A lone spent grain (lower right) is one of the few visible remnants remaining from shovel fulls mixed into the soil three weeks ago

Six weeks ago, I churned large quantities of spent grains, a byproduct of beer-making, into the soil in a couple of plots in our community garden in Roxborough. Only then did I post a question about the advisability of doing so on the Philadelphia Urban Farm Network forum. In short order, I got six thoughtful responses. The respondents were unanimous: I had probably made a mistake. Compost the stuff first, or use it as mulch, most of the respondents advised.

It’s not that I wasn’t forewarned. As I wrote at the time, I had read up on the downsides of using spent grains but proceeded anyway, hoping the ones I was using, from the nearby Twisted Gingers brewpub, were well enough along in the fermentation process that they would quickly break down in the soil in the several weeks I intended to wait before planting. I still thought that might be the case but the responses to my query were alarming enough that I scurried back to the garden a couple of days later, shovel in hand, to churn the grain-fed plots a few more times. That was a good move. The clumps of spent grains had already begun to solidify into sedimentary rock-like layers. One of the PUFN responses, from a gardener named Scott, had warned about that. “Unless completely mixed into the soil spent grains will stay clumped for months,” he said.

On that second pass with the shovel, I broke up the clumps. Within three weeks only traces of the spent grains remained (see photo above). But would the amended soil be seed- and plant-friendly? That was the big question. The answer was no sure thing. As Scott warned, “Have you checked the pH?  Spent grain put directly in soil without composting will lower the pH as it decomposes.” And if the pH falls out the optimal range, “a host of ills may follow,” as an article in Fine Gardening explains. I had also previously read that too many spent grains in the soil could inhibit seedling growth. For a quick test, you can plant some radish seeds in the soil and see how they fare.
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So I planted a few radishes. Three weeks later, they are thriving. So are the squash, eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes I had planted in another section of the garden that I had heavily spiked with spent grains.

Have I proved the skeptics wrong, or did I just get lucky? Who knows. But for anyone who doesn’t want to take the risk I was willing to assume, all authorities  agree that spent grains make a great addition to a compost pile, giving the finished product a welcome boost of nitrogen.

“It is not hard to compost,” wrote Karl, in another of the responses to my query on the PUFN forum. “All you need is enough brown material for the spent grains that you have; I’ve had lots of success with clean woodchips and leaves. As long as you layer the greens and browns well, you don’t need to do a lot of turning. You will want to cap the pile with leaves to hold in the moisture and the smells. If you do use woodchips, they will take a good bit of time to break down completely. you can speed up the process by sifting out the woodchips. The sifted woodchips can be added to the next batch of spent grains.”

UPDATE: By midsummer, compost, mulch, and wood-chip distribution had resumed at 3850 W. Ford Road in the park. Check for schedule.

The recycling center in West Fairmount Park usually opens its doors to aficionados of its free leaf compost  like me at the start of April. That didn’t happen this year. Blame the coronovirus, and the fact that in the old setup at the recycling center, a small throng would gather around one huge mountain of compost standing practically shoulder to shoulder to fill their buckets and bags, conduct that is off limits these days.

Philadelphia Parks & Recreation came up with a new, safe setup and commenced free compost distribution this year on May 20. Mulch and compost is now spread out into 12 different numbered piles so 12 customers at a time can load up while remaining properly socially distanced, a good 20 feet apart.

Below is the notice recently sent out by the department with details about where and how you can get free compost. Word apparently hasn’t spread very far and wide yet. I dropped by for compost on both May 20 and 21 and was the lone customer both times. (Hint: for ease of loading, back your car right up to the pile and shovel the compost directly into heavy-duty trash bags in your trunk.)

Hello Philly Food Growers,

As you may know, food production has been deemed essential during the COVID-19 crisis. Philadelphia Parks & Recreation appreciates your efforts in growing food for your families and communities.

In an effort to support food production in Philadelphia, we will reopen the Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center (3850 Ford Rd., Philadelphia, PA 19131) by appointment only for Philadelphia growers with open-bed vehicles (pick-up trucks or dump trucks) to receive free compost and mulch on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. We ask for your personal protection and the protection of others that you follow the protocols listed below. If it is determined that protocols are not being adhered to, this service will be discontinued.

For individual growers without an open-bed vehicle, there will be free piles of mulch and compost available for growers to self-load into containers at the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center’s parking lot (100 N. Horticultural Dr., Philadelphia, PA 19131). Compost and mulch will be available Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. We ask for your personal protection and the protection of others that you follow the protocols listed below. If it is observed that protocols are not being adhered to, this service will be discontinued.

Protocols for self-service compost and mulch at the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center parking lot:

• Please remain in your vehicle until loading.
• Please be mindful if there is a line of vehicles waiting. If there are more than two cars in line, you are limited to 20 minutes to collect the materials you need.
• Only one vehicle at a pile at a time.
• You will need to bring your own shovel and container.
• You must wear a mask and gloves at all times.
• You must follow directional signage and instructions from PPR Staff
• The best way to keep yourself and others safe from COVID-19 and to end the pandemic is to stay away from other people; try to keep at least six feet between you and anyone else picking up compost or mulch. If you’re having trouble keeping a safe distance, consider coming back at another time.
• You will be asked to leave if you are not following protocols.

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Protocols for open bed vehicles at the Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center:

• Please arrive 10 minutes prior to your scheduled appointment. We reserve the right to turn away any vehicles that are late to their appointment.
• We ask that you make a sign with the name of your garden and appointment time that can be read from 10 feet away.
• You will check in with the attendant at the gate and be given instructions on where to receive the materials.
• You must wear a mask and follow the instructions of PPR staff.
• You are not allowed to exit your vehicle.

Make your reservation for the Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center.

Please reach out to FarmPhilly@phila.gov with any questions or concerns.

From neighbor to neighbor: spent grains from Twisted Gingers ready for use in the Garden R.U.N. community garden in Roxborough

The Twisted Gingers brewpub, which opened for business a few blocks from our Garden R.U.N. community garden a few months before the coronavirus pandemic hit, makes great beer. We’re about to find out whether their beermaking makes good garden fertilizer. They knew about us because our garden’s informal management committee held a couple of planning meetings early this year at the pub. While they’re now closed to the public, they’re  still brewing beer and filling takeout orders, and they have begun offering us barrels of spent grains for use in the garden.

What are spent grains? In a quick search online, I have learned that it is a grainy mash that is a byproduct of beer-making, and the craft-brewing boom has generated lots of it in dispersed locations, maybe even in your neighborhood. It is far from the end of its useful life after it has been used to make beer, which extracts the sugars, leaving a high-fiber mash that’s loaded with protein and other nutrients. Socially conscious brewmasters, hating to see it hauled off to the local landfill, have gotten creative in looking for more productive uses of the stuff, as a 2012 article in CraftBeer.com explained. Some are feeding it to chickens and other animals. Others are processing it into a base for mushroom growing. Others are offering it to farms and gardens for use as a soil amendment, a trend that has become popular enough to earn a name for itself: foam to farm.

How has the foam-to-farm movement gone over on the farm and in the garden? Pat Welsh, a Southern California garden writer, engaged in an extensive discussion on the use of spent brewery grains in the garden several years ago, and seemed to offer as many caveats as endorsements.

It can be very smelly and attract flies and vermin. Some spent grains also may, apparently, have allelopathic qualities and inhibit seedling growth. Welsh says that since composting may not kill this action, you might want to test spent-grains compost by sprouting a few radish seeds in it before using it on a larger scale for seed starting. Or, says Welsh, “I would use this compost in areas of the garden where you don’t intend to plant from seeds and where you would like to prevent weeds from growing.”

Another caveat, for any gardener who wants to operate with any degree of scientific rigor (not really me), you can’t be sure of its nutrient composition. “Most spent brewery grains when used in the compost pile can be classed as a nitrogenous waste (a fast, hot, ‘green’ ingredient, like grass clippings),” Welsh says. But not if the mash is too dried out, in which case, it is carbonaceous and will consume, not exude, nitrogen.

If all of that weren’t enough to discourage use of spent grains in the garden, a commentator on Dave’s Garden forum named SoulGardenLove, who had read many rave reviews about the stuff and got a whole truckload of it, had this to say:

“For those of you that don’t know better and have any desire to ever use beer grain in your garden… here is the God’s honest truth…..It is the most rancid, vile, gross, vomit inducing pile of flytrap stench sludge I have ever had occasion to smell…. I don’t care how good this stuff is supposed to be for my garden. I’ll stick to manure…”

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hmmmm….to get the most from them, feed them to the hens and eat the eggs and spread the poo
sorry–I will go back to lurking now

Okay, I was forewarned, but I wasn’t deterred. In fact, I read enough to be intrigued. Intrigued enough about its potential benefits that I wasn’t about to wait to cycle Twisted Gingers’ spent grains through a compost pile before trying it out on plants. So I proceeded to put it directly into the garden, finding support for that move in one of Pat Welsh’s comments:

Spent brewery grains that are very soft, wet, and smelly can be dug directly into the soil … since they are already well on their way to breaking down and will release nitrogen in the form of gas directly into the ground in a form that plant roots can absorb.

The spent grains delivered to our garden were certainly soft and wet, with a pungent not-quite-rancid odor. That seemed to be about right, so in a part of one of Garden R.U.N.’s City Harvest plots with rocky, worked-over soil that badly needed replenishment, I dug trenches, filled them with spent grain, mixed it up a bit into the deeper layers of soil, and covered it with a skim of soil. I’m hoping that with some warm and rainy weather in the forecast over the next several weeks, worms and microbes can get a big jump on finishing the work started by Twisted Gingers’ brewmaster of breaking it down and incorporating the nutrients into the soil. So that it will be ready for planting in weeks, and yielding a bounteous harvest in months.

We’ll see. Stay tuned for updates.

UPDATE: See Spent Grains Pass the Radish Test.

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The compost design competition is sponsored by the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The composting system they are looking for would be suitable for use by schools and other community organizations.
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Find details about the competition, and information about how to submit your idea, in this press release.

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.

My seedlings like Philly Parks & Rec compost

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.