It’s been nearly a month since I spread a thick layer of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation compost on my community garden plot in Roxborough, and planted some salad-mix seeds in it. The seeds germinated, the seedlings are thriving, and I haven’t seen any five-legged toads in the garden. So that load of city compost, from the parks department’s recycling center at 3850 Ford Road in Fairmount Park, was apparently good, non-toxic stuff.
The compost, in a pile set aside for the general public, alongside piles
Compost in early April was cleaner than the plastic-cluttered stuff later in the month
of mulch and manure, varied on each of my three visits to the recycling center in April. When I dropped by for a bag on April 24, the compost was riddled with shreds of plastic bags, nylon rope and other decidedly nonbiodegradable trash, which was easy enough to pick out but a bit unsettling anyway. Earlier in the month, the recycling center’s compost was free of trash.
You can’t complain about the price. It is available free-of-charge, 30 gallons at a time, to anyone with an ID proving that that they are a Philadelphia city resident.
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The recycling center’s web site describes the material as “screened leaf compost,” which is made on site from “leaves and herbivore manure.” It contains no sewage or sludge material and is “approved for various applications and is tested periodically through the U.S. Composting Council Seal of Testing Assurance Program,” the web site says.
The most recent test results were released on April 7 by the Penn State Agricultural Analytical Services Laboratory, which analyzed a sample of compost collected in late March. The detailed analysis, posted on the recycling center’s web site, indicates that the compost on that day hit the sweet spot by the most important measures.
The nitrogen content was 1.9 percent by dry weight, towards the upper end of the average range for finished compost of 0.5 to 2.5 percent. The Ph level was 8.0, a notch above the neutral measure of 7, which is about what garden soil for vegetables should be.
In addition to a chemical analysis, the test also entailed planting cucumber seeds in the stuff to see whether they would sprout and thrive. The U.S. Compost Council uses the germination rate to group compost in three grades, from “immature” to “mature” to “very mature,” with a germination rate of over 90 percent required to qualify for the latter, highest grade. The sample of Philadelphia municipal compost from late March passed that part of the test with flying colors. Germination and seedling vigor for the cucumbers planted in it were both clocked at 100 percent. I can’t say that 100 percent of the seeds I planted in parks department compost germinated, but most of them did, as the photo below will attest.