Composting & Soil Building — Making Good Ground Out of What You Already Have

Plants that wilt in a dry week. Beds that puddle after rain. Crops that start well and stall in July. Fertiliser that seems to do less every year.

These look like four problems and they are mostly one: soil with very little organic matter and very little life in it, which cannot hold water, nutrients, or air. Compost fixes that — not quickly, but reliably, using material you are currently paying someone to haul away.

The book starts with what soil actually is and what makes it good or bad, because composting makes no sense until you know what you are building. Then how to make compost, hot and cold, in bins, pits, sheet mulch, and with worms. Then how to use it, along with mulch, cover crops, and manure.

One chapter is worth the price on its own. Certain weedkillers — the pyralid family — survive composting, survive an animal's digestive system, and arrive in your garden in manure, hay, straw, or bought compost, where they deform tomatoes and beans at a few parts per billion and can compromise soil for years. Most composting books do not mention it. Chapter 14 explains it and gives you the three-week bioassay that detects it before you spread the stuff.

Adapted from public-domain USDA and Natural Resources Conservation Service literature on soil and composting, rewritten in plain English.

What's inside

• 39 pages, 15 chapters, 5 appendices, 15 diagrams
• What soil is made of, and why the 5% organic matter runs everything
• Texture versus structure — what you are stuck with and what you can change
• The jar test, and reading your own soil
• pH and nutrients, and why a real soil test beats guessing
• How composting works, aerobic versus anaerobic
• The four inputs: carbon, nitrogen, air, water — and the browns-to-greens ratio
• Hot composting, temperatures, turning, and curing
• Cold piles, trench composting, sheet mulching, bokashi
• Bins: three-bin, pallet, tumbler, wire — and what any bin needs
• Worm composting from setup to harvest
• A full troubleshooting table
• Using compost: how much, where, and when
• Mulch, cover crops and green manures
• Manure, ageing, and the persistent herbicide problem
• A five-year soil building plan, and what moves the needle most

Who it's for Vegetable gardeners, homesteaders, allotment holders, and anyone whose soil is heavy clay or pure sand and who would like it not to be.

Note on scope Garden composting. Not human waste composting, which is a separate discipline with its own standards.

Format Instant PDF download. Letter size, prints cleanly at home, reads on any device. Yours forever, no subscription.