In a world where less than 1% of the planet’s fresh water is available for human consumption, it is curious to notice how people in overdeveloped countries choose to utilize precious water resources.

I often wonder what our grandchildren’s children will think of industrialized cultures; it is hope that inspires me to imagine them laughing. “Can you believe it?” they’ll say, holding their bellies and bursting with amusement at the ridiculousness of their elders. “They used our precious fresh water to flush their SHIT away!”

Over 884 million people globally lack access to safe water supplies – that is approximately one in eight people living on the planet whose water has been contaminated, generally by human excrement. In fact, over 5,000 people die worldwide everyday from drinking or bathing in water containing contaminants. [1] And we in the U.S. use over 5 million gallons daily just flushing away our waste.

From a health and a resource perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more inefficient system than a water flushing toilet. It contaminates water, and wastes our “waste.”

Anyhow, I digress. This blog posting was inspired by the chore of the day at the Permaculture Research Institute.

It was time to empty the composting toilet system, and I eagerly participated, curious to see how human “waste” could be utilized as a resource – quite a feat for our fecophobic world.

Here’s a quick rundown on how the composting toilet works.

The composting toilet system at the farm is simple; a normal looking bathroom, with two normal looking toilets. Just like any toilet, you pull your pants down, and empty your delivery into the hole that is attached to a chamber below.

(In industrialized cultures, that’s where your relationship with your poo ends – instead of taking responsibility for your shit, you simply flip a button and send it downstream, confident that someone else will take care of it, somewhere…).

Once the delivery is executed (whether yellow or brown), you add a scoop or two of sawdust, a carbon-based material that aids the decomposition process and helps balance out the nitrogen so that (smelly) ammonia isn’t released.

And people keep pooing away in to the chamber below, until it’s full. Then it sits for a few weeks, and meanwhile you switch to using the other toilet. If used properly with the right amount of carbon added, it won’t smell and won’t attract flies.

Simple as that.

When we went in yesterday to empty the chamber, my curiosity had mingled with a bit of dread. But I was determined; I had my gloves on and my nose plugged, prepared to feel the morning’s oatmeal churn…

Alas! I was shocked (dare I say thrilled?) to see that in less than four weeks, the excrement of forty people into a chamber had turned into a rich, humus-looking, stinkless mass – unidentifiable as human waste.

Fellow toilet compost removal technician, Dave, agrees

Granted, it had not yet heated up to the process of destroying all of the potentially dangerous pathogens found in human excrement. That requires a heat of 50-55 degrees Celsius for several hours, easy to accomplish in any hot compost pile. Once the humanure has been decontaminated through a composting process, it is essentially a carbon sponge that can act as a substrate to grow beneficial microorganisms for the soil – a valuable resource for any backyard garden.

Though I am generally in favor of decentralized systems, where we can personally observe how our actions impact our local environment, I’m not necessarily saying that everyone must process their own waste on a household scale.

In fact, there are plenty of examples of sane ways to process effluent on a local scale, such as the Ecological Wastewater Treatment Plant in Arcata, California. The facility utilizes the microorganisms on a plant’s roots to break down pollutants in the water.

Or the Living Machine concept developed by John Todd which also filters sewage solids out of water using plants and their associated bacteria.

Marin County (home sweet home!) is even in the process of piloting a very progressive compost toilet program.

These are all potential models for a semi-centralized, but ecologically sound, waste processing system.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty empowering to know that we can safely and effectively process our own waste, conserve our water for more precious uses, and convert “waste” from a problem to a solution.

And to pick up from my last posting… I feel one step closer to my steak dinner now that I know my poo fertilized the soil that grew the grass that Red ate!

Team Humanure: Mission Accomplished!

For more titillating reading on the topic, you can download (for free!) the entire PDF of the Humanure Handbook. A good book to have on hand in the bathroom.

References:

1. http://www.water.org

Related Reading:

• Phosphorus Matters

Here’s a great tip given by a member of the Aquaponics Made Easy Forum on a cheap easy-to-build hot water system using compost.

The original question posted to the forum was "how to heat a fish tank over winter without any extra energy costs?" A hard thing to do. Thermal Mass heating was one answer but a crafty member posted a very interesting solution and swears that it works a treat. We’ve illustrated his simple design. It’s so simple you will think “Ah-ha! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Daryl from Windsor in NSW came up with an innovative solution using two ordinary wheelie bins that are filled with compost and a wound central pipe arrangement to turn cold water hot very quickly. How does it work?

“What I have made is a compost heater, inside a wheelie bin with 20 mm poly pipe coiled around the outside wall of a pipe – about 8 metres in each bin.” he says.

Compost can reach a core temperature of 70 degrees Centigrade. Conventional Hot Water systems are thermostatically set to heat the water to around 65 – 70 degrees centigrade. So at its peak this system will create very hot water for free.

“Then I load the first wheelie bin with grass clippings and horse manure and after two weeks load the second wheelie bin with the same stuff. After four weeks I empty and reload the first bin. You can leave the system running longer but the main heat production is in the first four weeks.” says Daryl.

Sourcing a wheelie bin in the city is quite easy. The main ingredients are Nitrogen and Carbon. Any green leafy material like fresh grass clippings is suitable as a nitrogen source. When mixed with an alternating layer of carbon such as dry leaves, shredded newspapers or cardboard the end result is ignited by micro organisms to create compost.

Make sure the mixture is well watered as a dry mix will not work so well. But harnessing the heat given off in the core of the wheelie bin is where this idea really shines.

The central vertical pipe could also benefit with a number of large size holes drilled into it to assist oxygenation of the compost heap core without turning the heap over as is the case with most conventional compost systems.

Daryl says you can enjoy quite a number of free hot showers before the system will eventually cool down and he advocates a rich grass mixture.

"If the grass is packed in tight it should hit peak temp in about a week and hold for about 3 weeks then start tapering off.

“It’s best if you can have a second bin started and just swap from one to the other. You can use other stuff in the bin like a normal compost heap but because the grass has so much nitrogen in it its start up time is much faster.

“A few years ago I helped build a large compost heap that had about 300 meters of 25mm rural pipe going through it. After 4 weeks this system was providing enough hot water for 35 people to wash up and shower with. I was there for 3 months and we kept adding compost onto the heap and it worked the whole time I was there, eventually you would have to dig out the pipe, use the compost, and start all over again. That’s why I used the wheelie bins”, said Daryl.

The end result is an endless supply of rich garden compost and lots of free hot water!

Download: You’ll see the option to download the 913 megabyte MP4 file at bottom right side of this page.

YouTube: The video can also be watched on YouTube, in four segments, here, here, here and here.

Greening the Desert II (including Part I) – Greening the Middle East
(Duration: 36 mins)
Tips for playing: If it’s slow to load, turn off High Definition (HD) on the player.
If you still have problems, click play (on low or high def) and then after it’s started,
click on pause. The video will then continue to buffer into your computer.
Play once fully loaded.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Kelly Kellogg at this juncture. Kelly donated initial funding that enabled the purchase of the land for the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project site (aka ‘Greening the Desert – the Sequel’). But, upon watching the Greening the Desert Part II video, Kelly was inspired to donate an additional $20,000. These gifts are very encouraging to us as we try to solve problems at source (teach a man to fish…). Others who may feel inspired to donate to help us move this work forward faster can do so here.

A little background on the video follows:

Children in a school playground, Al Jawfa, Jordan Valley

When there’s no soil, no water, no shade, and where the sun beats down on you to the tune of over 50°C (122°F), the word ‘poverty’ begins to take on a whole new meaning. It is distinct and surreal. It’s a land of dust, flies, intense heat and almost complete dependency on supply lines outside of ones control. This is the remains of what was once called the ‘fertile crescent’. It is the result of thousands of years of abuse. It is a glimpse at a world where the environment – whose services provide for all human need – has all but completely abandoned us. This is a glimpse at the world our consumer society is inexorably moving towards, as our exponential-growth culture gorges itself at ever-increasing rates.

The original Greening the Desert video clip has been watched hundreds of thousands of times and has been posted to countless blogs and web pages in the datasphere. Although only five minutes long, it has inspired people around the globe, daring the lucid ones amongst us, those who can see the writing on the wall, to begin to hope and believe in an abundant future – a future where our survival doesn’t have to be based on undermining and depleting the very resources of soil, water, phosphorus, etc. that we depend on. The work profiled in that clip demonstrates that humanity can be a positive element within the biosphere. Man doesn’t have to destroy. Man can repair.

In the clip at top I introduce you today to Greening the Desert II. I shot the footage for this video last month (October 2009) and edited it on location in the Dead Sea Valley in Jordan – the lowest place on earth, at 400 metres below sea level. Much of it was shot in or near the village of Al Jawfa where I stayed, which is effectively a Palestinian refugee camp that has morphed over the decades since 1948 into something resembling a functional small town. It was first shown to delegates of the ninth International Permaculture Conference (IPC9) in Malawi, Africa at the very beginning of November and is now being released for general consumption. The video will take you to the original Greening the Desert site, letting you see its present condition after six years of neglect when funding ran out in 2003. You’ll also be introduced to our new project site – the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project, aka ‘Greening the Desert, the Sequel’ – and see some of the spin-off effects within Jordan from the influence of the original site; promises of much more to come.

The work we’re undertaking in Jordan is in accordance with what we call the ‘Permaculture Master Plan‘, where the project’s future is assured through funding from running educational courses. Project sites thus become self-sufficient, and self-replicating.

Geoff Lawton instructs students in a school yard in Jordan, one that PRI has
just created and begun the implementation of a design for, so its
many children can see, experience and learn permaculture first hand

Through this work we envision thousands of educational demonstration sites worldwide – all inspiring and teaching communities around them how to begin to tackle at root the massive challenges we now face after decades of short-term profit-based thinking has all but ‘consumed’ our planet and dismantled the social constructs that the human race has always depended on for its survival. Through this work we see desertification stopped in its tracks, and reversed. We see this century’s dire water issues getting resolved. We see productive work for millions in bypassing the irrelevant efforts of our ‘leaders’, to instead build a new kind of culture – a culture based on cooperative effort and learning. It’s a culture where its members have regained a sense of their place in creation, where they become land-based stewards of remaining resources; creating a culture where we at last find ultimate satisfaction – promoting and building peace and low-carbon, relocalised, community-based prosperity.

We have many such ‘Master Plan’ projects in various stages of development worldwide, and a steady stream of enquiries from people around the globe wanting to get involved and help widen this cooperative network. Perhaps it’s time you took a look at Permaculture? After all, do you have something more worthwhile to do?

Jordan Valley

Read the first installments here.

Part IV: Re-Inventing the Herbicide Tank – Giving Destructive Equipment New Purpose

Compost tea brewing requires the use of specialist equipment. Especially when you intend to apply tea to hectares of paddocks. In my case, I’ll be making tea using a 1000L brewer supplied by Trust Nature Pty Ltd. The brewer tank is a little large to mount on the keyline plow, so an ‘application’ tank is required. This is a smaller tank, fitted with a pump and plumbing necessary for application during keyline plowing.

I’ve opted to retrofit an old herbicide spraying unit, giving it a new life in the plant friendly business. As this tank has been previously used with poison, it is necessary to sterilise it. Otherwise our precious microbes will not survive their journey into the soil. To accomplish this, we dilute a 50% hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) mix – 5% solution to water. That is, 5 lts of H2O2 solution (50% mix) with 100 lts water. Running through the pump and tank, and then flush with clean water. The unit is now ready for retrofitting.

A few specifications to begin. The tank is a 200L herbicide stray unit, fitted with a small ‘Shurflo’ 12 volt diaphragm pump that is capable of discharging (with open flow) 5.3 lts of tea per minute under 60psi. The existing tubing I have chosen to completely replace, plumbing an entirely new set of lines optimised for the plow. While I’m still in the construction stage, it’s currently impossible to tell whether this pump will have the necessary capacity. Only testing will determine this. It’s a standard kind, and upgrading the pump doesn’t present any issues.

Since the original unit was fitted with only a single hose with trigger gun applicator, I’ve had to reconsider the tubing completely. With seperate tube lines running to each shank and a ground spray line, it is necessary to fit each line with its own flow control tap. This will be necessary to adjust the pressure between secondary lines off the main flow line. Otherwise some tube lines would receive greater flow than others.

For this flow control system, I’ve settled on inexpensive garden variety irrigation valves (available from any hardware store), plumbed on 12mm plastic tubing. One for each keyline plow shank, and another for an above ground foliar spray line. I’ve also plumbed a tank return line for master flow control (should I have too much pressure).

The next stage will involve running a sequence of tests to ‘calibrate’ the flow valves. Once set, they will distribute the correct dose of compost tea for each shank into the soil and over foliage. Setting these taps involves running the unit while timing the output and volume for each tube line. When they all output the same volume in the same time period, the system is calibrated.

Part V: Farm Like a Gardener

A wise piece of advice; “garden like a farmer and farm like a gardener”. That’s great, but how does one do this on a practical level?

If you are an organic gardener who tends to a modest 10 x 10 meter vegetable garden and you hear that a little soil inoculum in the form of ‘compost tea’ would do your patch wonders, I’m sure your response would be something along the lines of “what a good idea!, I might just do that…”

But what if you are a farmer with 100 acres of pasture, and you hear the same suggestion?

[ LONG SILENCE ]

One answer to this common silence is now clear. While this method certainly isn’t the only means of ‘farming like a gardener’, it is an invaluable tool in the box. As Paul Taylor says “… [keyline + compost tea] is cutting edge technology that has the potential of being [one of] the most advanced systems to date”.

This is exciting farming and land stewardship. On a personal note, I hope you’re enjoying this series of articles. For this entry, I’ll simply finish with a sequence of photos from my work today…

Healthy Soil : Accept No Substitutes.

Bubbling Away

You might notice the addition of the Yeomans ’seed boots’ which has been employed to deliver the precious soil inoculant. These are steel tubes mounted on each shank tool groove, as seen clearly in the photo below.

Part VI: The Final Prototype – Direct Injection

The keyline plow / compost tea injection system is now undergoing trials. The plow rig can be seen in the photo below. While I’m already planning several enhancements to this system, I’m very pleased with the current outcome.

Injecting Compost Tea Directly into the Rhizosphere

Establishing Injection Depth

An important consideration of keyline plowing is present root depth. This can be assessed by simply digging a hole with a shovel. Once we establish the depth of the pasture root systems, we can ‘dial in’ the shank digging depth to penetrate the soil just beneath the current root depth. This progressive deepening of the soil profile over successive treatments is what keyline plowing is all about. Re-activating and converting the subsoil material into fertile topsoil in step with plant growth.

When including compost tea injection in this method, we’re also able ‘dial in’ the shank boot delivery tube to inject compost tea directly into the rhizosphere (even has the shank’s actual digging tip cuts below this zone). The rhizosphere is a ‘narrow region of soil that is directly influenced by root secretions and associated soil microorganisms’ 1.

Re-populating the Soil

In this way, our efforts to re-populate the soil with beneficial organisms are given the best chance at success, since this region of the soil profile is the most active biologically and in terms of nutrient exchange, the most vibrant. Conditions critical for healthy plant growth and the propagation of soil life.

Additionally, by carefully accessing soil conditions and choosing the right time for treatments, our introduced biota are given a superb start in their new enviroment. They quickly establish themselves and set about stablising the ecology of the soil – something that is essential for the soil to function correctly if our expectation is vigorous plant growth.

The Keyline Plow : As Seen In Action

Thanks for your interest in keyline & compost tea. To view more photos and watch a video of the plow system, please visit the following address :

http://picasaweb.google.com/TaranakiFarm

A wise person once said that soil is not only more complex than we know, it is more complex than we can ever know! The good news is humans have lately achieved a level of practically applicable knowledge and experience in soil biology to be absolutely capable of massive, positive impacts on sustainable soil use world-wide! It is undoubtedly true that we’ll never know everything, but no matter – we already know enough to get very, very busy!

Renowned microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham kicked off the West coast leg of the first-of-its-kind Carbon Economy Course with a powerful three-day learning-fest centered on the soil food web. The bionics of biology, miracles of super-charged soils, blessings of extra-strength compost, and explosive results of super-activated compost teas were all on abundant offer in this powerful course. Such topics sparked a highly-charged, enlivening energy in the ‘brain-food-web’ of the attending students, while setting an inspired tone for the modules to follow in the series!

Thirty seven enthusiastic soil nerds, garden-geeks, and other ecologically minded farmers, permaculturists, and assorted agrarian adventurers from all over the US and beyond (many from all parts of California, Colorado and as far as Vermont) converged at the beautiful Orella Ranch for a full complement of complex food web inter-dynamics, mind-blowing biological success stories, rigorous scientific data, and no shortage of classic, coastal California sunsets overlooking the rippling Pacific (this radiance was rivaled only by the continual ‘light-bulbs’ popping on above the heads of the students in class!).

Orella Ranch, California coast

Dr. Ingham is President and Director of Research of Soil Food Web, Inc.; a successful commercial lab (with locations in Australia, Canada, South Africa and the US) which analyses soil and tea samples for their clientele, as well as providing consultation on using biology to vastly increase soil and plant health and promote a sustainable permanent agriculture. Clients include everyone from backyard gardeners to ranchers to 5,000 hectare farms and beyond (SFW, Inc. has worked with growers on over 2 million acres). A prolific author of cutting-edge research in the area of soil biology, Dr. Ingham is also a very engaging speaker and energetic teacher who is never more excited than when sharing her wealth of knowledge with students in the courses she offers regularly.

Talk about “Care of EARTH!” Most would agree this first of the Permaculture ethics begins quite literally with the small ‘e’ earth itself; soil. In this spirit, the Orella SFW course started off with a detailed introduction to the massive variety of soil organisms, from bacteria and fungi, through protozoans and nematodes, and on through the food web into micro and macro-arthopods and earthworms (An excellent condensed introduction to these can be found in Dr. Ingham’s Soil Biology Primer—a USDA publication). Along the way students learned about how the various organisms function in soils to:

• produce good soil structure
• cycle various nutrients (nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous, etc.) and make them available to plants
• interact with each other and with the root zones of plants
• provide nutrition to plants in the right places, at the right times and in the right amounts
• improve water holding capacity and aeration
• reduce compaction
• eliminate any need for pesticides or inorganic fertilizers
• greatly reduce water use (often, up to 70% reductions)
• increase both plant yields and topsoil

All of this, along with much more learning–about the affects of aerobic vs. anaerobic soil conditions, bacterial to fungal biomass ratios in the various ecosystems of the world, as well as the steps needed to move from a conventional industrial farming model to a biological and sustainable one—was only the first half!

Next, Dr. Ingham took the increasingly energized class through a detailed and well researched explanation of creating lively composts, brimming with the good biology needed in the soils and by the plants. This included different recipes for different scales and contexts, ways to tilt your composts towards bacterial or fungal dominance depending on your needs, as well as worm-composts and general vermiculture.

Finally the course dug into the topic of using good composts to brew excellent compost teas! From teas to extracts and soil drenches, Dr. Ingham took the class through the process, explaining how to best get life—and the precise life that you want–exploding in your tea bucket, vat, or tank, and from there out into your soil, or onto your plants. In the process students were exposed to amazing slides and explanations of the various and fascinating forms of life we want to see and identify in our teas and extracts when sampling them under the microscope. By course end, having been very well ‘inoculated’ and ‘activated’ with this valuable information, everyone was itching to get brewing!

A few additional ‘light-bulb’ sparking tidbits from this excellent course:

• There is life in soils as deep down into the earth’s core as humans have sampled—16 miles! There are even bacteria adapted to a habitat of molten lava!
• Organic matter holds TEN TIMES its weight in water, and there is no upper limit to the amount of organic matter a soil can hold! 100% not impossible.
• A healthy soil will have 50,000 protozoa per gram/teaspoon. These will collectively eat 500 million bacteria (per gram) every day (about 10,000 bacteria per protozoan), releasing 400 million molecules of Nitrogen (per gram, per day), typically right in the root zone!
• Standard soil tests measure only 1% of the total pool of soil nutrient (which is the ‘soluble fraction’ existing precisely at the time of sampling). This 1% fraction gives no information about the rate of nutrient cycling and replenishment provided by the soil biology from the remaining fraction. There is, therefore, no relationship – zero – between the numbers these standard lab tests will give you and the nutrients that end up in your plants! With the right biology in your soils plants will tend to have access to all major nutritional needs regardless of ‘low’ soluble fractions shown on standard lab tests.
• Using good soil biology can even eliminate the need for the very ancient practice of crop rotation! No disease, no need to rotate. Continual nutrient supply, no need to rotate. Therefore, one need never till again, saving time, energy and money, while increasing surplus topsoil, yields and other profit margins!
• Who doesn’t like CHOCOLATE! A well made, finished compost – likely to have all the ‘good guy’ food-web organisms we want – can be COLOR checked against a 70% cocoa chocolate bar. That is the ideal color we want to aim for in our composts and even topsoils. Check it out and enjoy!

Thank you, Dr. Ingham, for your tireless efforts and kudos to the good folks at Quail Springs and Orella Ranch who are jointly organizing and convening this leading-edge series. Congratulations on a very successful start! See the links to these organizations to learn more or to donate in support of their ongoing efforts to bring sustainable land management practices to a wider audience. Also, see the Soil Food Web, Inc. website for updates on future SFW courses or to purchase Dr. Ingham’s books or lectures (on cd) and learn even more of this fascinating and powerful information.

Next up in the Orella hosted West coast Carbon Economy Series: Sustainable Land Management with Kirk Gadzia (Holistic Management – Resource Management Services) and Darren Doherty (Keyline Design, Broadacre Permaculture – Permaculture.biz ). See you there!

Owen Hablutzel performs international work in Permaculture design, consultation, speaking, and education. He is a director of the Permaculture Research Institute, USA, and can be reached at owen (at) permacultureusa.org

The latest research tells us that Peak Phosphorus is an issue we cannot afford to ignore any more:

… a global production peak of phosphate rock is estimated to occur around 2033. While this may seem in the distant future, there are currently no alternatives on the market today that could replace phosphate rock on any significant scale. New infrastructure and institutional arrangements required could take decades to develop.

While all the world’s farmers require access to phosphorus fertilisers, the major phosphate rock reserves are under the control of a small number of countries including China, Morocco and the US. China recently imposed a 135% export tariff on phosphate rock essentially preventing any from leaving the country. Reserves in the U.S. are calculated to be depleted within 30 years. Morocco currently occupies Western Sahara and its massive phosphate rock reserves, contrary to UN resolutions. – Western Sahara Resource Watch

Marcin, the podium is yours.

Keeping Phosphorus on Farms – by Marcin Gerwin (the sequel to ‘Closing the Phosphorus Cycle‘)

Lupines. Photo: Carol Mitchell/Flickr

“Next to clean water, phosphorus will be one the inexorable limits to human occupancy on this planet” wrote Bill Mollison in Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual more than 20 years ago (1). It is that important that we design phosphorus recycling into our food systems. Phosphorus is an essential element for growing crops and no porridge, chocolate bar or cherry jam can be made without it.

Mobilizing phosphorus present in the soil

In many soils phosphorus is naturally present in sufficient amounts, however, it may be chemically locked up and not available for plants. Most of agricultural soils in Western Europe and North America are oversupplied with huge amounts of superphosphate fertilizers, which results in binding phosphorus up with other elements so it ends up unused in the soil. In consequence, the concentration of phosphorus may be as high as 750 ppm, while only 45 ppm is necessary for growing grains (2). To determine whether you have a sufficient level of phosphorus in your soil, the surest way is to make a soil test. If the amount of phosphorus seems to be okay, but your plants show signs of phosphorus deficiency (purplish leaves, stunted stems), you may need help from a specially skilled team of phosphorus extractors – fungi. Fungi are decay experts in soils. The enzymes that they secrete allow them to break up lignin, cellulose, chitin shells of insects and bones of animals, which are too difficult to digest for bacteria. A single teaspoon of a healthy soil may contain several meters of fungal hyphae, invisible to the naked eye (3).

The tips of certain species of fungi have an extremely significant function. The strong acids they produce allow them to literally dissolve rocks and extract phosphorus from them. These fungi can form a mutually beneficial relationship with plants roots and can transport phosphorus to these plants. They are called mycorrhizal fungi.

Mycorrhizal fungi can extend the surface area of tree roots by 700 to 1000 times (4). They can harvest phosphates at great distances, many meters down and away from the plant and they bring it back through the fungal net, which is called plasmic streaming. Phosphorus is brought to a tree in exchange for sugars created by plants, as fungi don’t have the chlorophyll and the ability to photosynthesize.

Seedlings of trees, shrubs and perennials can be inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi while you grow them in the nursery. Make sure you get the right kind of fungal spores for your plants. You can inoculate roots of existing trees and shrubs by digging holes in a root zone and applying spores of mycorrhizal fungi near the roots. Seeds of annuals and vegetables can be mixed with inoculum as well, however, plants from the cabbage family (Brasicaceae), beets and spinach do not form mycorrhizal associations at all. Instead of buying inoculum in a shop, you can also experiment with making your own mycorrhizal inoculum.

The optimum range for phosphorus uptake by plants is pH 6.0 – 7.5, and on either side of the pH scale phosphorus becomes immobile. A conventional approach would be to adjust pH by adding sulfur in alkaline soils or lime in acidic soils. It can be quite expensive on a larger scale. But suppose you would like to grow an acid soil loving plant, such as Northern highbush blueberry, then what? The optimum pH range for this tasty fruit is as little as 3.5 – 4.8 pH, and it can fail completely when pH is higher. Since phosphorus is immobile at this low pH level, how can this plant grow at all? Well, it can receive phosphorus through partnerships with certain species of mycorrhizal fungi which do well in acid soils and don’t mind low pH when extracting phosphorus.

You could also try to adjust the pH by increasing fungal or bacterial domination in topsoil. You can apply brown organic mulches, such as woodchips and shredded branches, to support fungi and to lower the pH. Or, apply fresh green mulches and aerated compost teas to support bacterial growth and raise the pH slightly above 7. The reason for this is that bacterial slime is alkaline and acids secreted by fungi are, well, acidic and they lower soil pH.

However, some nutrients are available for plants in low pH, while others are available in high pH. The pH of soil should vary from micro-site to micro-site and it is the role of a healthy soil biology to control it. If we leave it to applications of lime or sulfur, the whole biological system will be temporally determined by this input, and the quantity of micro-sites of varying pH will be limited. So, instead of applying minerals in order to mobilize phosphorus by a chemical reaction, you could stimulate growth of a vigorous soil food web that will ensure extraction of essential elements and support their continuous recycling.

Choosing phosphate fertilizer

There are many soils around the world that are naturally deficient in phosphorus, such as soils in the Amazon Basin, on Java or in Australia. Others have been damaged by inappropriate farming practices – bare soils were flushed by rains, which washed away phosphorus, they were depleted by overharvesting of crops and their natural soil food webs were destroyed, making it impossible for plants to feed on anything other than artificial fertilizers. While soil food webs can be restored, wherever there is not enough elemental phosphorus present, for any reason, it must be brought back by the farmer. The other option is to wait until mountain-generating processes raise the bottom of the sea, where phosphate fertilizers end up. When the new mountain ranges are formed, the rain will start to wash phosphorus out of the rocks, making it available for plants again. But this will take some time – around 10-15 million years….

For organic gardeners one of the main sources of phosphorus are ground phosphate rocks. Good quality phosphate rock fertilizer should be free of all contaminants such as fluorides, heavy metals or radioactive uranium. It can be applied directly on soil (100 kg or more per hectare) tied to organic matter, mulch, compost and compost teas, to enhance soil biology and enable feeding plants through the activities of bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms. Another way is to incorporate rock phosphate into compost with a fungal dominance, so that fungi will transform rocks into a soluble form, or preparing a special phospho-compost (8). Inoculating plants with mycorrhizal fungi improves greatly effectiveness of phosphate rock fertilizers.

It has been discovered in Costa Rica, that phosphate fertilizers can be applied on top of the mulch, rather than below it. This idea has been conceived to prevent phosphorus from being bound up in the acid tropical soil. And it worked. Yields of beans rose more than 3 times (9).

Clay washed out from between layers of phosphate rocks during mining can also be used as a fertilizer. Particles of this clay are surrounded by natural phosphates and it’s called a colloidal phosphate. Thanks to clay the phosphorus is more easily available for plants than in phosphate rocks. It can be used together with manure on compost piles or directly on soil – manure acids will dissolve phosphates, which in turn will stabilize the nitrogen in manure (10).

Superphosphate fertilizers are made from chemically treated phosphate rocks. They are not recommended for use as they are highly concentrated and reactive. When applied on the field they react with calcium, iron, magnesium and aluminium, creating within seconds compounds that make phosphorus unavailable for plants. They may react also with trace elements, locking them up and causing deficiencies of micronutrients. Superphosphates are water soluble and they can be easily washed away by rains before plants have a chance to assimilate them, which later may cause the eutrophication of lakes and rivers. Not to mention that high concentrations of phosphorus in fertilizers (above 10) are lethal to mycorrhizal fungi (11). Superphosphates, however, do have their advantage: they were purified and do not contain toxic elements such as uranium. There is a disadvantage, though. The waste product of the purification process is stored in slag heaps, that are sometimes unprotected and, since they contain uranium, they are radioactive. Fluorides leaching from these heaps may also cause groundwater pollution.

Another material that is rich in phosphorus is guano – bird or bat droppings. Bones of fish that are eaten by seabirds contain a lot of phosphates, and as a result seabird guano also contains a high level of phosphorus. Guano has accumulated over centuries on small islands on the Pacific Ocean or on the coast of Chile and Peru, where it was mined in such large quantities that its deposits are now severely depleted. In contrary to phosphate rocks, it is a renewable resource, however, only over a long period. Apart from phosphorus, guano also contains high levels of nitrogen and calcium. It can be fresh, semi-fossilized or fossilized, depending on the source.

Phosphates can also be found in mud from ponds, in freshwater mussels, in fish waste, in algae or in recent volcanic ash. Many plants, such as comfrey, lupine, sweetclovers, nettle or vetches accumulate phosphorus and they can be used as green manure. Note, however, that they don’t produce phosphorus in the way that nitrogen is fixed from the air by legumes. Rather, they just extract phosphorus from one place and you can put it somewhere else, leaving the source with less phosphorus.

Building your own phosphate factory

Bat house on a tree Photo: Birdfreak.com

If you would like to collect phosphorus from your local area, the exciting way to do this is to establish a small bat colony. If there are bats living in your neighbourhood, especially in buildings, you can build a bat house for them. Bats will come to rest there and… they will leave their droppings underneath. You can place a container under the bat house and collect their guano. The additional benefit is that insectivorous bats consume large amounts of moths, mosquitoes, flies, grasshoppers and crickets among many others. They are high-class specialists in insect control – in just one hour a single brown bat can catch 1200 mosquitoes. In fact, they are so effective in eating mosquitoes that in India an establishment of bat colonies around Calcutta was considered as a way of dealing with excessive mosquitoes numbers (12).

If bats are not your kind of animal, you may consider another type of a phosphate factory – a pigeon house. Pigeons mostly eat seeds, and these are usually rich in phosphorus. Their manure is rich in nitrogen as well, so it could be very useful on farms, and some people in the Middle East still keep them. If you are wondering how the permaculture principle of "every element should serve many functions" could be applied with regards to pigeons, there is one interesting thing that some breeds of pigeons can do: they can carry letters. Harry Potter fans may feel a little disappointed and prefer owls for sending letters, but the advantage of pigeons is that they can do it for real.

The adapted ones

Proteoid roots of Acorn Banksia. Source: Annals of Botany

A small group of plants, which includes lupines and macadamia trees, has developed a unique strategy to adapt to phosphorus-deficient soils. Instead of forming mycorrhizal associations, they create densely clustered roots that enhance phosphorus uptake. These roots received a scientific name of proteoid roots, after the Proteaceae plant family. Despite their unimpressive name, proteoid roots of white lupine have an extraordinary ability: they excrete citrate and in this way increase availability of phosphorus in the root zone (13). Well, why not call them power roots instead? Or, phosphorus-I’m-coming-to-get-you roots? They deserve a better name.

The intriguing thing about proteoid roots is that plants do not form them when phosphate fertilizers are applied. To the surprise of a farmer,

Macadamia nuts on a tree Photo: Kahuroa

macadamia trees can show signs of phosphorus deficiency even though a significant amount of phosphate fertilizer was added. When phosphorus is present in soil, even in small quantities, these plants grow well by themselves. And, when there really isn’t enough phosphorus, then compost and mulch can be used, instead of phosphate fertilizers (14).

Protecting phosphorus from being washed away

Phosphorus loss occurs especially on bare, sandy soils, where you have little trees and get heavy rains. While natural systems such as forests can lose 0.1 kg of phosphorus per hectare per year, bare crop systems can lose even 100 kg of phosphorus per hectare in one year (15). In heavy soils or loams loss is generally very small. Most phosphorus in the environment is in the insoluble form and unlike nitrogen, which can be dissolved in water, it is washed away with soil particles or organic matter.

Lupines in New Zealand. Photo: Anita 363/Flickr

Soil eroded after storms carried to the sea by Betsiboka river in Madagascar. Photo: Earth Observatory

Since this is known, protecting phosphorus is easy. A good soil structure can be created by adding organic matter and compost. Soil biology can be further improved by brewing compost teas. Together with compost they will add an army of nutrient recyclers to the soil: active bacteria, fungi, flagellates, amoebas, ciliates and beneficial nematodes. These microorganisms will retain phosphorus in their bodies and the functioning of a whole healthy soil food web will allow recycling it. It is also worth mentioning that certain species of bacteria can also dissolve phosphate rocks and they help in converting phosphorus into forms that are edible for plants (16). A no-dig system can be introduced to prevent erosion and protect soil life, and trees can be planted on at least 30% of land. And it takes mulch, mulch and mulch to protect soil from rain.

Farmers can pull another ace out of their sleeves – charcoal! It is an ancient soil amendment, tried and tested for thousands of years by Indian tribes in the Amazon. They used it with pieces of pottery to create Terra Preta, the black soil, which is still fertile today, an exceptional thing in this region of the world. The porous structure of charcoal provides a great habitat for microbes, it persists in the soil for a very long time and it retains nutrients, including phosphorus (17). Charcoal (or biochar) can be made not only from wood, but also from agricultural residues, such as rice husks (18).

Roots of vetiver grass 6 months after planting. Photo: The Vetiver Network International

To slow down run-off in the mountainous areas, crops can be grown between rows of trees planted on contour, in an alley cropping system. These hedgerows can be planted with nitrogen-fixing trees, or other fast growing species. Prunings from the hedgerows can provide much needed mulch for crops.

Instead of trees, vetiver grass can also be planted on contour. Its roots grow 3-4 meters deep and it can reduce erosion by as much as 90% and recharge ground water (19). Over the years, on steep slopes, natural terraces will form behind the hedge, as soil will accumulate there. A vetiver grass system is easy to establish and requires little maintenance. It can also be used for stabilizing road embankments, river banks, preventing landslides and for wastewater purification.

Fair share

Some say that free market is the most efficient way of allocating scarce resources. This may be true. If you are a farmer from Europe then letting the invisible hand of the market allocate the remaining reserves of phosphate rocks could be no problem for you. Let the most competitive ones win! However, if you own half an acre of land somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, your soil is poor in nutrients, yields are low and you hardly make ends meet, then you can easily notice a simple thing – with free market rules, scarce resources don’t go to those who need them most. They go to those who can pay most.

In 2008 some 82 million people were added to our planet. The largest part of this population growth took place in the South: in Asia, Africa and in South America. All these young people, a population four times larger than the population of New York, will need food, water, clothes and a place to live. They will need land where crops will be grown for them. And to grow these crops many nutrients are essential. One of them is phosphorus. Since the reserves of phosphate rocks are scarce who will get it?

Bill Mollison again:

Of all the elements of critical importance to plants, phosphorus is the least commonly found, and sources are rarely available locally. Of all the phosphate fertilizers used, Europe and North America consume 75% (and get least return from this input because of overuse, over-irrigation, and poor soil economy). If we really wanted to reduce world famine, the redirection of these surplus phosphates to the poor soils of Africa and India (or any other food-deficient area), would do it. Forget about miracle plants; we need global ethics for all such essential resources (20).

Field of rice in Bihar, India. Photo: yumievriwan/Flickr

It is possible to calculate a fair share of the remaining phosphate rocks for each country, depending on the soil’s condition and number of population. And that’s exactly what should be done. A global agreement is necessary for sharing the last phosphate rock reserves in a common sense way.

Planting rice in Madagascar. Photo: Gail Johnson/Flickr

Our current industrial agricultural system and the global economy that supports it are inherently unsustainable. Extracting a limited resource, such as phosphorus, and sending it to landfills or dumping it in the ocean doesn’t make much sense. Sooner or later reserves of phosphate rocks will become depleted, then what? There is some back up in the form of deposits on the continental shelves and on seamounts in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (21), but the cost of mining it can be very high and even if industrial farmers were able to buy them, what about farmers from Botswana? What about farmers from Madagascar or India? What will be the cost of food, when the price of fertilizers goes up? Recycling phosphorus is just common sense and it seems inevitable, if we wish to continue living on Earth. It means that the exchange of our entire food supply and waste management systems is inevitable as well. Honorable presidents, distinguished prime ministers, sooner or later we will have to do it.

Why wait till the industrial food supply system collapses from lack of phosphate fertilizers or because they are too expensive to buy? Farming the way nature does provides not only healthy soils and good yields, but also nutritious food, flavoursome food. A juicy tomato with its characteristic, charming smell, instead of a watery, tasteless, red ’something’. Our economy can be more local, so that it will be possible to easily recycle nutrients, and as a result people will be more connected. These changes can be for better, not for worse.

If we manage to close the phosphorus cycle in our countries soon enough, we will have plenty of phosphate rocks left. We will be able to use them for restoring degraded lands, for planting trees, and greening our planet once again.

Acknowledgements:

A big thank you goes to Geoff Lawton who provided many of the ideas and practical solutions that are presented in this article. Geoff recorded his thoughts and comments while teaching abroad and he sent them to me as audio files. His insights are a backbone of this work.

References:

1. B. Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, 2004, p. 192.
2. Ibid
3. J. Lowenfells, W. Lewis, Teaming with Microbes, 2006, p. 53.
4. Ibid, p. 61.
5. Honglin Huanga, Shuzhen Zhanga, Xiao-quan Shana, Bao-Dong Chena, Yong-Guan Zhua and J. Nigel B. Bellb, Effect of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus (Glomus caledonium) on the accumulation and metabolism of atrazine in maize (Zea mays L.) and atrazine dissipation in soil.
6. See also: K. Lewis, B. McCarthy, Nontarget tree mortality after tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) injection with imazapyr, Northern Journal of Applied Forestry, 25(2):66-72, 2008. In this study a herbicide imazapyr was injected to Tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which in some regions is an invasive tree. The results showed that imazapyr injections not only killed all injected tree-of-heaven, but also 17.5% of neighboring (within 3 m) noninjected tree-of-heaven and eight other tree species 62 weeks after treatment. The possible ways of transmission of the herbicide were root grafts, mutually shared mycorrhizal fungi, root exudation and absorption, and/or leaf senescence.
7. Methodology: Integrated Production of Highbush Blueberry, edited by Danuta Krzewinska, 2005, p. 7.
8. See: chapter 9 “Ways of improving the agronomic effectiveness of phosphate rocks” in: F. Zapata and R.N. Roy, Use of Phosphate Rocks for Sustainable Agriculture, FAO 2004. Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5053e/y5053e00.htm#Contents
9. R. Bunch, Five Fertility Principles, The Overstory #20,
   http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory20.html, accessed on 16.01.2009.
10. P. Sullivan, Alternative Soil Amendments, ATTRA, http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/altsoilamend.html, accessed on 13.01.2009.
11. J. Lowenfells, W. Lewis, op. cit., p. 151.
12. Bats, The Ecologist,
    http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=352, accessed on 15.01.2009. In some parts of the world bats may carry viruses that are dangerous to humans. Before building a bat house in your backyard, please make sure there are no health concerns.
13. J. F. Johnson, D. L. Allan and C. P. Vance, Phosphorus Stress-Induced Proteoid Roots Show Altered Metabolism in Lupinus albus, Plant Physiology, Vol. 104, Issue 2, p. 657-665.
14. A. L. Shigo, Troubles in the Rhizosphere, The Overstory #70, http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory70.html, accessed on 13.01.2009. See also: G. Porter, R. Yost and M. Nagao, The Application Of Macadamia Nut Husk And Shell Mulch To Mature Macadamia Integrifolia To Improve Yields, Increase Nutrient Utilization, And Reduce Soil P Levels.
15. B. Mollison, op. cit.
16. R. Ivanova, D. Bojinova, K. Nedialkova, Rock Phosphate Solubilization by Soil Bacteria, Journal of the University of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy, 41, 3, 2006, 297-302.
17. Soil Fertility Management and Soil Biogeochemistry, Cornell University, http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/research/biochar/biocharmain.html, accessed on 16.01.2009.
18. S. M. Haefele, Black Soil – Green Rice, Rice Today, April-June 2007, p. 26-27.
19. Soil erosion, The Vetiver Network International, http://www.vetiver.org/g/soil_erosion.htm, accessed on 16.01.2009.
20. B. Mollison, op. cit.
21. S. M. Jasinski, Phosphate Rock, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2008, p. 124,
    (available at: minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/phosphate_rock/).

Greywater mulch-pits provide an excellent solution when re-using greywater on your garden – they are cheap to construct, they improve the quality of water entering your soil and after some time provide you with valuable compost. They’re very easy to construct too. You basically just dig a hole, wack in some 100mm ag-pipe and then fill it up with nice chunky mulch.

Where possible a number of pits should be constructed around the garden. This enables you to rotate your greywater around and prevent the inevitable waterlogging that occurs if you leave your hose in one spot too long. For flat ground it’s great to create round pits, with each one midway between a few fruit trees. If on a slope, they will be on contour and can double as a swale.

The volume of each pit should be about 4 times the peak flow that leaves your house at any one time. For example if your washing machine pumps out 100 litres, the size of the hole needs to be 400litres (as a guide, 1m3 = 1,000litres). This is to allow for the space taken up by the woody mulch (about 2/3 of the volume) plus a bit extra. 40 cm is plenty deep enough, or else you’ll start to send most of the water down below the main feeder/drinker roots of your trees.

If you have very sandy soils in which most water just disappears straight down, it can pay to line the inside of your pit with plastic. A few punctured holes here and there allow you to infiltrate the water in the direction(s) of your choice. It also gives the critters more time to clean up the water.

With the huge increase in the use of greywater on Australian gardens, particularly here in Victoria where we’ve been on restrictions for a number of years now, there is concern about the effect it will have on soils in the long term. Even if using liquid detergents, which are much lower in sodium and phosphorus than powders (see lanfaxlabs for more info), the alkaline nature of soaps will affect soil pH. Fats and oils from our bodies can also clog up soil pores and make them hydrophobic and any bleaches or harsh cleaners will of course have a huge impact on soil life.

By filling these pits with chunky mulch, this acts to filter and clean the water, resulting in better quality irrigation for your valuable fruit trees. It’s not the mulch that does the filtering but rather the tiny soil critters that will colonise its surface and just like in a reedbed system, they greedily grab onto any nutrient that passes by. Inevitably, this mulch will be broken down into compost, at which time you should say “Awesome!” and fork it out of your pit straight onto the fruit trees beside. Then, give your local tree lopper a call and get a free/very cheap load of mulch delivered and refill them. (By the way, this is so much easier than cleaning out a clogged up reedbed, plus you get the compost out of it instead of a mess of aggregate you don’t know what to do with.)

The simplest way to get water to each pit is by extending the washing machine outlet hose. You can rotate this hose once a week or so. A few tips to prevent your washing machine’s engine from burning out: 1. Utilise gravity as much as possible; 2. Over 10m+, ensure the extension hose is at least 50mm to reduce strain on the pump; and 3. Don’t pump uphill (if you do need to, you’ll have to get a pump built for this purpose).

If you include an appropriate length of 100mm ag-pipe inside each pit, with one end just slightly sticking out, this means that you can poke your washing machine hose down inside so that the water infiltrates sub-surface as regulations rightly demand (stops kids and pets getting sick from the pretty nasty pathogens that greywater can contain).

If you want to utilise your bath and shower water also, by law you’re supposed to get a plumber in to divert the water. From here, a more permanent option is to construct branched drains which evenly distribute the water around the garden. Detailed design and installation instructions are available for this method in Art Ludwig’s book The New Create an Oasis Using Greywater.

You can irrigate a 1/8 acre suburban orchard for under $200, which is pretty good value I reckon compared to the $10,000-$20,000 approved treatment systems.

My partner Nina Grundner and I have just finished translating a 15 minute german video documentary short on the frenchman Jean Pain. For those unfamiliar with his work, I’ll quote wikipedia verbatim….

Jean Pain (1930 – 1981) was a French innovator who developed a compost based bioenergy system that produced 100% of his energy needs. He heated water to 60 degrees celsius at a rate of 4 litres a minute which he used for washing and heating. He also distilled enough methane to run an electricity generator, cooking elements, and power his truck. This method of creating usable energy from composting materials has come to be known as Jean Pain Composting, or the Jean Pain Method. – Wikipedia

Watch the clips here:

Part 1

Part 2

If you’re interested in learning more about his methods, there is a ebook available titled "Another Kind of Garden". You can purchase a copy here. The checkout process is in French, but you can get the english version.

Please feel free to distribute these video links to any people you might find will benefit or enjoy this information. To my knowledge, this is the only footage of Jean Pain accessible to english speakers.

FarmReady Approved Course ID# FRTC0185

July 18th – July 19th 2009. 09:00-17:00 with lunch break

Malanda • Atherton Tablelands • Far North Queensland

$265 for 2 Days Incl. Morning & Afternoon Tea & Lunch

Topics include:

• Making “backyard compost”
• The principles of compost tea
• Compost tea brewers
• Creating beneficial soil biology
• Making commercial amounts of high-value compost from dairy and feedlot waste, using a tractor driven compost turner
• and much more….

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn the benefits of a management system based in beneficial soil biology from compost. Use less water and reduce your need of fertilizer!

Click here for a PDF with full details on the course.

Next time you go to throw that banana peel in the bin, stop and think about the environmental impact that action has. As with most things these days, we are quickly running out of landfill space. More than 50% of all household waste, from vegetable scraps to garden waste, can be recycled or composted. By doing this you can not only help your own bank account, but also help the environment by reducing landfill contamination and greenhouse gases.

When organic matter in landfill breaks down it does so anaerobically, meaning without oxygen. This occurs because landfill is compressed, which squeezes out all the oxygen. Anaerobic decomposition produces acids which when mixed with items such as plastic creates a toxic mix called leachate. This poison then leaches into the ground water and from there it’s a short trip to our waterways. Harmful greenhouse gasses such as methane and carbon dioxide are also produced, which contribute to our climate change problems. All of that, just for throwing a banana peel in the bin? The answer is yes, but the other question is “What do we do about it?” The answer to that is simple.

The first step required is a paradigm shift toward so called “waste”. Society’s “waste” can alternatively be thought of as an unused resource. If we view this “waste” as an unutilized source of potential energy, we begin to be able to think of uses for it, rather than unconsciously discarding it. By simply viewing things in a different light we are able to open up a world of potentiality which is only then limited by our creative imagination.

Depending on the type of organic material, we may be able to feed it to a chicken or duck to produce meat, eggs or provide that animal with energy to perform other functions such as scratching for insects or turning over soil. The manure that animals produce further enriches the soil and in some cases can be collected and form part of a compost pile, providing an excellent source of nitrogen and phosphorus. That compost in turn can be placed around our bananas, producing more bananas for us to eat, leaving us banana peels, which we feed to the chicken, which….well, you get the idea.

There are many resources available for learning how to make quality compost. One of the best was put out by the CSIRO in 1979 titled “COMPOSTING – Making Soil Improver from Rubbish”. Only 20 pages long, and available for free online, it explains in precise detail the processes involved in composting and the various methods that can be used. All of your garden waste can be composted, turning landfill into quality fertilizer for your garden and saving you money to boot. The benefits of compost are many. By adding it to your garden you improve your soil’s condition, enabling roots, air and moisture to more easily penetrate. Millions of beneficial microorganisms are present in compost; by adding them to your soil you improve its micro-flora and micro-fauna levels, giving it further stability and growth potential. As compost breaks down further, it slow releases nutrients to your plants over their growth cycle. You can place it around your fruit trees or sieve it and use it for seed raising mix. There is no need for you to continue paying for that “brown sack” anymore. Compost it!

For those of us without the space to have chickens, ducks, or cubic meter compost piles, there is another solution to that banana peel dilemma. Worms. Not the earthworms that live in our gardens but compost worms with names like “African night crawlers” and “Red Wigglers”. Compost worms are capable of eating their own body weight in food each day and expelling it as nutrient rich fertilizer. Compost worms have beneficial bacteria in their gut which helps turn your kitchen scraps into the best plant food money doesn’t need to buy! These kid friendly pets do this 24/7, with no requirements other than an appropriate environment and food to carry out their work. Many commercial worm farms are available on the market but a variety can be made with next to no capital input. From a 52cm polypipe with holes at the base buried 30cm into the ground, to an old bath tub from the dump set on bricks with a bucket under its drain, the options are again endless.

It’s encouraging to realize that the seemingly small things we do can have a major impact on our environment and ultimately our lives. Start a worm farm at the office, get one for your kid’s class at school and if you don’t have enough organic materials yourself, tell your neighbours you’ll take care of theirs. They and the environment will thank you for it.