Arkansawyer

Making dirt. Take the most inhospitable environment that you control, say a gravel driveway, and turn it into a garden.

Anyone here have those green organics bins for city pickup?

At my city place, I use it for the *stinky* stuff (meat, diapers, etc). But, I have two others(same type and size) that I fill up with green compostable organics.

I then take them to my country place and compost them there.

Hate to see this stuff in a land fill.

Are you at all worried about the pigments on the paper in your bin? A lot of purists won't use colored paper.

http://science.reddit.com/info/2mteq/comments

if you are so inclined... :) we appreciate it!

I've two of those actually. They work quite well. It's amazing the quantity of garbage it actually takes to fill it. It can be like 6 months with stuff going in and in and in and the next time you see it it's still on the same level (and no, it doesn't flow down). It just gets more and more thin and "composted".

Earthworms particularly are great at helping compost into very excellent soil. There are units devoted specifically to earthworm based composting.

And yeah, it takes much work to make soil.

Now if you could take your largest volume of compost ready material and use it, you could produce much more. But noooo... we human beings are one of the few land based mammals that craps and pisses in our drinking water supply flushing good material out to sea. Local laws and regulations won't let you do this, Robert, but you might want to at least read The Humanure Handbook to see what else can be done.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone

This is the one I own - great value

http://www.sportsmansguide.com/cb/cb.asp?a=264294

Dirt by David R. Montgomery needs to be read by TODders. He might have called it Peak Soil.

Meat and dairy can also be added to an active, "hot" compost system. Run the meat through a blender to aid decomposition.

Do not attempt with a passive system, or it will stink like, well, rotting meat and dairy.

I've briefly looked through some websites and forums dealing with the issue of fire ants in compost piles. Is there anyone here with experience in keeping those ants out? The Hill country has a helluva problem with these things.

(I've heard different takes everywhere from diatomaceous earth to dried molasses to just turning it more often.)

I have posted this idea before, but since we have a dedicated composting thread I'll repeat it here.

If you are using open bins for composting (instead of an enclosed unit like RR's illustration), then try building a bat house directly above. That way the bat droppings can go straight into your compost, and enrich it tremendously.

You can probably still rig up a fold-up lid with hardware cloth for the top of your compost bin; the bat droppings should just fall right through. The screen lid will help keep rodent problems to a minimum.

Make sure that the bat house is located high enough above the compost bin so that you won't be banging it with tools, etc., and so that you're out of their flight path in case you are messing around there right when they are leaving or returning. Make sure that the supports are really sturdy, too.

Bats are good critters that will reward you with considerably reduced insect populations in addition to the increased fertility for your garden. Their habitat has been declining, this will help them out.

Just do a search for "bat houses" or "bat boxes", there are lots of free plans on the internet.

Consideration of using human waste for recycling and building of soils is overdue.

Composting with worms:

Brian (who used to have The Burrow)
http://www.jetcompost.com/burrow/
Figured out the 'best' worm composing would be if you controlled humidity and made sure you could keep the mixture aerobic. Hence the 6-8 inch depth Worm Gin design.
(background here)
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.terracycle.net/media/0...
Visit:
http://www.wormdigest.org/ for all kinds of vermi-composting info. Just beware of 'scams'
http://www.happydranch.com/137.html

Composting in general:
The pictures at the top of this article show me an anaerobic compost pile. These people do a fine job of explaining anaerobic VS aerobic:
http://www.magicsoil.com/MSREV2/oxygen_realities_in_compost.htm

And if one wants an aerobic compost treatment - none better than Jerry's jetcompost http://www.jetcompost.com/ He can set ya up with models that can compost sheep.

Worm swags, OSCARS, and any of the other schemes - the best I've used is the gin design. Most costly to set up also.

Just because technical-minded people (and I am one) often make subjects more complicated than they need to be, I'd just like to point out that composting is really quite simple: Throw compostable items, possibly mixed with high-carbon organic matter (fallen leaves, sawdust, paper, straw, rice-hulls, etc.) to balance nitrogen-content or just to encourage aeration, into a pile of sufficient volume, and wait until done. You can do a lot more than this (fancy bins, fluffing the compost, etc.), but it isn't strictly necessary.

I've taking composting fairly seriously for a few years and my experiences include composting all the things that are forbidden for no good reason, as well as worm-composting. Currently, I add about 15 gallons of compostables to a 600 gallon bin each week. This regimen makes for a pile that generates enough heat that nothing seems to bother it. (Although mice nest in the straw that lies on the periphery of the bin over the winter.) A big round bale of straw, coffee grounds from my work-place (about 2-gallons a work-day), the household kitchen waste, and Jenkins' book are the primary sources of compostables.

Hot composting is desireable because it gives you greater freedom with your feedstock. To achieve it all one needs is a bin with a capacity of about a cubic yard (four pallets work nicely), 5-gallons worth of compostables a week, and a pile of carbon-rich organic material to balance any nitrogen-rich material but also to cover and/or insulate the pile when necessary. In arid climates, there may also be a need to moisten the pile occasionally.

With the exception of spent malt from home-brewing and bedding from my flock of ducks (in both cases the problem was more one of the volume of the stuff rather than the stuff itself) smell has never been an issue. The two times it became an issue the solution was just to pile on moist leaves or straw (which acts as a sort of bio-filter). With the duck bedding (there was an awful lot) a two-foot layer of straw was required before I could talk to my neighbours without blushing.

And if you don't have a garden (if you have a yard, you really should have a garden) for the finished product, lawns love it.

If people are hesitant to compost because of the first step, getting it out to the bin.. we use a small Lunch-Cooler under the sink to store scraps in. Waterproof, good lid is smell-proof enough just with gravity holding it down, and it takes maybe 3 days to fill up if you're doing a fair amount of veggie chopping, etc.

Our garbage bags ( $$ City bags here in Portland !!), take some 2 weeks to fill with a family of 3, and are dry and sweet-smelling.

Meat-waste and packaging goes into the freezer in a baggie until garbage is ready to go out. Cuts down on smell AND critters tearing up the garbage bags on the street.

Hey folks.

I'm a long-time organic gardener and teacher of sustainable gardening. I've been doing this since the 70's, with some success (he said, munching on a just-pulled very sweet carrot).

What I seem to see in many discussions of gardening and composting and the like is a tendency to fidget and micro-manage - in short, to attempt to engineer the process. Gotta DO SOMETHING!

You know those "there are 2 kinds of people" things?... well, IMO, there are "engineers" and there are "ecologists". Well, gardening is not an engineering problem.

I just want to emphasize that you don't need to buy plastic composting bins, nor chase down exotic yeasts and enzymes and starter cultures. You don't need to make compost, you simply allow it.

If you feel a need to build and tinker and tweak, there are many books and articles with plans for composting bins and the like. But with minimal attention to ratios of brown to green and moisture, it will happen. And there are many good books and articles about that, as well.

I guess I'm just saying to make a place to pile up your kitchen waste, weeds, etc. It will turn into compost. If you want to obsess about cultures, enzymes and yeasts and such, no problem. Please just don't think you need to. Just chuck a few handfuls of living soil onto your pile from time to time, if you feel that sort of need. Or take your garden fork and turn over your pile - that's a useful thing from time to time, and will dissipate excess energy - yours, that is :-)

Save your energy for weeding, and even more, for harvesting. When you have a good harvest, what are you going to do with all that stuff? I know it may sound funny, but to me, harvest time is the most challenging time of all - it comes on like a flood. Indeed, as I write this, I've got yet more tomatoes and beans and cucumbers that need to be picked, but I'm just backed up with canning and freezing and giving away and what all. But I really don't like to waste anything.

But if something slips through the cracks, guess where it goes? You got it - right onto the compost pile! Compost is good!

- S

Thanks, Robert. I ordered a compost bin, turner and thermometer the other day over the internet and it just arrived while I was reading your article (how neat is that!) I have a passive compost heap that was basically going nowhere, but want to start an active one.

I've been lucky with my garden so far. I live in a 107 year old house in a "poorer" part of town that probably has ner seen a chemical in its hundred years. So when I dug my first garden there were hundreds of earthworms already. I get a salad garden worth of edible weeds in spring before my lettuce and radishes even have time to get started. Plus a big old poke bush for poke salat (yum!)that comes up every spring. So all I've had to do is give mother nature a little help with some organic compost and organic fertilizer. With my own compost pile, I shouldn't have to pay for compost for much longer. I think its sudh a goo idea whether TSHTF or not.

I have only about a 10' x 10' garden, but this year produced enough that after eating from it all summmer and giving some away to neighbors, I had to buy a little 5.7 cu.ft. freezer to hold all the stuff I wanted to save for this winter.

Which brings me back to your article and the importance of building/saving our topsoil. Keep up the good work.

Linda

It seems the task ahead is to apply home gardening and organic techniques to mass food production. Even with intensive monoculture and GMOs the EROEI of mass food production is said to be about 0.1, which is the calorific value of food as a fraction of energy inputs. To step up on-farm use of compost might require equipment similar to manure recycling on dairy farms. For example muck spreaders which are driven by big tractors and loaded by bobcat from a giant compost heap. The tractors will need to be 100hp/75kw machines that run 4 hours on a tank of diesel, not puny battery tractors. This is supposedly to get away from synthetic fertilisers post peak. Can large scale farming possibly be done without fossil fuels?

A related issue is whether charcoal should be mixed straight into compost or spread onto soil as a separate task, or perhaps plowed in. I experimented with spraying a 2 millimetre charcoal slurry via a fire fighting pump on the back of a pickup. Not so good so I ended up shovelling the charcoal out of a wheel barrow. I now have a few acres with 100 grams of charcoal per square metre, 10% of the recommended amount. It’s too early to say what the effect is.

I can't believe that I almost forgot to say this, but the best composter in the world for vegetable scraps and (many, not all) fresh plant debris is....

RABBITS!

Bunnies are a great meat source: you can raise them in your backyard, they're easy to slaughter and dress, and oh so tasty. But they're almost worth keeping just for their manure. Bunny poop is the best planting medium I have ever encountered. It's dry, nonstinky, easy to work with, and plants LOVE it.

Unlike most manures, it's not "hot" (i.e. high available nitrogen), so you can plant in it directly, without further composting. (It has lots of nitrogen, but it's not all available at once, so it won't burn your plants, but it will feed them for a long period of time.) Bunnies love all kinds of greenery and vegetable scraps, and they turn them into compost essentially instantly. There are some things they won't eat (solanacea, notably), but they love flowers (especially roses), fruit-tree wood, cane berries (even the woody stalks) and most vegetables (avoid high starch stuff). Also, at $13 for a 50-lb bag, their chow is cheaper by mass than good garden soil, and you can generally figure that 90% of what goes in one end will come out the other.

A lot of good gardening tips from everyone. Thanks. I started a real garden this year,
400sq ft. I have cleared another 300 sq ft for next year. I have chickens and turkeys, lots of manure. Many mistakes made this year, even after reading many gardening books. It has been fun and my family is starting to understand the predicament we all are in with resources and over population. We have canned and froze our veggies as a family, not to much bitching from my daughters. Tip: Don’t dig up shrubs around the porch and plant blueberries without telling wife first!

Robert,

While this thread has largely run its course, I wanted to thank you for posting the main article. Many articles here are very technical and don't hit home (at least yet, thankfully) but this article along with its comments has been very educational, even for someone who already was composting.

Thanks again!

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone

Hello there,

I've been reading through the posts on this site over the past few weeks ... this is the first time I've felt I had anything to add on any of the subjects.

Is anyone familiar with the concept of Biointensive Gardening? I've just been reading up on it and it looks like a good way to grow a lot of produce in a relatively small amount of space. It looks fairly promising ...

http://www.growbiointensive.org/

Ishtar

This is my favorite recent (2006) compost story: Cold Can't Stop Alaska Sewage Composting.

Hey Robert, Good on you, moving closer to the dark side.

One thing though, this being a oil heavy site, and tires being just a hop and skip from the well head, why no mention by anyone about using old tires to compost in? They work really well.

Have made a comment here about using them: http://www.wtdwtshtf.com/viewtopic.php?p=629#629

ComePost with us Robert:)

Quite interesting thread here and I'm late towards being last with a couple of comments. Interesting to note that people who will tear up and eat elements of complex energy discussions also seem to have a real flair for organic gardening and are excited about sharing their own experiences. What a twist of sorts!

In tagging through these posts I kept looking for some basics to composting which I'll term as "natural, biological fermentation." Something quite similiar to batch processing of sugars converted by acidic enzymes and then consumed by yeasty bugs whose waste urine is dilute ethanol. What comes out the top of the fermentation tanks stack as ethanol is naturally fermented by yeasts? It is CO2 beer fizz carbonation, correct?

Stop and consider a minute. Robert's plastic recycling/compost bin has been full to the brim 10 times and keeps going down in a natural process of physical reduction. Mother nature's bugs and micro-organisms responsible for this physical reduction of organic matter are doing what? They are consuming nutrients and offgassing both CH4 methane and CO2 greenhouse gas. Combined, these two gasses are commonly termed as "bio-methane."

The natural processes of organic composting (fermentation) are all part of the ecosystem's cycle and offgas both methane and carbon dioxide. And we know that methane is about 20x more reactive in the global warming phenomena than is carbon dioxide. Just something to think about and realize as your kitchen scraps and toilet paper tubes become naturally composted into great new soil for integration into your vegetable garden plots.

Last: My father-in-law who composts 365 days a year in Denver where it gets cold in the winter buys a half-gallon jug of milk in the springtime. He sets this milk out in the warm sun for about a week for it to spoil and get very ripe. He then sprinkles this sour milk over his compost heap to "recharge it" with bacteria each spring which really speeds up the natural process once again of making his kitchen waste and grass clippings physically reduce and disappear instead into Denver's atmosphere as greenhouse gasses.

Still seeking the primordial ecosystems balance as most of your other folks are. Good day...

Gary Bridge

Thanks for the post. A good subject for all individuals to consider for the future.
In the meantime, how do we convince the PTB that the 'modern' farming methods of anaerobic manure handling should be treated as industrial waste, not farming?
I think that any farm that is big enough to be incorporated should be made to meet the same standards as other corporations for emissions.

As long as we're in the composting and gardening subjects, I recommend everyone go to http://www.acresusa.com and visit the bookstore. Something for everyone.

Buy less, buy local, compost your sh*t, dude...

In Hong Kong they are apparently worm-composting urban garbage in a large scale, or at least attempting to do so. Here's a video news item, mostly in Norwegian (you all know that, don't you?), but with a part of the interview in English.