Some simple questions on starting a compost pile

Well I quickly rushed out in the cold windy blustery day....covered the most of my huge pile with fresh leaves and rolled out my tarp cover.

Why? Why because it is now spitting snow in Northcentral Pennsylvania. Not likely but this could be the last time I see the soil until spring. :)

SNOW! Yikes, we have been having temps in the 60's, sunshine days and cool nights in the low 40's!

I just read this whole thread - there's lots of interesting information here.

I'll just add one tip. When starting a new compost pile (mine are mostly grass clippings, chopped up leaves, sawdust, and vegetable garden waste), I mix the ingredients and get them wet with a hose.

Then, I pour a can of Coke or Pepsi (not diet) in the garden sprayer I use for fertilizer, and spray that over the pile.

The soda is sticky, so it sticks to every particle it touches. The sugar really gets bacteria going and the pile off to a quick start. Don't use a sprayer that's had herbicide or insecticide in it, that might kill the microbes.

Thanks for the tip Ozark. After family gatherings, I always have leftover soda that I dump down the drain .. now it will go into my compost pile.

Ozark, thanks for the tip on using coke! I have a big bottle that is flat and will put it on the heap instead of down the drain! Anything that will help heat it up or decay it faster is worth a try.

Next question: Will a compost made up of a single type of brown and a single type of green be as good as a compost made up of multiple types of each?

snow, lol

had tiny snowflakes this morning on the way to work.......


compost is compost... lol while the ideal may be a variety of different sources, it will all break down and become a very valuable soil amendment.

People can live on bread and water for awhile but its not the best thing to do. Some things you can add would add trace amt of other minerals, thinking here if you had seaweed, wow.

Snow is one thing I am happy I don't have, not even for the sake of my precious compost!

Seaweed...I wonder what my DH will think if I tell him we need to take a drive out to the beach and bring home 4 or 5 buckets of kelp...

Do you rinse it good first so it isn't too salty or is sea salt in the compost a good thing?

Either way the compost is a valuable soil amendment, but like a balanced diet is best for our bodies, sames goes for compost and plants. Adding a variety of organics to the compost is best and it is good to bring in sources from outside your yard as well, like seaweed, kitchen scraps, egg shells, coffee grinds, alfalfa, etc. Yes, you need to rinse the seaweed first. I'm am currently reading "Bringing a Garden to Life" and in the topic of herbs, the author suggests growing some herbs specifically to compost because certain herbs add valuable trace minerals to the compost. Some herbs suggested are valerian, comfrey, maybe chamomile, and even stinging nettle. At this point, I'm just getting started so growing things just to compost is not that high on my priority list but I'm going to try to add more amendments to my compost pile to enrich it.

Poor DH.. Just tell DH you planned a nice romantic picnic at the beach. Hide the buckets in the trunk and pull them out after you have fed him.

I think I read on many compost sites or threads I visited that you should rinse the seaweed first to remove the salt ... hopefully someone wiser will chime in.

No trunk in a Hundai Santa Fe...He will see the buckets and smell the seaweed all the way home **GRIN** Oh well, it will add to his repetoire of "My wife is so crazy she..." stories.

I would be happy to send sea weed to anyone. Just send a self addressed box w/credit card info (for postage), to 1234 Marine Layer Lane , Cloudy San Diego, CA. hehehe

On a serious note how about adding week old moldy grass clippings? Or possibly the juice that has collected in the bottom of the bag?

Another question. Will the heat kill the worms?

I'm a long ways from salt water here, but we have our own "seaweed".

In the summer our farm ponds often get covered with "pond scum". You know, the mat of algae that grows and floats about 6" thick on top of a pond, leaving the water underneath clear.

At times, I've cleared some of that by dragging it out with a garden rake. Even a small pond will grow tons of the stuff.

It's slimy, green, and wet - and I bet it would be great in a compost pile. Next time, that's what I'll do with it.

Let me know if that works Ozark. My neighbor has a pond that grows a ton of that "scum", I'll offer to help him drag it out if he let's me take some.

Dave - IMHO, I would think the old mold grass clipping and the juice at the bottom of the bag would be good ... old and moldy is on it's way to being compost. You should probably mix it with some dried leaves or some other "brown" stuff. Perhaps on of the experts will have an opinion.

nothing plant based is too bad to compost, to me.

Yeah, stick it all in. No problem. But yes, high temps will fry anything, but if the worms are mobile they'll stay in the ground or the outer-reaches of the pile. They like the moisture.

Credit card my compost!

There are definite concerns, especially in desert regions, of adding salts to soil. Salty stuff is not good in the ground, I'm afraid. The amount a home gardener would add is probably negligable, but why add to the bigger problem?

Now, just to play devils advocate, I've been told that compost adds almost no nutrients to the soil whatsoever. Whatcha think?

I think maybe a real question like that deserves a new thread : ^)

So tell me why I spent my whole weekend building filling a compost bin ...

Now hold on - there are other benefits of compost. Sally, you wanna do the honors of a new thread? I'm still thinking I need to do an alfalfa one ... Karen didn't pick up on my hint, lol....

"other benefits" All I can think of other then nutrients is texture/water retention and both of those could be taken care of by adding vermeculite and peat without bothering with compost at all.

Trouble maker ...

Heh!

Edited to add: Honestly, one of my professors made that statement once. (He made a habit of saying things that would send us off.) As I'm looking through various articles on the web, everything states that it contains micronutrients but doesn't say much about what and how much.

But there is a lot of other good reasons. Vermiculite is okay for some soils, but not all of them .... and I'm not certain it would do that much good long term. It's also costly (as opposed to free) and the purchase of it carries with it a cascade of other adverse effects to the environment - everything from packaging, transportation and the mining and processesing of it.

I do know that the use of compost has decreased the activity of non-beneficial nemetodes in soil, negating the need for
chemical treatment. That may well be from the introduction of the micro-organisms that cause the breakdown of the stuff put in the pile in the first place. From Earth911.com:
"Disease incidence on many plants may be influenced by the level and type of organic matter and microorganisms present in soils. Research has shown that increased population of certain microorganisms may suppress specific plant diseases such as pythium and fusarium as well as nematodes. Efforts are being made to optimize the composting process in order to increase the population of these beneficial microbes."

There's more....

This message was edited Nov 8, 2007 7:48 PM

Man oh man... don't tell those folks in the other thread that the compost has no nutrients... They have been making tea out of it to feed their plants and soil. If the compost has no nutrients, the wee little microbes would all starve and that tea they have brewing would be just junk food for the soil...

But tasty, lol!

I wish I could find a source that had actually listed the nutrients... but I guess that would wholly depend on the ingredients. If I made a compost pile of newspaper and Iceberg (sp?) lettuce, how much could it possibly have?

Good point, probably little nutrients available there unless it is full of worm castings. Strange that someting would have more value to the soil after it is digested by a worm than it had before it was digested and the worm took the nutrients it needed from it.

I don't think compost has much in the way of nutrients.

Back in June, I picked up 5 dump truck loads of very old oak sawdust. It's probably over 20 years old, and though I've been composting it further with grass clippings and garden waste ever since, I think it was already completely composted. It looks and smells like good black dirt.

Because I had so much of it, I got a soil test on it. It has zilch in the way of nutrients:

pH: 5.2 - low
Phosphorus: 5 lbs./acre - very low
Potassium: 66 lbs./acre - very low
Calcium: 1339 lbs./acre - medium
Magnesium: 67 lbs./acre - low
Organic Matter: 81.1%
Neutralizable Acidity: 2.0 meq/100g

They don't test for nitrogen, but I spoke to the Agriculture Extension chemist about it and he said compost would be very low in nitrogen also.

It's still great stuff, though, and it's making a big improvement in my soil texture.

I look at it this way:
Nutrients or not, it is way cheaper to toss "trash" into a pile and end up with soil to add to my beds than to go buy bags and bags of it at the stores. I use a good miricle grow solution a few times a year so that should take care of any "food" the plants may be lacking. Free soil? You bet it is a good thing!!! It is a no brainer.

I think its surprising that Ozark's sawdust has 'medium' calcium, instead of none.

Hi - On the question of whether to rinse seaweed to get the salt off: I used to rinse but when we had an "expert" doing a workshop here he said that if you rinse it removes the potassium so I quit rinsing. Much less work that way (I was using a lot of seaweed) and I am restricted to salt-tolerant plants anyway. If you grow avacados or other plants that won't tolerate salt you should probably rinse.

P.S. Seaweed is great for heating up a compost pile.

"I think its surprising that Ozark's sawdust has 'medium' calcium, instead of none."
--------------------------------

I wondered about that too.

Only thing I can figure - our Ozarks hills are made of pure limestone. Lots of caves, you can't keep water pipes clear, and lots of people get kidney stones eventually from the well water. On the other hand, we don't get osteoporosis in old age.

That old sawmill was sawing green oak trees into pallets. Maybe the trees pick up calcium from the water and soil, and it's in the wood? Also, the sawmills keep a stream of well water playing on their big bandsaw blades for cooling - so the sawdust was piled up wet with water right out of the rocks.

Oh, Ozark, I'm already jealous, that sounds like some really good "stuff" to build a pile with. Got no complaints here, since we have access to lots of cow manure, both composted and raw. And the leaf pick up should start soon. I usually go to town and ask to haul off the bagged leaves. Get some strange looks, but have met a lot of lovely plp and talked to some amazing old time gardeners with so much knowledge. It's great! Good thing I'm not real shy and I hate to see all that lovely material going to the landfill. LOL

The nutrient value of the compost will depend on what each batch has had fed into it. I've seen NPK ratings as something like 0.1 - 0.1 - 0.1.

The real value of compost is in trace micronutrients and soil conditioning.

Worms do take a hike away from hot compost. I never see any in my cooking bin. (It usually gets to 130 to 150 degree range after I flip and add to it). I do see some in the curing bin.

Pagancat: did you get your Biostack yet?

Karen

Natural/organic fertilizers are also low in nutrients but they release them slowly and are supposed to be better for plants as a result. I wonder if compost is the same way?

Also, I think compost has micronutrients that are very important to have but not in high doses. And as someone else pointed out, the really great benefit of compost is that worms love it and not only aerate the soil trying to get to it but leave castings that are rich in nutrients. So I think additional fertilizer shouldn't be necessary.

WooHoo!! I have heat!! I started my compost pile a week ago. I knew I had too many browns/not enough greens. Everyday I am runnign out too add any greens I could come up with. Left overs from daycare lunches, cleaned out the fridge. Rummaged the pantry for "old" food. Finally today when I went to add half a bag of leftover popcorn, coffee and a few other random kitchen scraps, there was heat in the center of my pile!! I was so excited. I felt like a school girl who just caught the "cute" boy glancing her way!!! I couldn't run in the house fast enough to log in here and post to let you all know. I HAVE HEAT!!!!!

Bravo, woo hoo! Hooray! Happy Dance time! Congrats! Feel like I should send you a card, haha.

I won't be posting for a couple of days, I'm headed to the woods.

Tomorrow is Opening Day. I'll see about putting Bambi in the freezer - another aspect of "gardening", in a way.

Congratulations, and may you have many more.

Karen