Today's prac is everything compost. We head over to the Pottager garden and check out a 'hot compost' that was built there as a display. Marcus tells us about the three different types of composting - cold (add to/build it slowly and it will break down gradually over many months, very slow however and does not heat up sufficiently to pasteurise weed seeds) hot or thermophyllic (build it all at once and when the temperature heats up (ideally between 50-60 degrees), turn at regular intervals to evenly break down materials, then allow to cool and use, the fastest process that is used commercially and kills all the weed seeds, pests and diseases) and lastly compost tea (add ingredients to water to break down into a compost juice, smelly!)
When we look inside this small home garden form of a hot compost we are impressed to see how quickly the materials have broken down even though this pile has not been turned yet.
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| Well on the way to useful compost! |
However now it's time for us to learn how to build a new one from scratch and all we need to start us off is two star pickets to stabilise the pile and a rectangle marked out on the ground as a guide.
Hot composting is basically adding layers of Carbon and Nitrogen material in a ratio of 30:1 to heat up, pasteurise and perform rapid breakdown of materials to recycle back into the soil and enable an ideal "closed system" in your garden.
The Carbon materials are your dry materials such as straw, hay, paper, chipped small branches, leaf litter etc... and the Nitrogenous materials are your wet materials such as grass clippings, manure, vegetable scraps, weeds and plant materials etc...
Marcus starts our new compost off with a layer of spent grass hay. This is usually the rain damaged hay cut in summer that can be purchased for around $2 a bale and is a fantastic low cost carbon ingredient. I have heaps of these bales left over at the end of each season but I originally resisted using my hay scraps on the compost because of the grass seeds. However I learn now I have only ever been "cold" composting and adding gradually to a pile that slowly (and painfully) breaks down over a very long time. However using a hot compost technique correctly will insure the pile will heat up to the optimal 50-60 degrees and this is sufficient to kill weed seeds off whilst still maintaining the beneficial organisms that help break down the materials. Anything hotter than 70 degrees however is too hot and may kill the good as well as the bad. Turning the pile at regular intervals will temporarily cool the pile and keep it at the optimal temperature as well as ensuring an even breakdown of materials.
As we start with the layers Marcus points out how important it is to keep the sides of the rectangle neat and even and water the pile as you go to activate the breaking down process. Ideally all the hay should be soaked in water before building the pile but hosing as we go will work fine for now.
After our first layer is complete we add rock dust and chicken manure pellets to activate the heap.
Finally comes our wet or green layer and today we are using Hippeastrum leaf cuttings fresh from the nursery.We make sure to take these right to the edges and keep everything as evenly distributed across the layers as possible.
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| Everyone doing a great job of adding the layers and watering in. |
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| Phillipa paying homage to the compost gods. |
That's it! Now we just repeat these layers until we have a sufficiently sized pile or our materials run out!
A group of us continue to build up the new pile while the rest of us turn our attention back to the existing pile and get ready to give it it's first turn!
This is done by basically pulling it apart very carefully and separating all the large chunks as best as we can and rebuilding it back up again from scratch. Julie, Phillipa, Michael and I are up for the task and get into it. Whilst we pull the half broken down materials apart we come across some white fungusy looking spores in the material that Marcus explains are the beneficial "Actinomycetes" fungal bacteria that aid in the breakdown. It's very important to use gloves and not breath this material in when handling any compost as it can be dangerous to get these spores in your airways.
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| The white specks are the beneficial Actinomycetes fungal bacteria. |
With all the material pulled apart we can now start to rebuild the pile again, making sure to put the outer (less broken up) layers on the inside as we go. Keeping the sides nice and straight is very important and we do a reasonable job although the pile does lean in slightly as we get higher!
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| Hard at work rebuilding the new pile. |
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| Our finished efforts - Not bad I think! |
The completed old and new piles look great and we make sure to rake up and wash down thoroughly afterwards to finish up. It will be great to visit the piles in a few weeks to see how quickly they are progressing into lovely usable compost.
A couple of days later back at Govt House for my rotation day, I ask Mick to show me their composting system as I know they do it on a large scale here and use a tractor to turn it - just as we would like to do on our property to make enough compost for our big garden plans!
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| The compost piles in the paddock at Govt House. This one is cooking and the one on the right is cooked and ready for use. |
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| Turning the pile at Govt House and learning the controls. |
At home we have everything at our fingertips for fantastic large scale hot composting. We have two horses to supply us with regular manure. We have grass clippings all year round and spent/old hay from cleaning out the hay shed each year. We plan to soon have a chicken scratching pen to throw our kitchen scraps into and clean out regularly when they have sufficiently been broken down and conveniently pecked into small pieces for us, as well as the chicken manure mixed with straw when we clean out the hen house. Add to this all our green weeding materials and chipped plant cuttings from the garden we should have quite a huge amount of materials we can make a lovely large scale compost with to put right back on the garden and vege patch.
And now I know how to build and turn the pile....... all we need is a tractor....
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| You can see behind the tractor the newest pile that is still to be built. Mainly grass cuttings and leaf litter at this stage. |
Excellent coverage of your activities Em. Ratio's for Carbon Nitrogen of 30:1 are natural ratios commonly found in nature. Ratios between 20:1 and the above are what we would be looking for in the ingredients we use in our heap when we first build it. The heap once composted comes can come back to about 15:1 when completed.
ReplyDeleteAlso Actinomycetes are microorganisms, bacteria, but they are filamentous and look a bit like fungi, but they are not. They are important organisms in the conversion of carbon matter into humus and they can suppress disease through the production of antibiotics such as in the varieties Streptomycin and Aureomycin.