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Old 09-24-2018, 07:35 PM   #14
Ben E Lou
Morgado's Favorite Forum Fascist
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Greensboro, NC
COMPOSTING--Prologue
For the next six-ish months, I'm guessing the majority of my writing will be about composting. There's a *lot* of good information out there on it, and I've done more than my share of reading. I figure some will be reading this who are largely unfamiliar with the process of composting, as I was three-ish months ago, so I intend to provide a basic framework of how it works here. There's some great detailed reading from the aforementioned NC Extension Service here, but to cover some basics...


What *I* Like About Composting
  • It's wicked kewl science-y stuff. It's an interesting challenge to eyeball the right mix and layering of leaves, grass, water, and kitchen scraps to get that pile heated up to 150 degrees or more.
  • If all goes well, I could reduce costs by $250 or more on soil amendments.
That's pretty much it for me. Yeah, there are other good reasons to do it, but those two do it for me.


Key Considerations For The Way I'm Composting

I'm doing an outdoor pile without any sort of framing/containing. From my reading, it seems like if doing it this way is an option for you (i.e. if you have enough space and there aren't aesthetic concerns,) that's the easiest and least expensive method. My pile is over 120 feet from the back of the house, in a corner of the yard shielded by the fence on two sides, storage shed on a third, and tall (over 4 feet in some cases) wildflowers on the fourth. For those unfamiliar with composting process, here are the key pieces as it relates to what I'm doing.
  • An ideal "hot" pile (the kind I'm doing) has a mix of "green" matter (higher in nitrogen, mostly-recently-living stuff like grass clippings, fruit/veggie kitchen scraps, and coffee grounds) and "brown" material (higher in carbon, mostly dead or inorganic matter like dead leaves, paper, cardboard, paper towels, etc.)
  • The decomposition process, when a "hot" pile is large enough to be self-insulating, produces heat. I'm shooting to maintain a temperature of 140 degrees or more, because 140 is consistently touted as the temperature above which weed seeds are killed, and a fair number of those are/will be in my pile.
  • Adding a bit of water and dirt is recommended when building a pile--something I've done previously, but forgot to do today when I expanded my pile greatly. We'll see if that hurts me.
  • I have virtually no dead leaves in my yard--not even enough to be bothered with raking them, so I have to get them elsewhere. I've previously been collecting them from my next-door neighbor, but today (lawn waste day in my part of Greensboro) I went all-out: took the back seat out of the Sienna, covered the bed with trashbags, dropped the girls off at school at 7:15, then rode throughout my neighborhood until I'd filled the back of the vehicle with bags of leaves.
  • Starbucks keeps their coffee grounds for gardeners. Apparently, those things are GOLD for compost piles. A couple of weeks ago I went around to six nearby Starbucks (yes, there are six of 'em within 3.5 miles of my house. I live in a yuppie-land...) and filled the aforementioned van with bags of grounds.
  • The main part of my pile right now is roughly 6 feet by 6 feet, and 2.5 feet high. Ideally, a pile should be turned when the temperature of it drops, roughly weekly, so I probably don't want mine to get much bigger than that. I may create a second pile next week with another run through the neighborhood. We'll see.
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Last edited by Ben E Lou : 09-24-2018 at 07:39 PM.
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