May 17, 2022
Here's a preview of our bonus segment. To hear the full bonus epsidode, subscribe to our Patreon! Compost is a mysterious product. Gardeners prize it as “black gold,” but few of us know how it is manufactured on an industrial scale. In this bonus, John Hart Asher breaks down the difference between traditional compost (the kind we might make at home) and the kind that you can buy by the bag or the yard. Commercial compost is a waste byproduct defined by the US Composting Council. Manufacturers don’t have to tell you precisely what’s in it, and in fact they’re legally prohibited from doing so due to the way compost is regulated in Texas. As John Hart explains, this lack of transparency, along with the “windrow” form of manufacturing, can be a real problem for large-scale ecological restoration projects. He describes his work on Mission Reach, an 8-mile stretch of the San Antonio River restored by the city of San Antonio from 2002-2012. Rehabilitating the degraded riparian soil on this site required 35,000 cubic yards of compost – roughly the equivalent of 2,500 dump trucks– and a lot of trial and error. John Hart shares his findings about the shortcomings of commercial compost production and offers up some practical solutions.
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