Ward and Cheryl Habriel – Northstate Master Composters
( If you are reading this anywhere but my blog, you can find the original post here. )
“One acre well compast, is worth acres three.” Ward Habriel becomes quiet and reverent as he quotes one of his heroes, J. I. Rodale, father of the modern day organic gardening movement. Quiet and reverent are clearly at the depths of their passion, but “gregarious and fun” are more accurate descriptors for Cheryl and Ward Habriel – Master Composters and avid home gardeners who have been visiting Paradise since the 1970s and have lived in upper Paradise full-time since 2004.
I first met Ward and Cheryl on the Paradise Garden Club tour earlier this summer – he was in charge of a home composting demonstration station. Their knowledge – and their senses of humor – became apparent almost immediately. In the handful of times I have gotten together with them, Ward generally has a Rot Hotline t-shirt on, their car has a bumper sticker that reads: Compost Happens. These people love compost. And they want us to love it too. “One of the great things about compost is that it happens whether you are part of it or not. Leave a pile of leaves and twigs and nature will compost it for you – it’s just the natural process of decomposing organic matter. That’s the science of it. The art and fun of it is when you decide to actively participate. I mean for heaven’s sake why buy what you can make for free and do a better job of it? You already have all the materials – no matter how large or small your estate or apartment might be!”
Ward and Cheryl are life-long home gardeners. In the mid-1990s, retired from the insurance industry and while still living in Castro Valley, Ward became interested in the idea of composting as way to save money and put his yard waste to work. He and Cheryl took an introductory class on composting by Alameda County and from there they were both accepted into the Master Composter program.
The Master Composter program requirements are similar to those of the Master Gardener program. For their program, the Habriels attended a three-hour class once a week for seventeen weeks and spent 8 hours on several Saturdays of the program on educational field trips. Once you have completed the program you are then responsible for providing 20 hours of volunteer compost demonstrations and presentations to interested groups – schools, garden organizations, farmer’s markets, etc. In order to receive your Master Composter certification you must also design and present a project in which you have identified an audience, created a composting related project and produce hand-outs and other resources for your audience to take home. In a class of mostly “young, long-haired, hippie-types” (a term used in the nicest way), Cheryl and Ward graduated with high-compost honors and Ward was voted class Vermidictorian (a word-play on Vermiculture, the name for worm-based composting – but that’s another segment).
In 1996, Ward’s enthusiasm and seemingly endless interest in giving volunteer composting demonstrations jettisoned him into his next career: Organic Garden Manager for the Alameda County Waste Management Authority (now known as StopWaste.Org). In this capacity he managed two large gardens around the county, including composting all plant waste, in Union City and Dublin.
Ward and Cheryl’s suggestions for composting are:
1. Remember that it’s simple.
2. You need only 4 things: Green stuff, brown stuff, water and air.
3. If you want to get fancy you can buy one or more bins.
4. If you want finished compost more quickly, chop all the vegetation you add to the pile into small pieces, add water and turn the pile to add air more often.
For getting started with home-use, back yard composting the Habriel’s start with just yard waste – twigs, leaves, anything you prune, clip or cut. No animal poop, please. If you want to add kitchen waste as well, great!, Fruit and vegetable ends and peelings, egg shells (squashed up in your hands a bit), coffee grinds with their filters. Citrus rinds work best chopped up into small pieces. Just don’t add any meat, dairy or oil products. So – no leftover salad with dressing. The other items they do not recommend adding are: “anything with thorns, gardeners are always using their hands and the thorns are not apt to breakdown as quickly as other things.” Also, “no diseased plants (such as roses with black spot or fungus), and no weeds that have already set seed.”
Other than that – throw it in! There are all kinds of bins on the market and bin system designs on the internet to build yourself. A bin that the Habriels like is the Biostack sold by Smith & Hawken. “It’s good quality, easy to use, tidy and inexpensive.” They use one of these at their house, but they also have two or three open piles and hand-built wooden bins as well. For chopping up larger branches for his piles, Ward has an old lawn mower that he runs over the material a few times, and was featured in the video “Do The Rot Thing”. Finally, for using your finished compost around your own garden, the Habriels recommend screening the compost if you want a finer textured product. Ward has built a hardware cloth screen, which he uses over his wheelbarrow. “But those square, black plastic flats they sometimes send you home with from the nursery work really well, too,” Ward suggests. Anything that does not make it through the screen gets put back into the pile to keep breaking down.
After you add fresh green material – which is high in nitrogen – you will notice that your compost pile gets hot - physically hot. Some people say you can slow-cook a turkey in a large pile. If a pile is reliably hot enough it can kill bacteria and fungal spores as well as weed seeds, however if it gets too hot – “over 145 degrees” – it will also kill the beneficial organisms helping to decompose the ingredients in the pile. If you get very interested in the fine points of compost, you can purchase a compost thermometer in order to monitor the temperature of your pile.
“If you keep a generally even balance between your green stuff (fresh clipped grass, for instance) and your brown stuff (dried leaves and twigs), your compost should never smell bad. If it does, add more brown stuff. Also, if you keep it about as damp as a wrung out sponge, your good,” Cheryl says in answer to commonly asked questions.
When your neighbors see how healthy your yard is, you then have an opportunity to explain the benefits of home composting. And if everybody did it, there would be less waste, cleaner environments, better tasting fruits and veggies, lower watering costs, and more leisure time to enjoy it all.
After one of Ward’s class demonstrations in order to receiving his Master Composter certification, a woman in the class asked him: “Are you a preacher? Because when I listen to you, I want to believe!”
Me too.
Below is a hand-out on the basics of composting compiled by the Habriels: Click on each one to enlarge and print.
