Westport

My Pile: ‘The Best Fertilizer in the World’

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I’m blessed to live within easy reach of the ocean, and it’s to the beach I go to bulk up on the greenest of green for my pile, seaweed.

This is not a new idea in these parts, as I discovered through an exhibit held some years back at the local historical society. “A Bunch of Farmers” detailed the area’s agricultural roots, beginning in the 1830s, which over the generations developed richly with the “successful maritime exportation of fish and produce to New York, Boston and beyond. By the Civil War, Westport was the leading onion supplier to the Union army, and onion farmers used nutrient-rich seaweed as fertilizer.”

Onion blight, along with the invention of modern food production and preservation technologies, did away with the farming of onions in the loamy, sandy fields here in coastal southern Connecticut, which gave way to second-growth woodland and tracts of suburban housing, ranging from gilded manor and weekend New York retreat to postwar cape and modern McMansion.

My one-story, two-bedroom cottage was built in the early 1950s and sits squarely in the center of a flat, one-third-acre corner lot of coastal marshland long ago dredged and drained into farm fields for those onions and later filled in to develop as postwar housing.

Driving to work or errands along the narrow, winding road my house sits on, each day I pass by two old onion barns. The smaller was long ago converted into a house; the larger, two-story wood structure tucked into the side of a hill, is still pretty much a barn and now used as what looks like a pool house for the modern home it sits behind.

My home is just a mile or so away from several public beaches strung along the northern shore of Long Island Sound in a collection of rocky coves, sandy beaches and tidal-river marshland. I drive to one of the local public beaches often in the fall, with the dog sniffing sea breezes out the side window and a washtub-size plastic bucket in the back cargo space of my SUV.

My dog and I both prefer low tide — him for chasing a tennis ball over the tidal flats and me for searching out the easiest pickings of washed-up seaweed and salt marsh grass.

Gathering seaweed in the fall at a local beach.

Gathering seaweed in the fall at a local beach.

Depending on the season, the weather and the wind, high tide usually leaves a long scraggly line of flotsam, most of it a motley salad of different kinds of seaweed and scraggly reeds of salt marsh grass turned to hay. The wrack line, they call it.

Today’s catch was good; a recent storm had pushed up a dense patch of detritus along a rock jetty close to the parking lot.

The seaweed is yellow and brown and green and chopped by the waves into small mushy pieces, the edges crinkly like lasagna. The layer I set upon is a half-foot deep and flecked with all kinds of seaborne detritus, a Sargasso Sea at my feet. I turn the plastic tub on its side and scrape the briny mix into the bucket with a three-tined hand hoe.

Caught up in the tidal ebb and flow are dismembered crab legs and carapices of baby horseshoe crabs. Shells of mussels, clams and oysters dot the mix, and in they go, too. The clattering seashells, which slowly break down into their basic components of lime and calcium, offset the acidic mulch of all the leaves in my pile. (I’ve also heard that seashells give tomatoes more flavor, and I flick stray shells from the seashore straight into the vegetable garden. Like tossing a penny into a fountain, I wish for tasty tomatoes next summer.) I always have to separate out a few bits of styrofoam or plastic — a broken fork, a bottle cap, snags of fishing line or deflated mylar shell of a helium party balloon, with string.

I love bringing this bit of the beach back home with me. The bucket smells like part wet swimsuit, part low tide, and all pure summer.

Seaweed gathered from the local beach is a rich stew of ready to rot greens.

The town opens up its beaches to dogs on Oct. 1, and I bet I’ve made 10 trips back and forth since then. It’s always a good day when you are at the beach, and on most visits within an hour or so I can tire the dog out and fill up a keg-sized bucket with 30 or 40 pounds of fresh, ripe seaweed or, just as good, a lighter mix of salt marsh hay. My dog’s in great shape, and so is my pile.

“Seaweed garden nutrients are relatively low in nitrogen and phosphorus,” I read on gardeningknowhow.com, “but contain about 60 other trace elements, as well as fungal and disease preventatives. Using seaweed for compost improves soil consistency and increases water retention in sandy or grainy soils and may be used as a top or side dressing. Composting seaweed speeds up the compost process.”

Erik Hoffner, writing for grist.com, adds that “besides being full of necessary nutrients, [kelp seaweed] also contains growth hormones (auxins, gibberellins, and cytokinins) which are readily taken up by plants and put directly to use.”

“Talk about magic seaweed,” writes noted journalist David Kirby in a fascinating article published in late 2016 on takepart.com, wonderfully titled, “How to Stop Farts From Warming the Planet: Feed Cows Seaweed.”

“A single type of seaweed could cut greenhouse gas emissions, fight ocean acidification, removed invasive species, restore fisheries, and help coastal economies around the world,” Kirby writes.

“Researchers in Australia have discovered that the seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, when mixed with livestock feed in small amounts, reduced methane emissions from sheep by up to 80 percent.”

All those burps and farts and manure add up to a huge amount of methane — more than 5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, Kirby quotes a researcher, “The total contribution from land transportation is 10 percent, so we’re talking about the equivalent of half of all the vehicles in the world. It’s not a trivial number.”

I worry about the amount of methane, however negligible it may be in the greater scheme of things, my puny pile may fart out. So I take comfort in knowing that the seaweed I stuff into it may also be a solution to a far greater problem. Evidently, the seaweed contains a compound that helps disrupt enzymes used by gut bacteria to produce methane, which has up to 36 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

We may be only just now finding out how basically good seaweed is, in situ and on my pile, but this new reporting makes me appreciate it even more.

Garden writer Eleanor Perenyi, in “Green Thoughts,” her classic account of gardening along the Connecticut coast in Stonington, also sought out seaweed, which required hiring “a man with a pickup truck and the willingness to scramble over wet rocks wielding a pitchfork, not a combination I find every day.”

“The ultimate mulch is, of course, compost and if I had enough of it I would need no other. But one never does have enough—wherefore the salt hay and, increasingly of late, seaweed.”

Perenyi also cites salt hay as “a good source of trace minerals and decomposes without depleting the soil of nitrogen.” Added to my pile it also helps aerate the mixture of other rotting organic material, and any bucket of seaweed I haul home from the beach is usually suffused with the straw of salt marsh grass.

“Like compost [seaweed] is a fertilizer as well as a soil conditioner, one of the oldest known to man. All marine peoples have used it. In seventeenth-century France, royal regulations established the kinds to be gathered and how they were to be used. It has twice the potash content of barnyard manure, making it perfect for beets, potatoes and cabbages, the potash lovers. More than that, it has the power to unlock minerals in the soil; it contains growth-inducing hormones that will increase the yields of tomatoes, corn and peppers. Plants given seaweed are better able to endure a light frost, and some are made more resistant to insect and disease attack. With those remarkable properties (some of which, it is true, have only lately been established by research), and given the high cost of commercial fertilizers and pesticides, you might expect to see the gardening citizenry of both coasts swarming over the rocks and beaches. You don’t, partly because no high-level interest exists to care to tell us.”

Another inspiration for adding seaweed to my pile is The Field, a fine if unsettling film by Jim Sheridan, made from a stage play in 1990 with a stellar cast, starring Richard Harris, John Hurt, a young and menacing Sean Bean and Tom Berenger as the rich, handsome Ugly American. The title role is played, with convincing Irish charm, by an acre or two of lush green pasture enclosed by a rim of ancient stone walls.

Bull, inhabited by Richard Harris, has tended the rented vale his entire life, turning it from barren ground to most productive pasturage, where he raises fresh hay and straw to feed his livestock for market. To Bull, his field is my pile a hundredfold.

The movie begins with Harris and Bean, as his mulish son, collecting heaping strands of giant kelp fronds from a rocky beach, packing the lot into wide-mouth wicker baskets on their backs and schlepping the harvest of seaweed over hill and dale back to their Field.

Their arduous trek plays out wordlessly over the opening titles. Cresting the last slope between the sea and the field, Harris plops down his basket. Gazing over the valley to his field, he says to his son, “God made the world, and seaweed make that Field, boy.”
the-field-richard-harris
“It’s the best fertilizer in the world,” Harris adds as they dump their wicker backpacks atop a pile of seaweed-infused compost, an Irish version of my pile.

It’s a tragic movie, and near the end, old “Bull” Harris tells the American, Berenger, who wants to buy the land out from under him, “It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it, I nourished it, I saw to its every want…”

If not to the same morbid end, I feel the same way about my pile.

Seaweed adds a rich mix of nutrients and minerals to my pile.

Seaweed adds a rich mix of nutrients and minerals to my pile.

My Pile: A New Home Base

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Some years ago I relocated from Los Angeles to Connecticut, landing a better gig with a golf magazine, and looking forward to a change of scenery. I plunged into marriage, then homeownership, buying a tidy little Cape in Westport with a sizable yard of trees and grass and not far from Long Island Sound.

At last, I had a compost pile that I could call my own. We had a son, and it was nice while it lasted. Then things fell apart, and I ended up buying a smaller, cottage-style house nearby for me and my 5-year-old boy.

It was an old widow’s home, with a seriously overgrown yard on a one-third acre lot studded with tall trees, including several different types of maple, two large sycamores, a pair of mulberry trees, a big white pine, a pretty tulip magnolia in front and an ancient, bedraggled willow tree in back. I knew I would buy it the moment I pulled into the driveway to meet the realtor. I was sold on the yard, a reclamation project that I knew would keep me preoccupied while rebuilding my own life.

I heard later from a neighbor that the woman of the house once enjoyed gardening, but after losing her husband and contracting Lyme disease, she gave up on maintaining the property. As she aged in place, a shut-in, the invasive vines and trash trees slowly took over, encroaching from the tree-lined edges of the yard, rolling over her garden borders until only a narrow moat of grass was all that separated her house from a suburban jungle.

When I moved in, the property was the neighborhood eyesore. I couldn’t wait to reclaim the yard from decades of neglect and make it my own.

Closing on the house in May, I spent the summer clearing the property of 20 years of unchecked growth, hauling away truckloads of brush. Spending so much time outdoors, I got to know my neighbors, who would stop by to appraise, and praise, my efforts at overhauling the blighted mess.

The property was so untended that when I was grubbing out the tangled mess of vines in the back corner of the yard, I came across tramplings and scat from deer that had overnighted there in seclusion, though my neighbors’ houses were less than 30 feet away on either side. I also had to encourage the fat and happy groundhog who lived under the back porch to take up residence elsewhere.

After a summer’s worth of sweat equity, the bones of the property were revealed, and they were good.

 

The west side of the yard, looking from the street to the back corner, where my pile makes its home.

The west side of the yard, looking from the street to the back corner, where my pile makes its home.

A corner lot yet not quite square, the yard had what English garden creator Vita Sackville-West called “minor crookedness.” Plotted from an onion farm that was developed in the postwar years into a modest neighborhood of capes and split-level ranches, the yard slopes from the road in front about a foot in grade, with the back corner the lowest point, tending toward the mucky. The neighborhood is less than a mile from Long Island Sound and just a few feet above the mean high tide line, which means that in wet times the water table rises up to nearly ground level.

A friend in the tree business tackled the trees that needed to come down – a pair of old mulberry trees that draped over two sides of the house, carpet-bombing the roof with purple berries; a slender maple tree fatally wrapped and warped by hairy tentacles of poison ivy that reached far up into the canopy; a bigger, rotted old maple that stood at the center of the new grass lawn I envisioned for toss-and-catch games with my young son.

I recall it being a handsome tree, but it was a swamp maple, considered a junk species by most arborists, and its roots spread far across the ground. Swamp maples sprout early in the spring. Their dense leaves block the sun in summer and come fall their weak, over-extended limbs often fall victim to storms, usually across power lines. Swamp maples are becoming the dominate tree species in the Northeast, unchecked by humans and aided and abetted by deer, turkey and squirrels, who chomp away at oak saplings and acorns and have no use for swamp maple.

Dominating the backyard was an old willow tree, a good three feet thick at the base. It had three main branches, each lopped off about 25 feet off the ground. Years of second growth had sprouted from the topped ends, giving the tree a ragged if still majestic crown. It was a dramatic sight, thickly cloaked in heavy strands of English ivy. I considered keeping it as I worked my way across the rest of the yard, rooting out truckfulls of brush, daydreaming of elaborate treehouse constructions to place atop its thick trunk and tripod arms.

Willow trees, too, are considered second-class citizens of the modern suburban landscape – fast-growing but unruly, messy and weak. They generally don’t age well. I suppose the old widow had the money to trim it but not the cash or will to take it down entirely.

Likewise, I resisted my tree guy’s entreaties to put it out of its misery. Cutting down the huge old willow would nearly double my tree-clearing bill; I got a deal on the maple because it made good firewood to be hauled away as logs, but the soft, spongy wood of the willow wasn’t good for anything. It would cost a small fortune to haul off, even if you could figure out a way to load it into a truck.

Chris, my tree guy, made the decision for me, and I came home from work one day to find it prostrate on the ground, in massive, chopped-up pieces.

It was those chunks of willow that I used to construct the new home base for my pile. I rolled them to the corner of the yard, upending two of the biggest pieces about eight feet apart. I hoisted two more logs atop them each, rejoining the pieces of the limbs so that two logs stood as one across the backside of my pile, about chest high.

I stacked two twinned smaller logs next to the first pillars, pleased to find them about six inches lower than the cuts of the anchor logs. For the third row I used two logs, each about six inches shorter in length than the stacked logs before, and finished with two squat logs of park-your-butt size, creating a wooden crib with twin barked sides that stepped from two feet high to about four feet.

The side wall of my pile, made of logs from an old willow.

The side wall of my pile, made of logs from an old willow.

The whole logs made a decent, if rustic enclosure. I nailed an 10-foot section of wire garden fence, caged from a neighbor, across the back end to complete the three-sided enclosure. I filled the crib with its first batch of leaves and dirt and debris left over from the cleanup of all the brush and tree limbs.

By the time the leaves of the trees left standing began to rain down upon my newly seeded lawn, that first flush of yard waste was well on its way to being cooked. I had a new patch of ground with plenty of green grass for my son to play on, freshly prepared garden beds to plant the coming spring, and a sturdy new home for my compost pile to call its own.

Five seasons later, the willow logs are now encrusted with fungus and molds and sprout mushrooms after rains. They look like old pilings, rotting away as they age in place. But they’ve done their job containing my pile, and adding to it. The log walls harbor billions of fungus spores and bacteria that launch themselves into each year’s new pile, just like my son once did.

Mushrooms sprouting from the rotting log sides of my pile.

Mushrooms sprouting from the rotting log sides of my pile.