When the Camp Fire burned the town of Paradise and surrounding communities in 2018, it also damaged the soil in the region. A Paradise nonprofit is encouraging backyard composting as a way to regenerate some of that damage.
The Camp Fire Restoration Project’s Community Composting Program collects organic material and turns it into healthy soil. Janel Luke operates the program, and spoke with NSPR’s Alec Stutson about her work.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
On what composting is
It can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be, depending on what kinds of materials you're using. But the standard accepted practice of composting is typically thermal composting where you're putting these materials together in a pile of some kind, you're making sure there's air and oxygen available, and you're growing out microbes that in turn take those materials and break them down into different materials. [Materials] that can be used by your plants that sequester certain other materials and compounds in the soil, and that act as food for microbes later.
On why composting is encouraged in Paradise
A lot of the reasons we're encouraging composting relate to the Camp Fire in 2018. After the fire, a lot of things changed. There were the obvious things that changed, which was the removal of all that vegetation, and the houses.
[The vegetation was wiped out] and the microbes in your soil rely on their relationships with plants to keep the soil healthy, and keep serving these functions of sequestering materials and releasing nutrients. Once the vegetation is gone, that immediately removes a lot of these microbes from the environment because they'll either go dormant or they'll die.
Now with the rebuilding process, it's a really heavy impact on that already disturbed soil. We have to go in and compact to build houses, there's tons of heavy equipment from utility companies and from contractors coming in, which is absolutely a necessary evil. But now that [rebuilding] is slowing down a little bit, I feel like now is the time to start considering that we need to rebuild the soil. Because we really need that environment to come back. We need it to be a forest again. The soil is everything. It's this interface, and it's in desperate need of some assistance.
On an easy methods for backyard composting
Three bin composting, or bin composting, is a super popular way that people make compost. It consists of three square bins of all manner of different proportions and styles. Typically, they're walled in, either with pallets or cinder blocks. And this is your vessel that you put all of your materials in to compost them. The idea is that typically you'll start in the first bin, and as you turn your pile, you move it to the next consecutive bin, and then it hangs out in there for a little while to cure out for the remainder of the time.
Some people simplify that with a cylindrical pile system. And sometimes people will put plastic tubes vertically into these piles to allow for aeration so they don't have to turn them. There's a very specific type of composting called Johnson-Su Bioreactors, which were actually created by a professor at Chico State. David Johnson is kind of a celebrity for us soil nerds. And that's a really particular version of this type of composting. You build a wire screen cylinder, set it up on a pallet, add irrigation, poke some aeration holes, and let it sit.
