A sad/concerning observation I made in Paraguay was that people will regularly clean their lawn, garden, patio but will burn the cuttings; something I will avoid at all costs. The organic residues are your future fertiliser/humus if put to use correctly. Why waste such a valuable resource.
When I started to work with Ramon, I explained to him that burning was not an option for me. But I was also too busy with other projects to install a proper compost pile, so I decide to do i the lazy way. I told him to dump all organic matter at the same spot.
At the same time on the other side of the garden a banana plat was growing.
Over time and after some storm damages some fallen over banana plants were thrown on to the compost pile. After some time (3-5 years) the compost side look like following while the original banana plant (its siblings) still looked about the same.
The accumulation and natural break down of the organic matter had/has a visible and very obvious increase in fertility. This became a ver nice real life example why it makes sense not to burn the organic matter and rather compost it, even if it’s the lazy way.
Composting will be a very important activity to increase soil health, soil biome diversity. I will definitely dedicate time and effort into different type of compost experiments:
- bacteria dominated composting
- 18 day compost:
- Chicken tractor on steroids:
- fungal dominated composting
and share my experiences here.