What do we talk about today? Hmm. Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be moving this around so you can see what I’m looking at. All right. So I moved the books. We found something halfway interesting, but this is the book that I was trying to find, 300 of the Most Asked Questions About Organic Gardening. Now, I’ve tried to be a gardener. I was just not, maybe I’m trying to be a farmer and a gardener. My end results of being a farmer/gardener is I just don’t think that animals like me, or vegetables. I like them. I like to eat the vegetables. Look at this, 72. I like to eat the vegetables and all that kind of good stuff, and I like to eat animals, but they just don’t really work with me very well. But that goes back from when I was a kid. I couldn’t keep anything alive when I was a kid, either.
Let’s go. Compost, right? Let’s do the importance of composting, 45. So, because you know, waste, food waste in America is absolutely ridiculous, we throw away so much food. Sorry about this. This book is pretty tight. It’s not opening well for me. Probably no one’s ever read this book. I’m one of the few.
All right. Importance of composting. How can compost be defined? The compost heap in your garden is an intensified version of the process of death and rebuilding, which is going on almost everywhere in nature. In the course of running a garden, there’s always an accumulation of organic waste and different sorts of leaves, glass, grass, weeds, twigs, and since time immemorial, gardeners have been accumulating this material in piles, eventually to spread it back on the soil as rich, dark hummus. Yeah. Hummus.
Because the compost heap is symbolic of nature’s best effort to build soil, and because compost is the most efficient and practical fertilizer, it has become the heart of the organic method. It is the basic tool necessary to do the job, creating the finest soil. The materials must be decomposed because compost. Okay, so I’m not going to read it at all, but basically we’re skipped down.
Compost is more than fertilizer or healing agent for the soil’s wounds. It is a symbol … Boo. Organic matter is the raw material of the composting … Boo. The degree of composition is referred to as the finished or … Boo.
Not a very good definition. I’ll use my definition, but we’re, you know, I’m going to write a paper anyways, we’ll go over a couple more questions. Compost is basically all your trash that, let’s say you eat an apple, all right, and your core, throw it into a pile, all your vegetable waste, throw it into a pile. And it’s kind of … It’s like having your own dump at your house, but it’s all natural stuff.
So with your leaves, if you ever notice leaves, after a while, leaves, leaves, well, one leaves retain water, right? And then when you crush them all up, it helps with your gardening, right? So that’s one good thing, it holds the water better, and, well, and if you talk to fishermen, you know what I’m saying? Some of their good worms come from, you know, worms and dirt are a good thing. Sometimes you’ll find some of the best little wigglers, whatever, under wet leaves, so that’s why they’re saying put your leaves, put your sticks, put your different thing, and during the compostion, or the decomposition, decomposition, or you know what I’m talking about, compost … When it’s breaking down, right? When the things are breaking down, which uses that language. I can stumble with my words all the time.
But what happens is the worms and the earth kind of goes in there and starts eating and stuff and starts breaking it down naturally. And then when the worms and all the other kinds of stuff poop, then they create better, better, more fertile soil. Does that makes sense? Because every time that you’re growing stuff, your plants that you’re growing extracts then the nutrients, right, out of the ground. So what they do this for the building a compost pile is it’s basically all your trash, or all the nutrients that the plants have stolen from the ground, you’re putting it all in one central place, and then you’re redistributing it to the ground.
See? I know a little bit. I might not be able to grow anything or keep anything alive, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn how to do it.