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Old 02-11-2005, 04:04 AM
simy1
 
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Default Did I get compost or did I get ripped off?

If the ball stays together even when tossed you must have some clay in
it. Now, if you take a few tons of organic matter, and put it into a
bed and wait say three years, that organic matter (with the exception
of large wood chips or other slowly decaying stuff) will look the way
you describe it, smooth muck with some native soil in it, courtesy of
the earthworms which churned the bed several times in those years. It
will still be good soil, call it a loam with high organic content.

Your own compost looks the way compost looks after six months or so. My
compost beds (up to eight years old, entirely filled with organic
matter) look like muck, with a bit of sand thoroughly mixed because I
have sandy soil underneath. The soil is stiff enough that you can make
a ball. As others have said, many nutrients will be gone in compost
this old, in my experience mostly nitrogen, and need to be resupplied.
At that point you have enough humus in there that you can, by and
large, fertilize chemically. And it is soil that drains well and has
good water retention.