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Success!! I made my pallet compost bins (minus one pallet). The one in the middle should slide out to allow us to transfer compost from side one to side two. Made from heat-treated pallets collected for free, some pieces of wood from a disintegrating picnic table the last owners left, some buckthorn sticks, and a handful of screws from a box of 500 I bought several years ago, knowing I'd eventually find uses for them.
Here's the bin a few hours later filled with apple leaves, some failed mushroom buckets, and a little fertilizer because I don't have much green to put in it.
Waiting to go get the motherload of leaves from my friend across town.
Does anyone know how well fertilizer works to make a hot pile?
#compost #allotment #gardening
I've never had a hot pile. I've always just piled things up and hoped for the best. I think I would love to have compost that doesn't randomly sprout stuff.
@MCDuncanLab Mix in a good amout of fresh grass clippings or, if you've got a craft brewery nearby, a sack of spent grain. If we add both our heap gets up to 70°C (~160°F)
Oh, exciting!! I'd never thought about getting material from a brewery. There is a brewery just down the road. I'll give them a call and see if they give away spent grain.
Grass clippings are hard to come by this time of year.
This is the eternal problem for us, a glut of browns in the fall but few greens and a glut of greens in the spring but few browns.
Most spent grain goes to animal feed (for free) but some breweries pay to have it collected. If you can grow some hops then maybe a collaboration is in order.
@MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood I'd avoid fertilizer. If you don't have enough green material (grass clippings etc) maybe a small amount of all nitrogen fertilizer.
Yeah, it's fall, no greens. Or certainly not enough to counterbalance the massive influx of leaves coming in the next couple of weeks.
@MCDuncanLab well even cold composting will give you great leaf mold next year. Great mulch as is or you can add green next yr.
True, but some of what I'd like to compost would benefit from hot to kill seeds.
@MCDuncanLab I understand. I'd look for a 30-0-0 fertilizer (use sparingly on a regular basis, say when you turn the pile) or better yet a slow release one that is high in nitrogen. Good luck. Feed the soil.
@MCDuncanLab you could also try the technique they use for straw bale gardening. Look up the info on conditioning a bale online and adapt to your pile. That should get the party started.
@MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood Not sure what you mean by a "hot pile", but if I'm starting a new compost I add a few spadefuls of the soil out of my garden in layers.
Hot pile is getting the compost to get composting fast and generating heat. The ideal situation is 30% carbon-rich material like leaves and paper and 1% nitrogen-rich material like grass clippings and kitchen waste.
The problem with composting is that in the fall, you have an abundance of carbon and the rest of the year an abundance of nitrogen.
Can you get some poop? Horse, goat, rabbit, cow, pretty much anything will liven the pile up.
A lot of what you need to get the pile cooking is damp stuff that'll hold moisture. The main difference between brown and green is the moisture content.
Dry brown leaves slowly break down, mainly due to fungus. Damp green stuff gets a full bacterial microbiome going that generates its own warmth so it won't freeze over winter. To much wet and you go anaerobic bacterial and that's just stinky and possibly dangerous.
If you can get some poo and turn it in to the pile to hold damp against the leaves long enough to break down the leaf cuticle and let the bacteria into nice nutrient rich spaces, they'll do their job.
Stinky food waste works well too.
@MCDuncanLab @Judeet99 It can be difficult getting enough greens in winter.
For hot compost you’ll need to get as many high nitrogenous compostables together as you can to mix with the browns: vegetable peelings, grass clippings, coffee grounds, animal manure, seaweed.
Comfrey leaves, nettles and bean pods and plants are really good compost activators too.
Add some lactic acid bacteria to the rainwater (always add non chlorinated water to a pile) to give the microbes a good boost too.
@MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood. Nettles and water make a hot compost tea if you have access to free range nettles. It’s a great new compost site.
It’s fall nettles are dead.
@MCDuncanLab. Our rogue nettles are still growing in southern Minnesota. They are the only green thing. We have an outside bucket of November nettle brew. It’s working because it smells.
I’ll go check there’s a small patch of them near our well maybe they’re still kicking.
@Pollinators @MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood
I wouldn't drink it!
@MCDuncanLab it looks great! I did the same thing with making the middle partition removable.
Btw coffee grounds are very nitrogen rich (green waste adds nitrogen, brown waste adds carbon). If you have coffee shops near by you could ask them if they have any used coffee grounds you could take.
Good idea!
@MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood It's used to jump-start composting in straw bales. I haven't heard of folks using in on leaf piles, but it seems like it would work the same. I've considered it for my own. I think the recommendation is something really high in nitrogen.
@MCDuncanLab @laurenheywood
I have some pallets which I was going to deconstruct and then make a compost bin. I didn't want the gaps in the wall. But I guess yours is a good solution so I might try that instead.
Seems to be ok so far. I figured I could always stuff some chicken wire or fabric on the sides if it was spilling out too much.
@MCDuncanLab
At my last house, in CA, I did use whole pallets but i had some fibre board which was originally a circular composter. I straightened it out and lined the inside. I don't have anything like that now but I guess chicken wire or some old chicken feed bags would work. Oh wait, I don't have chickens anymore 