Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
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
@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.