Composting

The word compost derives etymologically from the Latin word composita, meaning something put together or mixed, and appears in the 13th century in Old French as composte. At this point, it referred to a mixed dish of cooked vegetables or fruit meant to be eaten, which survives in the word compote. In English, the meaning referring to fertilizer dates from the 1580s in William Harrison’s Description of England, wherein he describes soil suitable for growing barley without compest. Shakespeare uses the word in the same sense in Hamlet (III, iv, 153): “Do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker,” meaning that using fertilizer to facilitate the growth of useful plants was already a common practice. At this point, soil amendment was typically made with animal manure, human manure, or “night soil” or what was called green manure, meaning rotted vegetable matter, sometimes in the form of a cover crop, which could be simply mowed down and turned into the soil. It could also be made from rotted straw and manure taken from animal stalls. Other amendments included marl, peat, seaweed, bird droppings, and later bat guano. These kinds of fertilizers were nothing new in the early modern era, and their use is well documented even in ancient times. The Greeks and the Romans used similar fertilizers; Cato the Elder mentions them in De Re Agricultura in the 2nd century BCE and even describes the importance of worms. Dung as fertilizer is also mentioned in the Old Testament.

All this preceded the advent of chemical fertilizers in the 19th century following the work of Justus von Leibig. Thus, composting is considered an older and more natural means of amending soil. Since commercial farming relies largely on chemical fertilizers, composting is used commercially primarily in organic farming and in home gardening.

The return to these older, organic, practices derives from the work of Sir Albert Howard, who published the Agriculture Testament in 1943 based [Page 278]on his earlier research in India. He promoted the development of layers of manure and vegetable matter as fertilizer in mounds. This was enthusiastically taken up by J. I. Rodale, who might be considered the father of composting in the United States, in his Organic Gardening magazine.

This entry examines how composting works, home composting for the garden, and large-scale green waste recycling.