In 1955, I was born in a small farming village in the southern part of Germany. I lived with my grandparents until I was three years old, and visited them frequently thereafter. During the times I spent with my Opa and Oma we had many wonderful days working in the small farming plots they owned around our village. This imbued in me a permanent love of the outdoors, and of growing vegetables. There has hardly been a time in my life when I have not had some sort of farming activity as a sideline.

When I moved with my wife-to-be Nanette into our first house in 1977, I immediately dug up a big portion of our back yard, and planted a huge garden. I also got my first subscription to Organic Gardening magazine, the "bible" of organic growers. Through Organic Gardening I quickly learned that if I was going to succeed in growing vegetables in the harsh climate of Boulder, Colorado, that I was going to have to amend my soil with massive amounts of compost. The cheapest way for me to obtain great compost was to gather up the bags of leaves that people put out for trash in my local neighborhood during the fall.

My first efforts in gathering leaves were almost laughable, as I would drive around with my tiny 1980 Chevette, stuffing about a dozen aromatic bags into my car with each trip. In this fashion I gather nearly 100 bags of leaves in my first year. By my fifth year, I was gathering leaves in a big Chevy van with a high cube box on the back, 100 bags per load. It was about this time that I became involved with the nascent City of Boulder composting project. When I moved my family to our present 32-acre farm in 1991, we had City of Boulder trucks dropping off over 3,000 bags of leaves per year at our farm. The problem we ran into, however, was that the city was happy to give us the leaves, but they wouldn't do squat to help us in our composting efforts. This despite the fact that they were paying a commercial composting operation nearly $10 per bag (!) to compost the leaves we didn't take.

Our problem was ultimately solved when I worked out a deal with a local private landscaping company. With their crew of 200 employees they gathered even more bags of leaves per year than the city. Ironically, however, they were having to pay a fortune in drop-off fees in order to send them to the landfill. They were so happy when I agreed to allow them to drop the leaves off at our farm that they also agreed to provide me machines in their off season, to help me turn our leaf piles (essential for them to break down into compost...). They also volunteered to provide me some of their workers on sunny days in the winter to help me put the finished compost into our growing beds.

As you can see from the first picture, we compost a huge number of leaves each year. The leaves are initially piled about 8' deep (2.5 meters) in an area that is about 1/4 of an acre (1,000 square meters). We let them sit in this spot for one year, gradually breaking down from the action of wind and rain. At the end of the first year the leaves are moved into a second spot, directly below there our excess irrigation water drains from our growing fields. By repiling the partially composted leaves into high stacks, and then flooding the bottom of the stacks for three months, we achieve a very rapid rate of decomposition. The excess irrigation water wicks up through the entire pile, greatly enhancing the steady evolution of the remaining leaf matter into a soft earth-like material. At the end of the second year the mostly decomposed compost is then piled up in windrows next to our growing fields by large earthmovers. It is during these final three months that the pile really decomposes at a rapid rate. The rapid decomposition generates so much heat, in fact, that if you dig into the center of the pile you can actually cause mild pain if you stick your hand inside! (click on image for larger view)

Two years ago was a drought year here in Colorado, so the gathering of leaves was particularly easy during that fall. As a result, our composting area was completely packed with leaves. This ultimately translated into five huge piles of compost that we are now adding into our fields. The general size of the piles is about 6' high, 8' wide and about 60' long. Because we allow no tractors into our fields, all of this material has to be moved in wheelbarrows. The goal is to add about 4 inches (10 cm) of compost to each of our 160' growing rows each year. This is a stunning amount of hard work. A single pile can easily become over 500 full wheelbarrows that need carting.

If you are really serious about adapting to such a program yourself, it is important that you understand a few basic principles. First, partially decomposed leaves actually decrease the fertility of a growing bed in the first year. Because there is still a lot of carbon left in the compost, a lot of your available soil nitrogen (which helps plants grow strong leaves) is bound up in the decomposition process. It is therefore very import to add compost very gradually into fields that you are planning to utilize in the same growing season. This becomes easier and easier as the years progress, however, as your base of friable and enriched soil gradually helps your plants compensate for that top four inches of carbon binding. If you are composting small quantities, in climates where the available moisture aids very rapid decomposition of carbon this isn't such a problem, but in Colorado it is a very big deal.

A second principle that is very important is to understand that not withstanding what I just said, it is important to continuously add a little more compost into your beds each year. Building soil fertility and friability (soil looseness) is a function of gradual additions of soil amendments over time. A four-inch layer of compost will be reduced to only two inches by the end of the first year it is in your fields by soil microbes, and will be down to under an inch by the end of the second year. If you are not steadily adding more compost, the positive benefits of your initial composting will have been completely mitigated by the end of your third year of growing. If, on the other hand, you keep adding compost year after year, you will gradually develop an incredibly rich layer of black nutritious soil many inches thick. As I hope the pictures of the inside of my greenhouse show, we now have built the soil level in our interior growing beds to nearly 12 inches (30 cm) over the original soil level. Since our earthworms also act to transport compost below the original soil lever, we now have excellent soil in our greenhouse to a depth of about 16 inches. The vegetable we grow in this wonderful soil are so tasty that we sell out nearly every week at the Boulder County Farmer's Market, with no other retail outlet needed. In fact, when we sell out I frequently have people ask me when I'm going to "Give up that comic book stuff " in order to increase our vegetable production!

The final tip I would give you is to work diligently to keep weeds out of your growing beds. The biggest problem we have in our area is with introduced weeds, such as teasel, and Canadian and Russian thistle. Even annual weeds can be a problem in rich growing beds, as they like the great soil just as much as our vegetables! To keep our weeding to a minimum we use a black UV-treated woven plastic material called landscaping fabric. Our experience has been that this fabric will last for ten years, or longer, and will allow water and air to filter through, while blocking out all, sunlight to potential weeds. Without our landscaping fabric, the weeds would take over our farm very quickly.

In closing, I would urge you to never forget that growing great flowers and vegetables does not happen over night. Aside from the fact that there's a learning curve, the very act of building up your soil is a linear progression over time. I strongly encourage you to start with a very small area (that's easy to maintain), and to gradually expand your growing area with compost, compost, and more compost. If you want some more specific tips, there's a highly rated book on composting from Rodale Press, the book arm of Organic Gardening magazine, available through Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0878579915/qid=1077648390/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-9533813-9807945?v=glance&s=books

Happy growing!

Chuck Rozanski,
President - Jay Hill Farm