very own miniature Eyjafjallajokull going in a few hours, depending on what I add. (That hasn’t stopped the LAPD helicopters from circling overhead, however.)

Compost can be used not only as an additive to loosen up compacted soil but as a mulch or a potting soil mix (combined with 50% worm castings and 20% vermiculite). Partially decomposed compost added to your soil, however, will suck away any nitrogen before it can get to your plants. To prevent that from happening, I was taught these guidelines:

Material put into your compost bin or pile should be smaller than an inch. You will hear many compost recipes, but the simplest is one cubic yard of material that is 50% green and 50% brown. Watch your pile and adjust accordingly. If it’s too wet, add brown. If it's too dry, add green and water. Be careful not to let the pile get soggy. It should be the moisture of a wrung sponge. It’s ready to use when it resembles soil, which can be anywhere from two months to never, depending on how attentive you are. The cheapest ingredient you can add is heat from the sun.

What constitutes green material? Think any fruit or vegetable scraps, grass clippings, horse manure, crushed eggshells.

Brown material includes dry leaves, non-glossy junk mail, newspapers, cardboard and wood chips.

I have been warned repeatedly against adding meats, bones, grease, dairy, pet food, pet feces, litter, chemically-treated plants, charcoal ash and melon seeds. Some compost purists avoid foliage from nightshade plants, including tomatoes and potatoes.

-- Jeff Spurrier

Photo credit: Ann Summa

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Master gardener in training: The joy of recycled tools

I hadn’t realized how much my inner pack rat would love gardening. I now throw nothing away without considering its possible second life in the garden. Cardboard tubes get saved to build pest barriers around tiny seedlings; plastic bottles, milk cartons, yogurt containers -- even coconut shells and grapefruit rinds -- are reborn as seedling bassinets (after being washed with soap and water and rinsed in one part bleach to nine parts water). Especially prized are pint-sized plastic mesh baskets, the kind strawberries come in.

The strawberry baskets come in handy for the cucurbits (melons, cucumber, squash) that don’t transplant well. I’m desperate to grow some Charentais cantaloupe, a sweet, small muskmelon from western France that is too thin-skinned to travel easily to supermarket shelves. Amy Goldman, author of the 2002 award-winning "Melons for the Passionate Grower," calls them "refined."

To prevent transplant shock I'm going to sprout my Charentais in a container I can plant in the ground. I first put a couple of layers of paper towels into the basket, filled it with a light blend of potting soil and seeding mix, poked the fat end of the seed down and topped it with ¼ inch of seeding mix. Once it's warm enough, I'll plant the seedling -- still swaddled in its basket -- directly in the mound it will live in. I've been assured that its roots will grow through the plastic mesh.

Assuming I’m successful -- not a given -- and I get some Charentais, I’ll prop the little melons up on cat food cans with both ends removed. This will keep the fruit off the soil (and away from gnawing pests) and lift it into the heat of the sun, resulting in a sweeter harvest, sooner in the season.

These are just a few of the ideas I've gotten from a 50-item, nine-page list of recycled tools compiled by Yvonne Savio, the program manager of the Master Gardener class.

More after the jump...

Master Gardener in training: Worms are an easy-to-love fertilizer

(This is one in a series of posts in which Jeff Spurrier shares his experience from a Master Gardener class.)

There’s something elegantly basic about a worm -- no lungs, no ears, no eyes, no brain, simply a feeding tube that eats garbage and excretes high-priced fertilizer in between non-stop mating.

I’ve had my worms about 10 days and even though I know they can’t hear, when I go out with their finely diced honeydew rind, I croon to them softly, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out …”

This week’s worm theme began with Curtis Thompson from the L.A. County Department of Public Works Smart Gardening Program, who talked to the Master Gardener class about worms and composting.

I didn’t need to be convinced about the joys of composting; being an essentially lazy gardener, I welcome any excuse not to haul the yard’s detritus down 65 steps to the street where I’ll never find an empty green bin anyway. Instead I just heap it all up in a pile -- the slightly inelegant name for what some neighbors might call a fire hazard -- and pay attention to my mix of roughly 50-50 green/brown, keeping it moist but not soggy, and, like a grudge, stirring every day or two. A well-maintained pile can produce finished compost in six weeks, Thompson said. A pile that's dry or matted could take a year or more.

Composting with worms, on the other hand, requires a bit more attention but has a more dramatic payoff. There are more than 2,700 types of earthworms, according to the Worm Digest, but African red wigglers (a.k.a. tiger worms, garlic worms, manure worms, or brandling worms) are most commonly used in bins. A starter population of a half-pound (200 to 300 worms, or about two handfuls) goes through about five pounds of well-chopped kitchen scraps a week, a process that can be speeded up by first freezing the food (thus breaking up cellular walls). They can be fed daily or less often, and the finer the dice, the more the worms eat and the faster they reproduce. Avoid wheat, citrus, garlic, bones, dairy and oil. They’re fine with onions, shredded newspaper, coffee grounds (and paper filters), tea bags (remove the staple).  They love melon, including the rind.

In about two months the worms will have produced a harvestable amount of vermicast, a manure that looks like soil but has five times as much nitrogen and seven times as much phosphorus as is typically found in topsoil. When using, mix one part castings to two parts compost (or potting soil). If it’s for orchids or tropicals, reverse the formula.

To harvest the castings after a few months, gradually train your worms to migrate to one end of the bin or the other by alternating your weekly feeding sites and scooping up the residue from beneath past food zones.

Worm tea (which sells for $25 a gallon online) is either collected as liquid runoff from a bin or made from soaking castings in water. Strain and dilute the straight tea from a bin with water, 6 to 1. It’s safe for use as a spray on flowers, trees, shrubs and veggies. Besides giving plants an easily digested shot of nutrients, it also repels mites, whitefly and aphids, conditions the soil and works as a fungicide. Thompson says worm tea can also help reinvigorate oak trees with fungus or pines with beetle infestation.

The two major pests you have to worry about are ants and soldier flies, both of which can decimate a worm bin. With no lungs, worms breathe through their skin and thus are susceptible to suffocation from too much water or too much heat. Like many of us they like it cool, dark and moist. And ant-free.

The Smart Gardening program holds workshops on composting and vermiculture where you can get one of their two-tier stackable bins, above (with a spigot for tea) along with your starter population ($65). While three inches of  torn-up newspaper can be used for bedding, coconut coir (available at nurseries in a brick, at left, or at the workshops) is preferable since it’s less likely to get soggy or dry out. You could also build a bin from just about anything that has at least 10 drainage holes and a fly-proof cover and can be kept at a temperature of 60 to 80 degrees F. (Metal bins, for this reason, are a bad idea.) Never put water in a worm bin. If you need to moisten the bedding, use a spray bottle.

Worms don’t like to be handled, but every once in a while I sink my hands into the bedding and let them slither blindly over my fingers. Try doing that with a compost pile.

-- Jeff Spurrier

Photo: Ann Summa

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Master gardener in training: How to plant seedlings

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Master gardener in training: How to plant seedlings

It was the opening class of UC Cooperative Extension's Master Gardener program, and as most of my fellow students leafed through the 700-page textbook excitedly, I eyed mine with trepidation. I’ve never been a good student and rarely an adequate gardener. Though I've written extensively about gardening, in my hands a watering can is a weapon of torture and fertilizer a form of sub-soil napalm.

Hundreds of people apply to the local Master Gardener program every year, and enrollment is limited to about 50. Through a series of posts in the weeks to come, however, I'll relay some of what I'm learning in class.

One of the first lessons: seedlings. Growing plants from seed is a mystery of life I had yet to unravel. I have sown yet never reaped in the past, getting more fruit from volunteer tomatoes than any pricey seed I’ve started in a tray. My seeds sprout fine, but once they go into their permanent bed they languish, victims of my rough midwifery skills.

This year will be different now that I’ve learned some of the niceties of transplanting seedlings: Handle the plants gingerly by the leaves rather than by the tender stalks. Free the tap root of extraneous dirt clumps by gently swishing them in water. With the exception of tomatoes, plants should go into the ground at the same depth as they were being raised in a tray or pot. And the hole? It should be filled with a blend of its former soil and new potting mix.

To practice I have a 2-inch clump of asparagus seedlings -- about 10 reedy spouts, each needing to be separated and placed in its own 4-inch pot. There they will spend the summer, awaiting final transplanting into the ground in the fall. For now, I just have to separate, wash and repot. The wire-thin seedlings are tougher than they appear, each capable of developing an 18-inch root ball that will produce spears for more than a decade as long as I don’t over-harvest and I continue to provide manure, water and mulch. My seedling will hit its stride in about five years, and I can’t even think of harvesting it until the next presidential election. This isn’t a food source so much as a relationship.

I belong to Seed Savers Exchange, the Iowa-based nonprofit repository for heirlooms and the largest non-governmental seed bank in the country. But before I could place my order, Craig Ruggless from seed seller Garden Edibles stopped by the Master Gardener class. Working from a 10,000-square-foot organic garden in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, Garden Edibles has a nice selection of Italian regional vegetable varieties -- 21 types of tomatoes, 36 types of lettuce and chicory, 26 types of beans and more. Although not as comprehensive as Seed Savers, which has 193 pages of tomatoes (and about 25 choices per page), the attraction to Garden Edibles is focus. Ruggless has the Franchi line of Italian veggies and flowers, and he is the sole U.S. importer for Larosa Emanuele Sementi, a company in southern Italy known for seeds that deliver a high germination rate, vigorous growth and great-tasting crops.

Next class: worms.

-- Jeff Spurrier

Photo credits: Ann Summa

Follow the series: Get more lessons from the Master Gardener program by becoming a fan of our Facebook page for California gardening.

UC master gardeners to lead classes on edibles at 11 sites across L.A.

Students in the University of California Cooperative Extension's master gardener program work through a 700-page textbook and complete three months of classes to be certified. It's tough to get in, and it's certainly not easy to get through. But now the extension is expanding its reach through something called the victory-garden initiative. The goal: to teach more Angelenos how to grow food at home, at schools or in a community garden.

Beginning later this month and in early April, certified master gardeners -- graduates of the extension course -- will offer four weekends of instruction, advice and hands-on practice at 11 sites around Los Angeles, including downtown, Highland Park, Venice, Canoga Park and Tarzana. Attend all four sessions and you’ll become a UC-certified victory gardener.

Justin McInteer, owner of the Echo Curio gallery in Echo Park and a graduate of the master gardener program last year, will be running the classes behind his spot on Sunset Boulevard. “This is a drastically scaled down but still functional version of what you learn in the master gardening class," said McInteer, pictured here. "It’s information for the individual growing his own garden, taking advantage of the space they already have.”

At the same time, he said, participants will create a neighborhood network using the Echo Curio message board. His classes start April 10. Prior to that, on March 27, fruit-tree specialist and worm-wrangler Lora Hall will be giving a one-day class on how to build your own worm bin. For $20, you’ll see how she turned a battered 1980s plastic suitcase into a home for night crawlers. The cost of the class includes a bag of worms.

And stay tuned: In the weeks to come, I'll be sharing what I learn as I go through the master gardener program myself.

-- Jeff Spurrier

Photo credit: Ann Summa

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