Composting

Small news on the compost front. Have built a new bin from second hand pallets that were given away on a local facebook group. I'm going to use this one to make some fast bacterial compost. This will hopefully take around a fortnight. This is a labour intensive process requiring regular turning and monitoring but it will produce decent compost quickly. Am using horse manure and wood chip, cardboard  as well as misc dried out weeds mixed together.

What is Compost?

Compost is organic material that has been decomposed into a fine nutrient and humus rich soil conditioner.

Anaerobic vs Aerobic

Anaerobic compost works quickly but produces undesirable digestate and methane gas. If you can process the digestate and harvest the gas this can be a very useful way to make compost and energy on a large scale. Bokashi compost bins use this process on a smaller scale.

Aerobic is what most home composters typically aim for. Oxygen loving bacteria, fungi and insects process your food and garden waste. Done well this will produce enough heat to kill off unwanted bacteria and also any seeds in the compost. To achieve this you will need to make sure that your compost bin doesn't get to wet, or too dry and you will need to turn it several times to make sure it is aerated. You can also use a special compost mixing tool

Hints and Tips

Going to have to be honest here, compost is not an area of massive expertise for me yet. But there are a couple of rules of thumb you should follow.

• Bigger pile is better as it generates and holds more heat
• Roughly twice by volume brown to green ingredients
• Keep it moist but not wet.
• Turn regularly

Green ingredients are high in Nitrogen and usually green in colour. The exception to this is manure which has very high nitrogen content and must be treated as green

Brown ingredients are high in carbon and usually brown. Dried grass, cardboard, paper, straw, wood etc.

There are many guides out there with complex recipes and carbon and nitrogen values. But I've found eye balling 2:1 by volume works quite well in my context.

If you compost is damp and smelly, add more browns, if its isn't getting warm or doing anything add more green.

To make life easier I include large bits of wood in my normal slow compost as it helps keep everything aerated. I pick or sieve these out and put them into my next pile.