If Life Hands You Lemons, Make Compost

Grinding Garden Waste Into a Healthy Living

Anyone who thinks Yankee ingenuity is dead should meet Clarkson Sherwood Jr. -- Pogo to the world at large. The owner of one of the largest private composting operations in the Washington region, he has employed this business stratagem: Landscapers who need a place to dump the detritus of their residential yard work pay him $25 a cubic yard to haul it away. He waits for this jumble of grass clippings, old mulch and brush to turn into compost, which he then sells back to them for $27 a cubic yard.

For Pogo, who likes to call himself a pirate, this is not quite the buried treasure it seems: Turning trash into soil is a lengthy endeavor with high overhead. The microbes that heat the piles to 160 degrees work for free, but everything else costs.

"The equipment just kills you," he said as he stood in front of a new wood-grinding machine that sells for $340,000 and shakes itself to bits in a few short years. But "I'm not complaining, I make 10 percent" profit on the enterprise.

In recent years green recycling has become big business; the Montgomery County government converts residential yard waste into 77,000 tons of commercial compost a year, most of it bagged and sold as Leafgro to consumers through mass merchandisers.

Bulk compost is another commercially popular item, which homeowners and landscapers alike use to dig into and improve poor soil, to create vegetable beds, and to lay thinly on lawns at seeding time.

Increasingly, gardeners recognize that the beneficial fungi and bacteria in compost foster a healthy world of microbes that work to strengthen and invigorate everything from turf grass to oak trees. Many ardent gardeners make their own, but for those who don't, or who need lots of the stuff, the reliance on commercial sources also means a leap of faith: There are no government standards for selling compost so consumers don't know, for example, if a load was adequately composted to kill weed seeds or even the ingredients in it.

Pogo says he has produced compost in as little as six weeks, but abandoned that model in favor of a slower method that he believes produces a finer product.

The compost is known as some of the best on the East Coast, said James Sotillo, who runs an organic landscape business in East Hampton, N.Y. Sotillo has bypassed closer sources to buy compost from Pogo, which Sotillo uses to brew a "tea" that he sprays on the estates of wealthy clients in the Hamptons. Pogo, he said, is interested in making good compost, not in simply processing debris, and like fine wine, it cannot be hurried.

As Pogo, 50, flits from pile to pile at his remote farm off New Hampshire Avenue near Brookeville, he is clearly consumed by the idea of tiny creatures feeding off wood and brush, and turning it into gardener's gold. He declares himself still a hippie, but then modifies the description to a "guerrilla capitalist." Like the compost itself, he has mellowed with time. He has, after all, come a long way from difficult beginnings. He dropped out of high school, worked as a racetrack blacksmith and descended into drugs and alcohol. When he picked himself up, sober, he bought a chain saw at a yard sale and went door to door looking for tree work. This later blossomed into a bona fide tree company that continues today, along with the nursery in Olney. He operates under a number of enterprises, including Pogo Organic Tree Products (www.pogoscompost.com).

He sells the compost and mulch from a second site, a small yard on Spencerville Road, a location that gives little clue to the scale of the mother compost operation or the vision behind it.

For that, one travels a long, winding and unmarked dirt road to reach the 180-acre site, a former farm whose terrain today is defined by maintenance sheds, heavy equipment, and the eerie sensation of walking not on mud or dirt but a vast brown-black sponge.

Between this ground rise dozens of piles of various sizes, textures and shades of brown, from a light tan to near black. Some are as high as 20 feet and almost as long as a football field.

One pile consists of raw logs and stumps, some from trees that look to be a century old or more. These are too coarse even for the grinding machine, so a machine with a steel beak snips them into long shards. Bleached by the sun, the splintered trunks look like stacks of dinosaur bones. Front-end loaders and dump trucks move the piles from one area to another, for additional grinding and aerating.

Old mulch, brush and topsoil make for easy compost -- the mix is screened two or three times before fully decomposing -- but the more woody material takes as many as a dozen grindings and screenings and at least seven months before it yields a product that satisfies Pogo.

Some of his finished compost derives mostly from leaves. It is black and rich looking and finely textured. Pogo picks it up in his callused hands as if to cradle the rich microbial life it supports. "This tested nicely," he said, referring to the laboratory tests of microbial life in this dirt.

As you scan the acres of piles you imagine that this is the place that all the trees in Washington come to die, or at least the ones knocked down last year by Hurricane Isabel. No, says Pogo, just the normal arboreal carnage of a 10-mile radius around him: trees taken down for infill lots in Bethesda, the brush and trees from arborists working in Silver Spring; the clearing of woodland for new subdivisions near Gaithersburg. According to a new study sponsored by the National Park Service and the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments, between 28 and 43 square miles of green space in the region are lost each day to development.

Pogo accepts this reality, decries the burying of old trees in landfills, and is clearly driven by the need to make some good out of it. "I have an empathy for trees and creatures," he said, and no one who meets him could doubt it. Tall, slightly stooped, his furrowed brow and flinty blue eyes are framed by a mop of salt and pepper hair and a bushy beard sometimes gathered into a braid. He seems comfortable in this skin, blithe to his resemblance to a hirsute Charleston Heston playing Moses.

And prophet might be a better metaphor than pirate, because Pogo now is moving beyond compost production to embrace organic gardening's next big thing -- the use of brews of beneficial bacteria and fungi to feed and medicate turf and ornamental plants. The most common product is a compost tea -- non-chlorinated water brewed into a plant broth by aerating a submerged tube full of compost, sugars, proteins, acids and other ingredients for 24 hours. The result is a liquid teeming with microbes that are then applied to plants, sometimes as foliar sprays.

The makers of brewing kits sell directly to gardeners, some garden centers sell the brew by the gallon, and commercial systems are available for organic farmers. Pogo is interested in the next step: providing compost tea and other organic products to homeowners with regular visits from the tanker truck.

This already is big in the Pacific Northwest and California. Sotillo, an arborist for 20 years, began his treatments on Long Island in December of 2001. "Here, it's huge, and on the West coast, it's gigantic."

Each property's soil is tested for microbe levels, and the tea ingredients are adjusted for site specific needs, he said. "It works, it works great," he says.

Pogo used compost tea in small batches for the past two years for his tree clients, but he is now gearing up to provide a dedicated organic spray service like Sotillo's, hiring an expert named Kevin John Richardson.

Richardson has been spraying yards, golf courses and farms in the West before coming to work in Maryland. Richardson has rigged a truck with a huge plastic tank (actually three separate tanks totaling 1,100 gallons) in which the tea is brewed directly. It is critical, he said, to use the tea as soon after brewing as possible to deliver the maximum number of microbes.

As Richardson is explaining this, Pogo arrives in his truck with boxes containing tens of thousands of red wiggler earthworms, which he is raising in an old metal farm trailer nearby. He is rearing the worms for their manure -- castings -- used both as a fertilizer directly and a key ingredient in brewing the compost tea.

A worm produces its own weight in castings each day and Pogo reckons he could sell or use two tons of castings daily, meaning 4,000 pounds of seething worm.

He is not, yet, the true believer that Richardson is. Some of his doubts are fueled by farmer friends who came of age with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and advocate them. They may be right, he says, "but then I run into people like Kevin. Are we going to drive Monsanto and all the other chemical companies bankrupt? I seriously doubt that. I think we can do some good."

Sotillo is a convert, but he draws inspiration too in Pogo's journey from addict to luminary in the world of organics. "There's a classic American story," he said.