Thread for COMPOST, compost discussion, compost tea, etc.

was inspired by Branwell's enthusiasm and there ain't nothing in search, I know there's a gardening thread but hey why not one for compost?

L just built her own compost tea system, our second batch is gonna be ready this afternoon. Basically, you dechlorinate a barrel of water, mix in fresh compost, and add a starter (the cheap ones are mostly molasses, fancier ones have more/different ingredients). Then you aerate the liquid with an air pump for 24 hours. The turbulence knocks the microbes off of the particles they are on, and once the get into the liquid they eat the starter and multiply. It's weirdly similar to brewing beer.

We do regular backyard compost as well, using straw to aerate the layers. I also do volunteer work at a festival where we compost insane amounts of mostly paper waste, we're finally getting some of the prior years tested for residual heavy metals or other crap.

Tell me about your compost setups and give me your tips!

This is a rotten thread.

(sorry, I couldn't help myself)

FWIW my mother is a mad gardener and she's been composting as long as I can remember. IDK what her setup is like but nearly every piece of organic waste in the house ends up there.

We also used to have a composting toilet before it was ruled in violation of some municipal code and we replaced it with a septic system.

We have a compost bin where I dump our vegetable scraps and egg shells, but I never turn it and haven't added leaves/straw/lawn clippings in at least a couple of years. It's a nasty mess on top but the overall level of stuff never seems to rise, so it must be breaking down at the lower layers. I wouldn't use it to fertilize the garden until I'd added some clippings, turned it well and let the whole thing break down properly.

I tried worm composting for a couple of years and that worked great, except for trying to sift the worms out of a finished batch to put into a second bin. I got lazy and didn't keep my eye on moisture levels, but I never was sure if they died from getting too warm or getting too wet. I still have the bins -- might go down to the bait shop for a new batch of red wigglers.

<3 the smell/feel of successful compost, unfortunately i'm terrible at getting the right green/brown ratio, so i usually end up with the dreaded nitrogen run-off. studied vermiculture as part of my hort study a few years ago so i have plans to set up a worm farm which means you can directly tap the liquid for fertiliser teas. also: my brother's just got a bokashi compost set-up which uses effective microorganisms to break down the food scraps through fermentation in anaerobic conditions, so will be interesting to see how that works out...

whoah anaerobic compost! did not know that was a thing.

We compost.

We moved out here (Western Mass) last summer and it seems like a lot of folks here compost and keep a vegetable garden through the summer. There was already a compost bin in our back yard so we started filling it up and this summer we have lovely rich soil to grow strawberries and cilantro in. It's great.

Also out here recycling is free and you pay by the bag for trash removal, so we love seeing how little trash we can actually throw away each week, trying to recycle or compost most things. It's fun, wish I'd done it before!

OMG, AWESOME THREAD!!!!

<3

Lambeth Council does food composting so all of my household compost goes in there, which makes me a bit sad because I'd really love to have a wormery, but don't have the space indeed any soil (back garden is totally paved and decked, and shared with 3 other flats, none of whom garden).

Up at the Community Garden we have various shades of composting. Various gardeners keep compost bins for their stuff. Then there are the garden's compost piles. Then there are the BIG MASSIVE INDUSTRIAL COMPOST HEAPS which are mostly full of branches that have been trimmed by the Council or the park staff. (Our community garden is technically inside the Common, so we share compost and facilities.)

I've been learning the shades of stuff you can compost and stuff you can't - they have this rule (which seems weird to me) that you can't compost any weeds with roots on them. Which seems odd to me, as if it's been out of the ground in the sun for an hour, it's unlikely to grow again. But them's the rules. Also no composting of anything that is diseased, which makes more sense.

I need to learn more about composting. What I'm really in love with at the moment is bug hotels. Which is something I saw in Upper Dulwich Wood - they make these weird woodpiles and huge constructions of bits of rotting wood piled up in towers. Which are for insects to move in! Especially Stag Beetles. I'd love to build a bug hotel in my back garden but I bet the neighbours would freak out. Oh well.

in my personal experience some roots (bindweed, the bad kind of buttercups, "Himalayan" blackberries that are actually from Armenia, etc.) can live for days or even weeks in the hot sun out of the ground, so that part makes sense to me.

insect hotel is super cool, that's one of the functions of the "unhealthy" trees in an old growth forest.

Ah, it would be the bindweed then. We do have a problem with that stuff. (But the flowers are so pretty!)

We also have Japanese Knotweed infesting the walled part of our orchard, but the council has been alerted for months and no one has come to dig it out. Hoping maybe they'll do that when they come to relay the paths.

But yeah! Sorry, off topic. Just "things that should not go in compost heaps" knotweed is definitely one.

They're leaving a lot more dead wood on the common these days. Some of the large chunks of tree have been moved, e.g. to the verge opposite the car park to double as a kind of barrier as well as nursery areas for insects, young plants etc. But then again, some of those stumps, they start sending out shoots again! Lime trees especially seem to be prone to that. Leave a chunk of dead lime trunk rotting on your common, soon you have a baby lime tree. How? Who knows.

What we've been doing is saving all kitchen scraps in biodegradable "plastic" corn starch bags in a canister. When it gets full, we throw the bag in one of several large clay pots in the back garden area.

Bugs and rain run-through spread the no-effort compost tea through the drainage hole right into the soil. I'll through some weeds or leaves on top. Vegetable seeds sprout out of it.

After a while we fill the pot the rest of the way with soil and plant things. We've only done it a year or less, so no real results to report. Our organic material stays here and nature does the rest.

I'll "throw" some weeds on top, not "through". I don't have the space or neighbors for proper compost bins and methods.

interesting - I assume the bags have some permeable membrane that lets oxygen into the insides?

we don't seal the bags, and they kind of melt away after a while.

My latest experiment is a very solid cardboard box on the dirt part of the patio. I laid it on a layer of cut shrub branches, and partially camouflaged it with rectangular clay pots and bricks. I'm layering kitchen scraps and bush trimmings in it. I hope the box will gradually collapse in upon itself but maintain some structure, and I will plant blackberries out of the small hill.

I'm not concerned about potential chemical contamination from the cardboard itself because of fungal breakdown, rain dilution, bacteria, time or some other magic process.

^the cardboard will also add to the carbon content as it degrades.

general rule with composting weeds: big no to perennials, especially things like bindweed and vinca since they'll just reproduce from any fragments with nodes, and taproots like dock/dandelion store all their energy in the root so they'll just resprout too (though you can add the foliage). annuals/biennials can be composted as long as they're not seeding: the heat kills some but not all of the seeds. i also do the piles of pruned branches left in a heap to break down, amazing little eco-systems.

This is all so interesting about the roots! (Esp thinking about taproots and rhizomes and their power to sprout again.)

This is the weirdest/funniest thing (well, to a novice gardener like me) - that one of the biggest weeds we get in the garden at the moment is potatoes. Like, seriously, potato plants just sprouting up where they have no business being, and in beds no one can remember seeding potatoes in, in the 3 years we've had the space. I'm now wondering if a potato got in the shredder when we mulched, and bits of shredded up potato have sent new potatoes up all over the place? It's quite funny, though, these random weed-potatoes. (I just dig them out and eat them as itty bitty baby new potatoes.)

ha, i can totally see that as a possibility, any big enough fragment with an eye: new potato plant! propagation is an amazing thing.

I can totally stan for compost. You can get all micro-managey about it if that's your sort of thing, or you can follow the PIUALIR approach (that's Pile It Up and Let It Rot). Guess which one I do?

note: I have learned that corks (as in wine corks) don't break down so much, which is like DUH QUINCIE that is why they are used to bottle wine. Anyhow, there are lots and lots and lots of corks floating about my veggie patch now.

We have a compost bin where I dump our vegetable scraps and egg shells, but I never turn it and haven't added leaves/straw/lawn clippings in at least a couple of years. It's a nasty mess on top but the overall level of stuff never seems to rise, so it must be breaking down at the lower layers. I wouldn't use it to fertilize the garden until I'd added some clippings, turned it well and let the whole thing break down properly.

Ha, my mom is one step behind even this. She has a wooden fence surrounding her yard and when she has scraps, eggshells, etc, she just throws them on the edge of the fence. She is really playing the decay LONG GAME.

I know this is a *bummer question* – my cat likes to kill lizards and birds and leave them in a certain part of the yard. Would it be ok to throw those in the compost? It's not going to fertilize any food.

They'll get maggoty and a lot stinkier than veg scraps, but I guess they'd break down...? Rotting carcass smell would put me off that, but anosmia means ymmv.

putting lizards/birds in non-food compost is a bit dicey... I'm not the expert here by any means, but in the large-scale pile I work with (we're talking 50' long 20' wide 10' high at the beginning of each year), meat & dairy in small amounts is no big deal cuz it gets above 140 degrees F, killing any pathogens.

the problem with the smaller piles, like what we all have at home, is that the temperature of the active pile doesn't get as hot. also, the meat attracts different species of insects, carnivorous ones, that eat the good worms. this is especially true when your overall percentage of meat goes up. in the large pile I mention, the only meat that goes in is, like, leftover chicken bones and plate scraps. in a small home pile, I'm guessing some birds and lizards would add up to a significantly higher percentage of the total volume/mass.

so I guess my point is, the meat would inhibit the normal compost breakdown process.

The heat thing is really interesting. I am a completely novice and know nothing at all (beyond conventional folk wisdom I've picked up from grandmothers and in-laws) but the rotting process and the generation of heat therefrom - I am assuming it is unlocking the energy that the plants stored in their cells via hot microbe action. But if anyone has a good link on how this actually works, or would like to explain to a novice Why Compost Is Warm, I would love to read that!

no longer have any links bookmarked, but if you want a very basic explanation? cribbing from my old composting assignment: heat generation is caused by the presence of microorganisms which act to break down the carbon organic matter... as the temperature level rises the conditions for heat loving (thermophilic) bacteria to populate the compost occur... aids in killing weed seeds and pathogens... speeds up levels of decomposition of proteins, fats, cellulose... /hortnerd

OK, wow that hortnerd stuff is really interesting to me! Thank you for taking the time to explain.

So basically it's kind of a pile-on (LOL) effect - that the more microbes there are generating "body heat" (or probably biochemical heat from molecular breakdown) the temperature rise attracts other microbes which work more effectively at digesting the compost. (And the heat itself probably has an effect, the way that cooking a vegetable makes it easier to digest.)

This is so fascinating!

I don't use any animal manure or artificial fertilizers on my veg plot, so I have to compost like a crazy man to replace the nutrients in my soil. I've kind of organised a compost collection thing at work and all that goes straight up to my allotment. Well I say organised, but basically I've put a collection bin in each of our kitchen areas and people just chuck their tea bags/coffee grounds/banana skins in them and I wind up with about 4 kilos of material each day. I run commute so it normally means a heavy pack running home - it would make much more sense to compost on site and take the finished compost away with me but there's nowhere really to put a composter without pissing someone off.

Anyhow, I've got a row of 8 large plastic dalek-looking compost bins and basically I fill them up one by one and by the time I've reached the end, the compost process has finished in the first one. It's a pain to try and mix the compost while it's doing its thing, so I just pile it in and leave it alone. I do stab at it with a big metal pole though, just to let some air in. Have never added any worms but it's always amazing how many there are in there. End product is decent enough, but cos there's a high proportion of tea-bags going in, I get left with all these weird ghostly plastic tea-bag exoskeletons blowing around the place.

Aside from that, I've got about four compost bays made out of large wooden pallets lashed together and all my garden waste gets chucked into those. Again, I don't bother turning them, but that's mostly cos there are always frogs/slow worms/lizards living in it and I don't really want to disturb them too much. Once a year though I'll carefully dig a couple of the bays out and use the contents for earthing up potatoes.

Jesus what a dull post.

Not dull at all! It's like most of ILX basically attained The Allotment Age around the same time, and this stuff is now absolutely fascinating!

I get left with all these weird ghostly plastic tea-bag exoskeletons blowing around the place.

this is a problem with the big pile I was talking about, it is maybe 75% paper, and we have to be extra vigilant about hot tea/coffee cups in particular - they have what we call "cup condoms" inside that shiny white paper, a plastic lining that never (well, almost never) breaks down. a big part of our job is educating people about those, and trying to get vendors to stop using them (they are cheaper than the compostable hot cups, money talks at festivals)

universal problem with laminated products i guess, hard to recycle cos it's not easy to separate the layers

so L is now trying this fancy brand for her compost tea starter:

http://earthfort.com/

she made up the first batch last night - unlike the previous method, where you just mix all the compost and starter into the water, this one requires you to mix the starter and some fish emulsion directly into the compost, then let it sit for 36-72 hours while (I assume) the microbes multiply. After that, you can put it in the water. The fish emulsion is super stinky, hope that all goes away during the brewing process. It should be ready to put into the water tonight or tomorrow morning.

I've got one of those bins that you can buy cheaply from the council and get a curious enjoyment from thinking "It's full" and then finding that a couple of weeks later there is plenty of room for more weeds/kitchen scraps. I don't think I've ever used any compost though.

If any Londoners want to know about COMPOST, we are doing a COMPOST WORKSHOP at the Streatham Community Garden on the 31st of August. (registration may be required, I shall ask if anyone has any interest in attending) Come and learn everything you ever wanted to know about COMPOST!!!