However, rotting large quantities of very resistant material like sawdust can take many months, even in hot, moist soil.  Most gardeners cannot afford to give their valuable land over to being a compost factory for months.  One way to speed the sheet composting of something with a high C/N is to amend it with a strong nitrogen source like chicken manure or seed meal.  If sawdust is the only organic matter you can find, I recommend an exception to avoiding chemical fertilizer.  By adding about 80 pounds of urea to each cubic yard of sawdust, its overall C/N is reduced from 500:1 to about 20:1.  Urea is perhaps the most benign of all chemical nitrogen sources.  It does not acidify the soil, is not toxic to worms or other soil animals or microorganisms, and is actually a synthetic form of the naturally occurring chemical that contains most of the nitrogen in animal urine.  In that sense, putting urea in soil is not that different than putting synthetic vitamin C in a human body

Burying kitchen garbage is a traditional form of sheet composting practiced by row-cropping gardeners usually in mild climates where the soil does not freeze in winter.  Some people use a post hole digger to make a neat six-to eight-inch diameter hole about eighteen inches deep between well-spaced growing rows of plants.  When the hole has been filled to within two or three inches of the surface, it is topped off with soil.  Rarely will animals molest buried garbage, it is safe from flies and yet enough air exists in the soil for it to rapidly decompose.  The local soil ecology and nutrient balance is temporarily disrupted, but the upset only happens in this one little spot far enough away from growing plants to have no harmful effect.

Another garbage disposal variation has been called “trench composting.”  Instead of a post hole, a long trench about the width of a combination shovel and a foot deep is gradually dug between row crops spaced about four feet (or more) apart.  As bucket after bucket of garbage, manure, and other organic matter are emptied into the trench, it is covered with soil dug from a little further along.  Next year, the rows are shifted two feet over so that crops are sown above the composted garbage.

Mulch Gardening

Ruth Stout discovered—­or at least popularized this new-to-her method.  Mulching may owe some of its popularity to Ruth’s possession of writing talent similar to her brother Rex’s, who was a well-known mid-century mystery writer.  Ruth’s humorous book, Gardening Without Work is a fun-to-read classic that I highly recommend if for no other reason than it shows how an intelligent person can make remarkable discoveries simply by observing the obvious.  However, like many other garden writers, Ruth Stout made the mistake of assuming that what worked in her own backyard would be universally applicable.  Mulch gardening does not succeed everywhere.