Spreading Compost

On the weekend of August 9th we arranged for our garden helpers to sell our vegetables at the farmer's market in Honesdale, PA so both of us could scoot up to Cuttingsville and work on our land. Our two big projects for the weekend were to begin cutting and splitting a load of firewood that we had delivered, and to spread spent mushroom substrate (or mushroom compost) on our garden plots.

Spent Mushroom Substrate is a byproduct of commercial mushroom production. To grow mushrooms, producers make a mix of animal manure, bedding, spoiled hay, and gypsum that they allow to compost in large windrows. They then move this material into their grow rooms, sterilize it with high temperatures, and innoculate the compost with the desired mushroom species. After a certain point, it is no longer profitable to grow mushrooms on that particular batch of compost, and they move it out of their grow rooms to make room for another batch. This waste product is a valuable source of nutrients for the soil, as it is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, and many other trace minerals. It has a high organic matter content and a near neutral pH, and because it was brought to a high temperature before innoculation, it is free of weed seeds.

After doing some research, we decided that spent mushroom substrate was the most economical way to add nutrients and organic matter to our fields, which tested low in many macro and micro nutrients. Doing some math with numbers from our soil test results and information on the levels of nutrients in mushroom compost, we decided to spread 30 tons/acre of mushroom compost. With three acres plowed up, that means 90 tons of spent mushroom substrate, or 4 tractor trailer loads.


This is the last of the 4 tractor trailer loads dumping off our spent mushroom substrate by our gardens. The 4 loads were trucked from an organic mushroom producer in Pennsylvania. The compost itself was free, but we had to pay for a company to truck it to Vermont.

Spreading the pile on our fields got off to a slow start, as it took us a while to work out some kinks in the used manure spreader that we purchased. That part was challenging: it's stressful to have such a limited timeframe to do a job and run into unforeseen difficulties along the way. But fortunately, with a little tinkering from Ryan's Dad we got the spreader figured out it went smoothly the whole way through.



Loading the pile into the spreader


Spreading a load on the field. The white cloud is steam coming off the pile as it's spread. The pile was rich with microbial activity, with the temperature in the middle reaching well over 120 degrees F.

These pictures below show a field of buckwheat shortly before mowing, and then after being mowed and composted. This particular field will be planted to garlic this fall. We also plan to experiment with overwintering leeks and onions in this field, too.




And this picture below shows a field of sudangrass, planted as a cover crop. We decided to let the sudangrass grow until it is killed by the fall frosts, and we spread compost over it without mowing it.






Firewood being delivered


David adjusting chainsaw


Firewood cut and split

We weren't able to seed our fall cover crops like we planned, but fortunately David went back this past Friday with his neighbor George to disc in the compost and seed peas, oats, rye, vetch, and buckwheat in the fields. This fall we'll test the soil again to see if other amendments are needed to grow healthy vegetables. We plan to get our greenhouse up and ready by this fall, as well. We staked out the four corners in the photo below.



What a doozy of a weekend! Many, many thanks to our wonderful neighbors Dave and Allison for putting us up for weekend and helping us stay clean and well fed. What a blessing.