Compost only logical for ‘Masteress of Humus’

By TIM KING

The Land Correspondent

SAUK CENTRE, Minn. — The Flowers family takes the health of their farms’ environment very seriously.

“My husband Jim’s family has been farming the same land for three generations now, and they are very careful about how they treat the land,” Kristy Flowers said. “One year, my husband was talked into treating the grasshoppers to save the crops — and he regretted it instantly. He found dead snakes and rodents shortly after, swearing never to go against his family’s belief in no pesticides or insecticides again.”

Flowers, whose environmental awareness developed while she was growing up on a farm near Brainerd, Minn., has turned that concern for the world around her into Kristy K Organics. The company sells a range of natural biological products to maintain and improve soil health in customers’ gardens and lawns.

Kristy has been big on gardening and growing her own food since she was a child.

“My mom was very adamant that chemicals were terrible,” Flowers said. “She also used those same principles in our vast garden. We raised all the veg-

She calls herself “Founder and Manageress of Humus.”

Compost was a logical place for the Manageress of Humus to start.

“My husband had made compost for his farm so we used the basic recipe and just tweaked it a bit to make it for lawns and gardens,” Flowers said. “We knew what we wanted the end result to be so we worked closely with Alan Doering and Harold Stanislawski at AURI to get there.”

Kristy K’s compost has several ingredients including composted poultry and cow manure, from local farms, and bark fines.

“Poultry manure is high in nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and calcium,” Flowers said. “Cow manure also brings nutrients and helps increase moistureholding capacity and aeration. Plus, the composted cow manure contains beneficial bacteria that can improve etables you would expect on a farm, corn, onions, potatoes, beans, raspberries, rhubarb, and of course, carrots that I remember pulling out of the ground and eating right there. I was a 4-H kid and grew flowers and vegetables for 4-H projects. I had my own flower garden in the middle of our old windmill tower.”

In the spirit of the lively biologically active soil that Kristy and Jim grew up with Kristy founded Kristy K Organics.