How to Make Organic Compost DR ELAINE INGHAM.

Transcription

1 How to Make Organic Compost DR ELAINE INGHAM

2 CONTENTS SMALL-SCALE BACKYARD COMPOSTING... 1 Before you start How to make compost heap using wire... 1 Overview of the process... 2 YOUR STARTING MATERIALS... Error! Bookmark not defined. Woody Materials... Error! Bookmark not defined. Bokashi Wood Chips... Error! Bookmark not defined. Green Materials... Error! Bookmark not defined. Coffee as Green Materials... Error! Bookmark not defined. High Nitrogen Materials... Error! Bookmark not defined. Lucerne... Error! Bookmark not defined. YOUR COMPOST PILE... Error! Bookmark not defined. Your Compost Recipe... Error! Bookmark not defined. Building your compost pile... Error! Bookmark not defined. Wetting your materials... Error! Bookmark not defined. THE COMPOSTING PROCESS... Error! Bookmark not defined. Finished Compost... Error! Bookmark not defined. Your container options... Error! Bookmark not defined. Large-scale Composting... Error! Bookmark not defined. Adjustments... Error! Bookmark not defined. Temperature... Error! Bookmark not defined. REMINDERS... Error! Bookmark not defined. ABOUT THE AUTHOR... Error! Bookmark not defined.

3 SMALL-SCALE BACKYARD COMPOSTING On a backyard small-scale composting systems where you could put together a ton or half a ton of really good compost that you made yourself. You can monitor the compost and make certain that it is composting properly and you will be able to turn it yourself and you know the source of compost materials you ve got. In this book, I am going to show you how to do the small-scale composting approach. Before you start... First, we need to have our equipments for you to be able to do this. The first equipment that you will need is a wireframe. You want the thick enough wire. Go and buy this at the local garden store or hardware store where you can get lengths of the wire material. You want to have something that's easy for you to move around and about your arm width wide, about the same across, so that it's in a circle. How to make compost heap using wire You could by a roll of wire for about $60 for a 10 meter-roll and that's plenty enough to make two large compost heaps but you can adjust them to size. First you have to lay it down because when you get the last part out, it can pop open. If you do this yourself you have to anchor the first end using a pitchfork. Then we measure it to cut a 10 meter roll into half then pull the pitchfork out and that's basically it. Now you just have to clip it to make it a circle. We're going to put our starting compost materials in the wireframe. We'll layer them in at first, so will be able to see what percentage of our pile is woody, what percentage is green, what percentage is high nitrogen. Then we may repeat the woody, green, high nitrogen, but we're going to layer it in so we're making certain that we're getting the proper proportions of the materials. We also want to be able to get a little ladder or a bucket, be able to stand in the bucket and walk inside the wire frame once we start to put that starting material in the wireframe. We need to have it compacted so the density of the material is enough that the microorganisms all come in contact with the starting materials and we can get a good temperature going. The weight of the human being is plenty of compaction. That's all the more dense we want to get those materials. It is better if you walk around it and don t jump on it to get it dense enough. That's where you can really compare how much woody, how much green, and how much high nitrogen have you put into your starting materials and you would be able to get it right. You need to have your thermometer handy. You really want thermometers that have stainless steel stems and it would be better to have a really long thermometer so you could have at least a meter-long thermometer and it might be nice to have a little bit larger face so it would be easier to read the temperature. 1

4 You also need a host to water your starting materials to get the moisture up to 50%. You will also need a pitchfork or shovel to mix your compost material. Overview of the process Collect and prepare your starting compost materials and put them in your wireframe. After we've got all the starting materials, we're going to let it compost and it's the biology on the compost material, the organisms that come in on your sawdust, on your cardboard, on your paper, on the green grass material, on your green leafy material from your trees, the garden vegetable materials from your house when you're bringing in kitchen waste material, the high nitrogen containing legume material, like peas and beans, lucerne, clover, vetch, leguminous plant material, or when you put manure, the two kinds of high-nitrogen-containing materials that can go into a compost pile. We're going to make sure that we've got the proper percentages. Then, we'll measure temperature the next day and if we've got the proper ratios of food resources, we'll be generating temperature by tomorrow morning. If it were up to degrees, we are going to want to turn the compost pile. If it's not up to degrees, we just leave it alone, let it keep on composting. Within the first three days it must get up to that degrees temperature. We have to turn it. If it doesn't get up to that temperature, then we're going to have to add more high nitrogen material to the pile. As soon as we start adding something, we're going to mix and turn the compost pile. When that happens, you just unclip the wire. It might be easiest to have actual clips on the wireframe instead of bent wire material because it is hard to get apart if you bent wire. You take wire and unwind it. You might want to set it up a little bit wider circle and get some clips in. You take it apart and pull it off of your compost material, move it over to another position. Bring it on over the side. Then close the wireframe and clip it back together. Then, you take your shovel or your pitchfork, whatever you've got to start mixing your compost material and as you mix it, you probably want to take the stuff from the middle of the pile, reserve it. While the existing material goes into the pile, the high temperature material goes back on top. That's the mixing process that you would be dealing with, whenever the compost pile gets up to a high enough temperature that you need to turn it. When we look at the regulations for compost, you have to get above 55 degrees in the centre of the pile for a full three days because that full three day length period of time will kill the weed seeds, kill the human pathogens, kill the plant pathogens and kill the root-feeding nematodes. Of course, in our plant material that we're starting off with, we've got to make sure that all of those disease and pest problems have been completely removed from our compost before we had finished compost, before we might be putting that material back on the plants, on our soils, mixing it into our soils and improving the health of the soil and the plants that we are growing. So it is very important that the temperature is 55 degrees for three full days but we don't want to get above 65 degree Celsius for any length of time. 2

5 Every once in a while, you might come out and measure temperature first thing in the morning and you'll find out that it's already about 65 degrees, then you've got to get it turned right away, immediately. Don't ever let these materials be over 65 degrees for any length of time because when we're above 65 degrees, that means the bacteria and that fungi in the compost pile are growing so rapidly that they're using up the oxygen in the pile faster than oxygen can be defused into your compost pile. We are going anaerobic and if we go anaerobic, we are making some very plant toxic materials, we are losing our nutrients, and we are losing our nitrogen, our phosphorus, or sulphur, as gases. We are dropping the ph of that material to some very low phs, if we allow it to go anaerobic. Temperature is a really good way to tell whether you are going anaerobic. As long as you turn the pile, get oxygen back into the pile, as soon as you start to run out of oxygen, measure the temperature, then you're going to compost and produce some really good compost, as long as it doesn't go anaerobic for any significant period of time. It's got to get high enough temperature for long enough. As soon as it gets to be high temperature, above degrees, we want to turn the pile again. You take the wire from around the compost material, set up your frame again and then mix the material so the inside of the pile, the hot part, is now on the outside of the pile. What was on the outside of the pile is now in the middle of your pile. We want to be turning this a couple times to make sure that absolutely everything that pile gets into the middle position sometime during the composting process. 3