Article printed in March 26, 2006 Maine Sunday Telegram Newspaper

Maine has to be the compost capital of the Northeast, if not of the nation.

Touring the trade show floor at New England Grows in Boston for the past few years, it had seemed to me that more than half of the companies selling compost - whether in bags for the home gardener or in bulk for landscapers and garden centers - have operations in Maine.

Part of the reason is the award-winning Maine Compost School - run by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the Maine Department of Agriculture and the University of Maine Cooperative Extension - that has a reputation as one of the best in the world. Its students come from all over the United States and the rest of the world, too, including India, Ireland, Australia, France and Mexico.

Because of that school, Maine gardeners have a wide choice in types of composts that can help them grow better flowers and vegetables. Those composts can be made with lobster, crab, salmon and blueberries and sound almost good enough to eat, or they can be made with sewage-treatment plant sludge that's safe for use in home flower and vegetable gardens.

Farmers have been creating compost forever. They create piles of manure, bedding from their animals and vegetation from their gardens, and after a few years when the materials have decomposed, they add it to their gardens.

"Compost is not a soil nutrient," said Mark Hutchinson, an instructor and director of the Maine Compost School, as well as an educator working out of the extension's Waldoboro office. "Compost is a soil amendment. It benefits the soil by helping with the soil structure, how the soil feels, how much moisture is held in the soil, the tilth of the soil."

All of those benefits mean a plant's roots will grow through the soil more easily and more readily pick up the nutrients that are there. And although compost is not a plant nutrient, it does provide some nutrients to the soil. "The nutrient compost does provide is a slow-release nutrient," Hutchinson said. "It takes two or three years to get that nutrient level to where it needs to be to support the plants. Organic growers who do not use chemical fertilizer get a lot of their nutrients through cover crops and legumes that they till in."

Carlos Quijano, president of Coastal Maine Organic Products, which has its headquarters in Portland and production facilities in Washington County and, to an extent, over the border in New Brunswick, said compost is needed especially around new construction.

"The soil around houses is just awful," said Quijano, who also is an instructor at the Maine Compost School. "The topsoil is removed in construction; what is put back is just junk. The answer isn't Miracle Gro or some chemical fix. Compost will replenish the soil and create a texture that lets plants grow."

Allan Hayes, director of marketing sales support and education for Winterwood Farms in Lyman, said the value of the compost is more than the sum of its ingredients. Lobster and crab shells contain chitin, a chemical that attracts moisture to the soil when it breaks down.

"The compost is slow-release and it creates an environment that encourages beneficial insects and earthworms and is also good for mycorrhizal fungi and beneficial bacteria," Hayes said. You then have a good atmosphere for the nutrients that will be takenup by the plants' roots.

Defining Organic Compost

Composting is an organic process, but not all compost is acceptable for use on organic farms. Eric Sideman, director of technical services for Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, said that many types of composts are approved for use on organic farms. It all depends on what goes into the compost.

Manure from any source is approved. Old produce from grocery stores, leaves and almost anything from a farm would be allowed. Vegetative material from any source is allowed unless there is a likelihood that there will be a high amount of pesticides. That eliminates compost that includes lawn clippings because it is assumed that lawns will have pesticides, although Sideman said that Woods End Research Laboratory in Mount Vernon does a test that can determine if lawn clippings are pesticide-free.

Most municipal compost operations are not allowed because of lawn pesticides. "If someone wants to use a compost, we would do a site visit and talk with the people who are making it, find their turning process, a list of all the ingredients," Sideman said. "It has to get warm enough to kill all the human pathogens. It has to heat up to 131 degrees and maintain that heat for three days." Recipes for compost vary widely. And some of the companies make more than one product. New England Organics, which has its headquarters in Falmouth and makes compost in Unity as well as in sites in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, makes all of its compost, which is sold as EarthLife, with biosolids from sewage treatment plants and sawdust. That product is sold as just the compost or mixed with mulch, peat moss and humus to make a wide variety of products.

John Kelly, product manager of New England Organics, said that though it comes from sewer systems, the product is perfectly safe for use, even in vegetable gardens. "It speaks to the technology and the industrial process," Kelly said, "and 100 percent of that is controlled through a computer - the feed stocks, how much oxygen is given, the amount of moisture - to optimize the compost process." The product spends up to 65 days in a specialized tunnel, is aerated another 17 days outside the tunnel and then aged for 90 to 120 days on a 10-acre paved area.

The product is tested at the end to make sure all the pathogens were killed, that it does not have too much metal and that it meets all of the industry standards. I can say from personal experience that compost made from sewer sludge works. In the mid-1980s for our perennial and shrub beds, we got pickup truck loads full from a municipal-waste compost facility in South Portland. At that time the processors advised against using the product on vegetable gardens. The plants did great, and my only complaint was volunteer tomato plants from tomato seeds dumped down sinks all over South Portland. But that should not happen anymore.

"We now have 20 years of research behind us at the Hawk Ridge facility, and we are a lot more familiar with the process," Kelly said in explaining that vegetable-garden use is now approved. Kelly noted that the New England Organics was named national composter of the year for 2004, and Hawk Ridge often is one of the field-trip sites for students at the Maine Compost School.

When I met with Quijano at the Coast of Maine products offices in Portland, he was excited that White Flower Farm, a high-end Connecticut nursery with national catalog sales, had just agreed to sell his products. Quijano is a former banker who got into the business by taking a contract to process the waste from some Washington County salmon farms. From that project came his first and most popular product, called Penobscot Blend, which is compost made from salmon and blueberry compost, mussel-shell fragments and peat moss.