August 2011. In Praise of “Buglets” and all they do for your garden as compost.

Every month we start wondering what the next gardening topic should be. This month’s topic came to Leon from a friend who asked why his neighbor’s compost pile smelled so awful. With the wind blowing from that direction, sitting outside was a miserable experience. We, and a friend who retired from teaching soil microbiology, pondered this and came up with a simple answer: if the compost smells bad it isn’t being managed correctly. (Notice that we didn’t try to suggest how Leon’s friend should get the neighbor to change his composting ways.)

So, simply put, composting is the decomposition of organic material. The details are much less simple and would be too long and boring for a good article. Bear with us while we try to compromise somewhere in the middle with a few practical ideas that are almost accurate. First we should say that composting has two goals: to reduce the volume of organic matter quickly, or to produce a sort of, pretty good, fertilizer for your garden.

Cattle feeding lots are designed to fatten up skinny critters into plump, contented cattle that will produce nicely marbled steaks and hamburgers. This requires a lot of high protein feed and results in great piles of nitrogen-rich manure that must be disposed of. We aren’t going to discuss the techniques except to say that they use large bulldozers to keep turning over the material to let it have plenty of oxygen. That stuff smells awful and this technique wastes a lot of the fertilizer content, but it reduces the bulk rapidly.

The Burden Research Center has a composting project, working with the city, to get rid of the piles of tree branches and trunks that were left over by the last hurricane. In that project they simply chop up the wood into small wood chips and pile it up until it decomposes. The compost, or almost compost, is spread as a mulch around the collection of beautiful camellia bushes that they have.

Moving on to your backyard, you do have bulky organic material, such as grass clippings, leaves, stalks of vegetable plants, and a few rotten veggies. Your goal is to reduce the bulk but to keep most of the fertilizer content—and not to disturb your neighbors. Now we will get just a little boring. All of this material is decomposed by various kinds of “buglets”—our generic term meaning mostly bacteria, some fungi, and various other little critters. Broadly these buglets come in two forms: aerobic and anaerobic. Obviously, this means that some need oxygen and others can get by with very little. The well-composted end product is exactly the same, regardless of the oxygen, because good compost is almost entirely the dead remains of buglets which have a fertilizer content of 1.8% nitrogen, plus a little bit of other plant nutrients. Because the stuff came from plants, the remains are essential or maybe-essential nutrients.

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