Compost

Yesterday, I took a little break from the coffee buying rush to spend some time with one of our growers and their compost pile. This farmer and her husband let me tag along at the beginning of December when they were making a compost pile. The special ingredient in this particular pile was coffee chaffs, the leftovers of the pulping process, which was a bonus for me being the local coffee guy, but really I was just interested in seeing how one of the more savvy growers in the area views and executes compost production. I did need to bring up the process of turning the pile myself and frame it as a special request that we should do it, because otherwise this farmer would have been happy to leave the pile as it was and add what she got to her farm in a few more weeks.

During that first round of compost making we used a ‘lasagna’ method. This starts with a layer of sticks, branches, or whole corn stalks that aren’t going to break down too readily and will give some airspace at the base of the pile to provide some aeration. On this we placed layers of grass, coffee chaffs, goat dung, fresh weeds, and soil (respectively) which we repeated two times. We also added some urine for good measure and to provide some nitrogen and moisture off the bat. The process went pretty quickly and none of the steps took a lot of effort, which was partly because the pile was not very big, and that helps to make the process less tedious.

I’ve played with composting a little bit in the past and I have a pretty good understanding of the basics of the process, much of which I formally learned from Steve Solomon’s Organic Gardener's Composting. In reality though, while I can talk a good game, I’ve never made a real earnest attempt to make a good pile (never living in one apartment for more than 2-years at a time can kind of keep ambitions like that in check), so I’m happy to get to do work like this where I am tagging along with someone else’s project that I can check in on from time to time and know that they’ll be there to continue it if they choose.

That being said, I wasn’t sure what kind of compost this pile was going to produce. In my mind, having all the ingredients of compost well mixed seems important and this layering method, while easy to teach, would keep the ingredients segregated. When we started turning the pile yesterday, the top layer of grass (directly under a thin layer of goat dung) was pretty much untouched by the decomposition process, which seemed to confirm my suspicions, but as we got past that first grass layer the next 15 cm or so was well on its way towards becoming stable humus, so much so that I could understand why a person would feel like the product of the first round could be added to their farm. I’m hopeful that after this next round the change will be perceptible enough that it will convince the farmer that there is a significant difference between stable humus and the partly decomposed products we were looking at before.

A terrible case of Coffee Berry Disease (CBD)

My ulterior motivation is that I want to have some good compost around for producing compost tea. The idea is to ‘steep’ the compost to extract lots of the nutrients, bacteria, and fungi cultures into a solution of water that you can than apply to your plants as a foliar spray. Compost teas promote plant health by providing nutrients directly to the leaves (reasonably useful) and also by improving the vibrancy of the micro flora and fauna communities in the farm, which can reduce the impact of pathogens on the premise that the non-pathogenic organisms will compete with the bad guys for resources. We want to try applying a tea of this sort to the coffee plants to see if it can have any effect on reducing the dreaded black berry disease that plagues the farmers in this area.