It’s been a busy few weeks at the WLBOTT Agricultural Extension Service (Go Waggies!). In addition to our usual duties that include repairs to the manure spreader, seed selections, and debates over crop rotation (“i before e except after c” gives us guidance: Idaho potatoes, Eggplant, Cucamelon[1]), we were wondering if it’s time to utilize our compost heap.
[1] Cucamelon
Before instituting our “No Parrots While Harvesting Cucamelon” policy, we had numerous eye injuries.
After the policy, we encouraged protective eye wear.
Back to the Compost
For years we’ve been adding to the compost heap, but it never gets any taller, implying that a great deal of compression is taking place. Frankly, the compost bin scares us a little, so we gathered the Elders to ponder over the situation. Baba Yaga, who is currently residing in the WLBOTT test gardens, was curious.
Heap Analysis
We used the powers of Elder G to predict the internal state of the compost heap.
Geological Formations
The World’s Largest Fire Ant Colony
Armadillo Habitat
A Little Background
There a period of geological history, where plants covered the earth, but there was no fungus or bacteria to break down the dead plant material. This caused enormous deposits of dead plant material.
Elder G gives us the details.
It’s one of those wonderfully strange chapters in Earth’s story where the planet briefly forgot how to clean up after itself.
We’re talking about the late Carboniferous Period (roughly 359 to 299 million years ago) – a time when the world was less “yard with a compost bin” and more “yard where nothing ever gets taken out.”
The Great Pile-Up
During this era, vast swampy forests spread across the continents. Think:
Towering club mosses the size of trees
Giant ferns
Thick, humid wetlands stretching for miles
Plants were thriving… but decomposition was lagging behind.
The Missing Ingredient
Here’s the twist: The tough structural material in plants—lignin—is hard to break down. Today, fungi (especially certain white-rot fungi) are experts at dismantling it.
But back then? Those fungi either:
didn’t exist yet, or
hadn’t evolved the biochemical tools to do the job efficiently
So when trees died, they didn’t rot away quickly. They just… stacked up.
The Slow Transformation
Layer upon layer of dead plant material accumulated in oxygen-poor swamps. Over millions of years:
Plant matter → peat
Peat → coal (under pressure and heat)
And voilà: the origin of most of the world’s major coal deposits.
Your compost pile’s imaginary “peat → coal → diamonds” progression? That’s basically a backyard reenactment of the Carboniferous… minus a few hundred million years and some tectonic drama.
