Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1104/en

On the composting site there should always be enough starter compost on hand to inoculate the newly set-up material — likewise loam soil, marl or loess for scattering between the individual layers and for covering the heap; and straw for the final covering. To narrow the C/N ratio, farmyard manure, horn shavings or blood meal may also be mixed in. As further additions in small doses, rock dust, raw phosphate, bone meal, algae lime and the like may be considered. The addition of the biodynamic compost preparations will be dealt with separately. The setting-up and mixing of the materials can be done with a manure spreader, though most probably best of all by hand. And here lies the sore point. Where are the many hands, the people who will do this not altogether easy work in good time, with understanding and with joy? They are missing — and for this reason compost-making has either become the stepchild of the farm's working routines or a matter of merely technical routine to be mechanically managed. The latter confines itself to the purely mechanical operations of mixing — and that very limitedly — of setting up and usually of repeated turning, in order to accelerate ripening into usable manure at the cost of heavy losses. Here one again relinquishes a rich field of experience — precisely this one: of gaining "a personal relationship to the manure and to working with the manure." Like everything organic and living, the composting process is subject to the