From Victoria Gershik, Guest Blogger
Entry 2 on Junior Composters
On another Saturday, a second class of the Junior Composter Course took place. It was a beautiful day like the Saturday before. I was traveling on the train from south Brooklyn through Manhattan to Queens with no local stops on the 7 train. I was carrying with me a quartered watermelon chunk and a leaky bag of thawing fruit and veggie scraps, leaving a puddle of water on the train wherever I stood.
When I arrived at our meeting place in Sunnyside, Queens, we, like last week, sat down in a circle on the ground. I like the spot we sit by. There’s a lovely oak tree and the tree pit is filled with sandy soil. It evokes teachable moments. I asked the students what kind of a tree it is. Most knew it was an oak. They promptly mention how every time they look at a city tree they see all the things that need to be amended, like the poor porosityof the soil in most tree pits. We discuss how adding compost to the soil would draw more insects and worms to create spaces in the soil. Compost could create higher porosity by binding to soil particles and forming aggregates, or clumps, in the soil. I wonder if the Parks Department actually is making a conscious decision to use just sandy soil so that when it rains the water drains quickly in the tree pits. Otherwise, the rainwater could pool up in the pits causing roots to rot. I’m not sure.
Half of the Junior Composters did the reading and the rest were honest about not doing the reading. They received the books Let It Rot and Worms Eat My Garbage and I asked them to catch up on the reading by next class. On the other hand, the poem, This Compost, most everyone read. They enjoyed the poem and we discussed its meaning; how amazing the earth’s ability was to take in the old, the death and from that create the new and alive. Then we read the poem aloud, taking turns. It was interesting to hear them read aloud. I started to think about how very little time I spent in public school reading anything aloud and when I did I was always scared to mess up. I felt maybe it was an unnatural or vulnerable thing for them to do as well. I possibly could learn something about them from this. Eli prodded everyone to read the poem with vigor and gusto. I tried to read the poem with vigor and gusto and even I, because the bar had been set for a neutral tone, was more tame than I might have been than if I had been reading it in the company of thespians, poets, and/or English majors. I hoped it to be fun and not seem like a school assignment. This was tough. I was still getting to know them and they were still getting to know me, and each other.
We went over the compost basics and the compost systems we learned about from the last class. I wanted to be sure they at least had a solid understanding of the compost basics. We did this while eating watermelon. We also discussed how their week went, what they did during the week and how most of them got involved with TreesNY. That followed with sharing with them my idea to start a group compost bin just between us seven and for each Jr. Composter to take the transportable compost bucket home each week. They agreed to the experiment and Senley volunteered to be the first to take the compost bucket. It was bigger and heavier than I wanted us to start with. I would like to get a smaller container for the compost babysitting process.
They had fun adding stuff to the group compost bucket. We started with some browns – soil and dry leaves at the bottom of the bucket, then added the cut up watermelon rinds that we had as our morning treat, and then added all the food scraps I had brought from my home. I was composting a diverse number of things and they were curious about each and every item. I had just finished a cross-country trip and lots of my grains, seeds, and spices rotted on the journey. We added some more dry leaves lying on the ground in the park and threw in some more soil I brought from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn to increase the diversity of the micro and macroorganisms in the compost bucket. They really enjoyed the “hands-on” group process of making the compost mixture. There was so much to comment on, learn and connect about.
I asked them what they each wanted to get out of the course. Bryan wanted to know how to make really good compost, Felix wanted to learn about the different systems to make compost, Sophia wanted to know how to compost indoors or when one doesn’t have a back yard, Tremayne wanted to know how to compost without it smelling badly, Senley wanted to know how someone can make money from composting, and last, Eli had yet to tell me what he wanted to know. He did mention being interested in wanting to make compost with certain ingredients that improve the health of a particular plant – for instance, making compost using only chamomile flower heads and stalk debris to add to next year’s chamomile garden bed.
Today was a day to discuss soil, compost ecology, carbon and nitrogen cycling, and see some compost critters or macroorganisms. We’d be doing this at the LIC Roots Community Garden and the LIC Community Garden.
We headed to LIC Roots Community Garden; a garden in the thick of Long Island City’s industrial buildings. It’s a small and narrow garden. The only composter they had was a large tumbler that was on some gears that made it easy to turn with a crank-like handle. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of a compost bin like the tumbler. The advantages were: the ease in turning and thus ease in aerating the mass; a sealed system that prevents pests and rain from getting in; it’s not messy; it can produce compost quickly; odor is not usually a problem; no nutrient leaching into the ground. The disadvantages are the lack of contact to soil which would allow more macroorganisms like worms to enter the pile; tumblers are costly; the volume is relatively small; the system works best when material is added all at once. We took a few scoops out of the tumbler to check out the macrorganisms in the pile. The students were all over the roly polys and sow bugs. We found a spider in the pile, some ants, but very few or no worms. The students got a big surprise when a centipede crawled quickly into view and then out of view. They all jumped back and asked, “what is that?” I explained was it was and the role it played in the pile. They were predators. They are as scary to their prey as they are to us. We talked about the difference between millipedes and centipedes which are often mistaken for each other. I showed them the Food Web of the Compost Pile diagram from a page in Worms Eat My Garbage but they were distracted by looking at and for compost critters in the compost sample, the pill bugs, and the one or two worms we found. They enjoyed having physical contact with the decomposers, except the centipede.
I also asked the students to smell the compost (it smelled earthy) and feel it between their finger tips. Our fingers are sensitive enough to distinguish soil types. There was lots of sand in the LIC Roots Community Garden compost as well as organic matter, some clay, and probably some silt too, though I have difficulty distinguishing silt. We discussed the components of soil which include varying proportions of sand, silt, clay, rocks, air, water, and organic material or humus. I asked them to think about the trouble in growing plants in a very sandy soil. “What happens to water when it is poured into sand?” I asked. They said it drains right through the sand in a matter of seconds. This allowed me to explain that only a few plants can thrive in just sandy soil because most plants need soil that can hold water for longer amounts of time so the plant roots have time to absorb the water and absorb the nutrients in the water. They seemed to understand this. A 100 percent clay soil on the other extreme would not allow water to drain and plants could end up standing in pools of water for long periods of time which for many plants could cause root damage. A soil with a balanced proportion of each soil particle size would be the most ideal soil for most plants. I discussed how compost could help amend many soils because compost itself was able to hold water and nutrients for the amount of time plants needed. I wanted to demonstrate these concepts with better visual aids. I had a sample of sandy soil but no other samples. It was amazing to me how little they and I knew about the soil that feeds us. They had taken Earth Science way back and hardly remembered it.
The discussion of soil brought us to the question, why is healthy soil important? Healthy soil is important for healthy plants and plants are important to us as food, building materials, for fresh oxygenated air and more. Plants grow best if they are getting what they need to grow – nutrients, soil, air, water, sunlight, space. This whole discussion led us to going over the carbon and nitrogen cycles which tied in nicely with the discussion we had in the previous class about greens having a higher ratio of nitrogen to carbon than browns; browns were considered high carbon materials, greens as high nitrogen materials.
It’s interesting how many of the topics in composting revolve around what does so and so need to live, whether it is bacteria (since they are the ones doing most of the decomposition), plants, worms, or humans. And what’s even more interesting is that we all basically need the same things.
We left the LIC Roots Community Garden to go to the LIC Community Garden, which was a very small, quaint, neat garden. The garden had several tumblers, an earth machine, garden cuttings and debris only pile (no food scraps), and a wooden frame compost bin. We looked into all the bins and discussed their conditions. Was it finished compost? Did it smell? Was it too wet or too dry? Did it need mixing?
We ended our day with the banana experiment, an experiment idea from the NYC Master Composter Manual. The experiment was about watching how different environments affect the decomposition process. The environments would be air, water, soil, sunlight, and no or very little oxygen. We cut up a banana peel into many same-sized pieces. Then we placed 3-4 pieces into each small jar. Unfortunately the jars were not the same size; they should be for a fair experiment. One jar was sealed with just banana pieces in it. It was labeled the air jar. In another, jar2, we poured water into the bananas; the water jar. In a third jar we placed soil with the banana pieces. The fourth jar was also just banana peel pieces and the instructions were to keep it in the sun. In the fifth jar the banana peel pieces were dropped and sealed in a Ziploc bag. All the jars were to be kept in the dark, except the one to be kept in the sunlight. They were excited and curious about the experiment and so was I. They took them home and we had to report what happens in two weeks.
We ended class on a fun, happy, cheerful note. Next week they would be attending a Climate Justice Youth Summit with Leanne Spaulding from Western Queens Compost Initiative and I would see them the following weekend for our third class.