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Composting: From Kitchen Scraps to Garden Gold
101 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Hort Culture, we dive deep into the wonderful world of composting!
We'll break down the basics: what composting is, why it's fantastic for your garden, and the different methods you can use to create your own nutrient-rich compost.
Here's what you can expect to hear:
- The benefits of composting: Learn how compost improves soil health, reduces waste, and saves you money on fertilizers.
- What to compost (and what not to!): We'll sort through the kitchen scraps and yard trimmings that make great composting material.
- Composting methods: We'll explore various composting techniques, from simple bins to fancy tumblers, to find the perfect fit for your space and needs.
- Troubleshooting tips: No compost pile is perfect! We'll address common problems like odors, attracting pests, and getting the right balance of "browns" and "greens" in your compost.
By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and inspiration to start composting and turn your kitchen scraps into garden gold!
Home Composting: A Guide to Managing Yard Waste
Composting Ingredient Calculator (Excel file)
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Weather and Rain Types
00:00:16
Speaker
Well, it is a rainy recording day here in the bluegrass for probably the whole state at this point. It feels like it's not stopped raining in a while. So good thing we put out all those great episodes about what to do when you get too much water. So head of the game. That worked out really good for us. It's like we've lived here in the spring before.
00:00:41
Speaker
Yes, when it's dry, it's dry. But when it's wet, it's really wet. And that's where we are now. It's a very peaceful rain again today. So that's at least good. It's not flooding. As opposed to like a rain with a vendetta. Yeah. War in its heart. Yes. There's like actually water seeping into the soil profile. You're talking about sideways rain and it's angry. Yeah, that's an angry rain. I like polite things.
00:01:09
Speaker
That distinction like when I was out in New Mexico, there's like this, like the the Navajo have like a feminine reign and that's this chill reign because it like rejuvenates and then there's like the masculine reign and it's like violent and blow stuff around. It's not as good.
00:01:24
Speaker
Washes things away, tear stuff up. Yeah. The Navajo get it. I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with signing that gender roles because as a man, I mean, maybe it's true. I don't know. You can nurture, but I guess it's just, this is the rain, you know? That's what it is. They have to have things, ways to refer to things quickly because if they say it's a manly rain, run for your lives. I mean, that says a lot in a few amount of words. So that's the way to sum it up,
Introduction to Composting
00:01:48
Speaker
maybe.
00:01:48
Speaker
That's true. If you set that to just about anybody, I feel like they would know what you're talking about immediately.
00:01:55
Speaker
I don't know, if somebody said lady rain, I might be confused. It's a lady rain. I mean, I don't know what that is. Let's not call it lady, but if you said this is a feminine rain, I feel like the word backwards is different. I think that that's just an Elizabethan lady rain. I mean, that's just a more proper way. Oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot you were around then. It feels like a feminine rain is coming on. If someone said it was the Queen Anne's pocket melon. Okay, that's better, Brad. I'm glad you're bringing this full circle back around to sensibility.
00:02:29
Speaker
If now, if there's listeners out there that don't get the reference at your fault, you have to go back and listen to the prior episode. Yes, we talked a lot about.
00:02:38
Speaker
Uh, such topics as good. Pocket melons and feminine rain. We have a show title and it happens in the first five minutes. Yeah. We need to give Elvis. The microphone is picking all of that up and it's cold.
00:02:57
Speaker
I'm loving it, right? Record. Well, but we are talking about something else besides rain and pocket melons
Starting a Compost Bin
00:03:04
Speaker
today. It is compost, which we were all, I think a little surprised when we were coming up, or at least I was, it felt the vibe like everybody was, but we hadn't talked about compost yet. And like all of these, we referred to it a lot. And I was like, are you sure we haven't talked about it? And we went back through the list and we were like, we have not had an episode on compost yet. And so it felt like
00:03:25
Speaker
about dang time. It was time. As we start the season. We get lots of questions on compost. Lots and lots of questions. What to do, what to put in all that jazz.
00:03:38
Speaker
And those kind of like basic questions are the common ones you get like, should I, how do I do it? That kind of thing. I think starting out with what kind of, how do I start like a bin is usually the first question we get. And there are tons of options and it's kind of comes down to like,
00:03:58
Speaker
Functionality if you like have this Venn diagram of like there's the really really functional but then there's like the really really aesthetically pleasing and most of the time most people want to find something right in the middle and there are some things that are but.
00:04:12
Speaker
It definitely depends on your scale. I think that's usually how I ask people. It's like, well, what is your scale? What do you want to use this for? Is it like your pots, your small backyard garden, your raised beds, or is this a larger scale you're putting this in a high tunnel commercial? I have 10 acres for my composting area for my 600 acre plant production system. Do you think a 90 horsepower tractor will be big enough
00:04:36
Speaker
to turn my combos. How many tractors do I need for the turning events? Yeah, how many people do you have that can actually turn this because that's that's part of it. But yeah, so let maybe let's start with the like high functionality side of it and just sort of like
00:04:54
Speaker
go through that spectrum relatively quickly of highest functionality, but maybe least aesthetically pleasing, at least to my brain. Yeah, like what you need it to do. I feel like you're talking about my trash heap out back, Alexis. You're gently- Not a trash heap if you're not putting trash. It's a cold compost pile. That's what I've learned to call it. Yeah, there you go. That's okay for you home composters that know that, yes.
00:05:21
Speaker
So maybe that's an important place to start, right? Is that a poorly managed pile is one that is just going to work really slow and it won't be generating compost for you. Because it's not like you can really go wrong. You can just like go off or go stinky. And it doesn't do anything. There's your bad compost. And it has raccoons coming out of it, yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Rats. Rats. You know, somebody put it a great way. They were like, you know, they were in the office one day and they said, they said for them, they were like, well, I guess it all just, you know, I was rattling off all of these things and temperatures and microorganisms and all the things that we cover when we're talking to someone about composting.
00:06:03
Speaker
And they were going to involve themselves in a little bit larger operation, kind of like, you know, they wanted to produce a volume of compost and, and they finally, they stopped me. They were like, so you're just saying that it's all relative to the speed with which we want to finish. And I thought for a second, I was like, yeah, I guess that's true. And, uh, and I guess you start there because in nature, if you walk in the woods, you're seeing composting everywhere with micro and macro, you know, organisms like termites all the way down to, you know, fungi.
00:06:32
Speaker
It's happening all the time, but it's happening on a little bit slower scale, slower time scale usually. And I think one important thing to talk about that I think we're referencing mostly today, uh, is aerobic composting anaerobic composting, which, uh, we have a little mini episode we'll throw out of soon about like an anaerobic anaerobic version of that, but primarily what most people are going to do.
00:06:59
Speaker
the traditional compost when that comes to mind is gonna be aerobic which means there's air involved so when we talk about turning you're adding air into that system and that tends to be a little bit of a slower process so like how slow are we talking.
Large-Scale Composting Techniques
00:07:15
Speaker
Who want who how fast have you ever made good compost goodness in a large commercial operation i work with a city before and they had the you know the big piles seven eight feet tall they were being actively managed and it was incredible to me.
00:07:28
Speaker
It was way north of 150 degrees Fahrenheit. And the way we would test the piles and how long they were going to last, you just put that rod in there about five to six feet deep and you pulled that out. And basically I learned not to touch it. I would just spit on it and it would sizzle. I'm like, yep, that's going to be done in three weeks. But you would leave it in there and you would time for a certain amount of time on your watch and you would pull the thing out. It would almost glow. It would get hot. Now that that compost was finishing goodness.
00:07:55
Speaker
I don't know, it was finishing them four weeks, but they were lending specific amounts of new and old. So it's highly managed, what's going in it, when it turns, moisture content, that kind of stuff. And they were turning that and getting complete aeration even down through the seven, eight foot column. So they were very actively managing that on a concrete pad.
00:08:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's the upper end. That's the super fast end. I worked with a guy that was creating a lot of volume of compost and was managing it quickly, but wasn't that fast. He's like 45 day kind of turnaround. And that's still really fast. 45 days is really fast. Yeah, that's pretty darn quick.
00:08:39
Speaker
And I think this operation I was working with, which we'll get into details on this, is another huge aspect of home composting is the particle size. And this particular operation I was working with was actually shredding everything to a uniform size. Like if you can imagine a wood chip that comes out of like the chippers that you see on the side of the road, that is absolutely huge compared to, this was smaller than sawdust particles, what was going on in this operation.
00:09:04
Speaker
And so their biggest, their biggest thing they were dealing with is compression. They didn't want it to compress, so they had to constantly turn it. But 45 days still is super fast to produce compost. And yeah, it's just that particle size is how I got to imagine they were pulling that off because all that surface area. Yeah, that's incredible. That's awesome.
00:09:25
Speaker
So first tip of the podcast, if you want compost faster, put in smaller particle sizes. So whatever you're putting in, and we'll talk about what to and not, like what's put in and what not, but start with smaller particle sizes. So like you're putting the banana peel in, chop it up or something like that. And it does make a difference in how quickly that compost will finish. So that's our first little tip here.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah. Somebody put it to me. They were like, and it was a, it was a college class and we were doing microbiology and the professor was like, well, if you really think about it, that's like trying to feed.
00:10:00
Speaker
like a city bus to you and saying, have at it. And I'm like, oh, okay. When we were talking relative particle size. I love the challenge. Yeah, I'm like, okay. Is it made out of chocolate? Can I put gravy on it? Can I eat it like a shrinkies? Yeah, that's a very practical question. So particle size, yeah. Particle size and oxygen or air, I think are probably like your critic figure. Yeah. Often most limiting factors in this.
00:10:30
Speaker
But I guess even before we've kind of skipped over and Alexa started talking about it, one of the probably the most important thing if someone's completely new to composting is what can go in there.
00:10:41
Speaker
Should we talk about that? I mean, all the things that can and maybe some of the things that shouldn't go in the compost pile. I feel like it's easier for me, maybe it's because I'm negative to talk about what can't go in there because I feel like the list is a lot shorter than the what can go in there. So I'll start us off and then we can just round table what can't go in there. So for aerobic compost,
00:11:06
Speaker
And let's call it specifically home compost, not a commercial compost. Amateur, amateur compost. More amateur level. Even a lot of our farmers are what we would consider amateur because it's not their full-time job to run a compost. So I'm going to say no meat products. So don't throw your leftover chicken bones in there. Don't throw your steak bones. So I'm going to start off with no meat products. Because?
00:11:34
Speaker
because you will get rats.
00:11:37
Speaker
You will get higher level organisms that you don't want, like a raccoon, for instance, or rats or whatnot. Yes. Yeah. There are, you can compost bodies. I mean, let's just call it. There are dead animal removal composting. Whole animal composting. Right. That's amazing. You don't want to do that in your backyard. No. It's a very different system. It's a lot. Yeah. You're not going to do that. If you're listening to a Hort Culture podcast episode,
00:12:04
Speaker
you shouldn't be coming here to figure out how to do whole animal. No, but read a book or two or talk to someone maybe. And I was just like, you know what, I know how to accomplish the body. So you can use that as a, there you go. So just a heads up. What else? You know, uh, I don't, I don't typically put like,
00:12:27
Speaker
lawn trimmings in unless I know where they come from, just because the persistence of certain chemicals and the potential of those lawn chemicals being on grass trimmings. First of all, I mean, most of the time we recommend leaving grass trimmings on the lawn, but there's certain scenarios where it may be advantageous to remove those grass trimmings and compost those. But the first question you ask as a homeowner is, is there any kind of chemical on there? Then you have to do a little bit of a deep dive there.
00:12:55
Speaker
finding out the nature of chemicals, if in doubt, just don't put chemically treated plant materials into a compost pile. Right. And I hesitate with weed trimmings too because, or grass trimmings too because sometimes you can be putting, you know, Bermuda grass or things that spread by rhizomes. You can also, you know, if maybe you let the grass get a little too high because it won't stop raining.
00:13:21
Speaker
You can have weed seed, like seed heads that have formed in there, like annual bluegrass is a really good example. It flowers and goes to seed on like really short. So even if your grass isn't, you know, six foot tall, you can't have weed seed. So I always hesitate to use lawn clippings as a mulch or as a, in my compost, but that's me being very cautious. So. Yeah. On the cautious side.
00:13:45
Speaker
I generally don't put in anything that is pretty disease resistant. I don't put the cleaned up plants in there at the end of the season. So like tomato plants or cucurbits. I tend to put those in my home compost. I put those into the yard waste.
00:14:02
Speaker
been because there's no way that I can reliably hold the temperature high enough to definitely kill the stuff that could be a problem. I tend to not put anything that either has disease or that the
00:14:18
Speaker
it tends to be disease prone if I was gonna be planting that out again. Especially if you're newer, I guess, Brett, right? Totally. Because later on we'll talk about temperatures and the duration of the temperature and the degree of the temperature, but it takes a pretty high temperature to kill some of these weed seeds and especially diseases. So if you're a new composter and you do not have confidence in your ability to get what we call a hot compost pile for a period of time, then yeah, those things are kind of off the table, especially then.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would say new or like, and this is just something I want to throw out there because just like we've talked about how some people love lawns and some people hate them. Some people love to compost. It's like a whole thing. They get really into it. For me, it is literally just a trying to keep some of the vegetable scraps that we use out of the landfill and into some sort of a rotatable thing. But I am so far from wanting to
00:15:15
Speaker
be like a huge compost guy as far as like yeah it's time to turn let's rock and roll let's turn this into something else and so so while i i understand the principles and i i am initiated enough to know what i'm doing i am personally as a composter not motivated enough to turn it and and make things happen frequently enough to
00:15:36
Speaker
Yeah. Kill those diseases. Now, if I over the course of the of a year, the level of the compost bin kind of goes down, goes down, goes down, and I'm adding stuff back to it. And at the end, the bottom looks pretty good. I'm able to get some compost out. That's awesome. That's sort of my, you talked about timelines. Yeah. I was like, I'm sure I could get it fast, but for me, it's, you know, a couple, maybe once a year, I'll pull some out and. Yeah.
00:16:05
Speaker
which is totally fits with our lifestyle. And so it's not all about speed in some cases, but maybe if you're looking to do that, then you certainly can speed it up. You said keeping that out of the waste stream. I read some words and I think it was one of our specialists just 2015, 2016 had a really cool composting presentation, but I think it was something like four pounds on average for an American organic waste per day.
00:16:32
Speaker
which roughly equates in landfills to 21% of total volume of landfills are compostable materials. That was pretty shocking to me. I don't know why I had never thought about it. But when I looked at that 21% in landfills, that was pretty amazing. And to keep that out of the waste stream, yeah, it's awesome. And for me, at this point in my life, if I was just composting to have compost, that is not worth my time.
00:17:03
Speaker
But I'm composting for the same reason that you might ride your bike to work. Recycle. Recycle. Recycle. Or you might do those types of things. It's just a little thing. And to be honest, if I'm being totally honest and giving credit where it's due, Annie's the one that my wife's the one that keeps us on the straight and narrow of doing the compost and taking stuff out. And I have to go turn it and do all the nasty stuff. But as far as the day-to-day keeping us going, she's the...
00:17:26
Speaker
responsible party. But I just shout out to people who maybe are composting for the love of the game. Yeah, you guys are all sellouts if you're trying to use the compost. Transactional with your compost. Stupid thing that I do while I get bit by mosquitoes. You found that it's the small things, the day-to-day niceties that makes the difference. That's right. Yeah. I like it.
00:17:54
Speaker
wood ashes get lots of questions on that as far as in compost. And to me that's kind of like the grass clippings not knowing the origin of the grass clippings and what may or may not have been on there. I guess I have the same question
00:18:12
Speaker
with ashes and compost, because, you know, there's lots of different types of wood people can burn and it's not all natural, right? Right. And we don't know for good. You don't know what's going on with it. They don't even burn the Colorado ties or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And in a best case scenario, it's like you don't want very much of it at all. Like, let's say, you know, the provenance of the wood, like it would only be a tiny amount. So it's not something you want to get into. Exactly. Really alter the pH, which if you're applying that
00:18:42
Speaker
to a smaller garden especially that can mess up a lot of stuff when you add too much wood. So be very cautious or don't do it at all with wood ash for if you have a quantity of that, be careful of that. And I also get questions on
00:18:58
Speaker
kitty litter and pet waste. How about that? That would be a hard no. I would say pet feces or human feces. No dice. Don't tell me how to live my life, Josh. You took the one last thing that Brett enjoyed about compost. It's like a David Letterman joke about the
00:19:21
Speaker
the small pleasures in life ruined by a meddling bureaucracy. It's quiet place. Exactly. So yeah, kitty litter. I don't know why I get that. It seems like we get that a couple of times a year.
00:19:42
Speaker
And it falls into that category. Yeah, no litter. Eggshells are good. Eggshells, I would say, my word of wisdom there is that if you are cold composting, which is what I do, which is what Ray and Brett kind of talked about where it's like a once a year, maybe once every six months type of thing, you're not paying a ton of attention to it.
00:20:01
Speaker
you will still have eggshells left in there if you just kind of throw the whole egg or even just like a, you know, something you've slightly crushed up. So if you really want to be able to use that compost within a year, I would recommend
00:20:13
Speaker
really like breaking them down into very small, small pieces. Otherwise they probably won't break. And that doesn't mean you
Balancing Compost Ingredients
00:20:22
Speaker
still can't put it on your garden, but it's not as satisfying. They look like a trash pile. If you get a bunch of large eggshells, people are like, why do you have a trash heap in your backyard? All of a sudden they're judging because you have a vibrant white color out there with jagged edges.
00:20:36
Speaker
I'm like gray not as satisfying to this like dark compost and like yeah to be here to get there baby more But then you have these pieces of white eggshell in it or an Alexis's compost follow human femur, you know You will never find that's what the acid
00:20:55
Speaker
bath is for in the basement. That's what that is for. Me and the fungi have an arrangement, okay? Putting the fun in fungi. So as far as the things that do go in there, do we want to maybe just quickly cover that basic brown and green stuff before we move on to some of the what Alexis was talking about with like the form to function spectrum? Sure.
00:21:20
Speaker
So I like to like start out so we talk about browns and greens and compost and to like put a sciency name to that our browns are carbon source typically, and our greens are nitrogen source and we call them browns and greens because a lot of the times the things
00:21:35
Speaker
that are brown, are carbon sources, cardboard or, you know, something. Wood chips. Wood chips. Yeah. And your greens are going to be the things that would, I like to think about it as like the things that would rot quickly. Right. And those are your higher nitrogen sources and you need to have a balance of those so that you don't get smelly compost.
00:21:56
Speaker
and you get your compost working because if you don't have enough of enough nitrogen, enough greens, your compost will just sit there. So even after a year, it might not do anything. So if you've had a problem with that in the past, you need to be adding more of those greens. If you've had smelly compost before,
00:22:13
Speaker
or anything slimy, weird, just overall weirdness happening there. You don't have enough carbon essentially soaking up, kind of soaking up those juices, but as another food source for those microbes as they break down that nitrogen. So you got to have, and that's what Ray, we said earlier, 30 to one is like a magic number. So 30 carbons to one nitrogen. And you know, the funny thing is, and this is kind of a key point for home composting me, people sometimes get hung up.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely hung up because, you know, you look online and then one of the first things you're going to see is the magic 30 to one. And that's actually a pretty hard concept in home composting because, you know, and we kind of were joking about it before we started recording is we were like, is that by volume or weight? And that's an excellent question from a functional standpoint. But you don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole there. You just want to keep in mind.
00:23:07
Speaker
that you don't want your compost pile to compress. You have to have some brown stuff I call it. That's low moisture, high lignin or high fiber type material. The browns like wood chips like Josh mentioned. You want some of those for a bulking agent. Usually
00:23:22
Speaker
From a functional standpoint, I always say two to one for the green stuff You can even go a little bit higher than that depending on particle size, but you wanted your pile to be bulky So lots of Browns and scattered completely throughout that is your nitrogen and that's your less porous Higher moisture content items think carrots or celery kitchen waste top stuff even long clippings That's how nitrogen low-carbon
00:23:49
Speaker
But you want a mixture of the greens and browns together, usually more browns to the tune of, I don't know, if you're just looking at a pile and mixing things at least two to one brown to green. Otherwise, as Alexis said, you get you get some problems. Yeah, some smells. If your pile ever compresses and goes without oxygen, you will not forget the smell of hydrogen sulfide gas, which is the the oxygen free process or anaerobic process. Yeah, you won't forget that.
00:24:17
Speaker
Well, there is just sort of like a functional learning. We can use the scientific terms and the general class concepts guidelines to start, but there will be some learning curves involved. And that's okay. Part of it is that, talking about the ratios, the green stuff,
00:24:36
Speaker
the nitrogen stuff, the food waste, et cetera, has a lot more water in it usually than ground stuff. And so by volume, it looks like, whoa, that's a lot of green, but that stuff dries out and will kind of compress down and the water will...
00:24:51
Speaker
become one with the compost and leave the evaporate and all that kind of fun stuff. And so that was something I had to learn. But generally speaking, like what Alexis said and what you were saying, Ray, if your compost is bug ridden and smelly, you're not using quite enough brown. And if it looks like it's just kind of sitting there
00:25:12
Speaker
then you're probably not using quite enough green. And it's just this ongoing kind of give and take. You have to pay a little bit of attention. When you go and add something to it, look at it. Use just visual things. You don't have to know a ton about compost. It'll be like, hmm, this is looking a little funky. Or this doesn't look like anything has happened at all. And just kind of use those obvious signs to dictate what you put in there.
00:25:37
Speaker
And I, I live in a neighborhood with neighbors. And so I tend to air, if I'm going to air, I'm going to air on the side of a little too much brown because I don't want smelliness. I don't want grossness, but that does cost me in terms of speed of processing and everything else. Like we're saying that.
00:25:55
Speaker
but I don't mind it as much. Again, I'm not encouraging you to do air one way or the other. We want to go right down the middle and make that perfect compost as quickly as we can. That's been my approach.
00:26:08
Speaker
Because when I started out, I didn't have enough brown material. Things got smelly and weird. Neighbors complained. Kitchen scraps stuff. At that time, it wasn't my house. I was a rental place, so I just left. I just took over to the neighbors and built a stinky pile. I left all my stuff and ran away. But I now have a lot of kitchen scraps. They say that. They say they have trouble with that because they have a lot of wet stuff coming from the kitchen. And it's those composters. But on the other end of that, there's the composters have like a huge oak tree.
00:26:36
Speaker
So the pudding, which are notoriously slow to compost sometimes, oak leaves into a compost pile and they have no nitrogen source. And that's, that's the people I'm like, we'll put some, I mean, if you have any on hand, just lawn fertilizer, throw some of that on there and it provides a very concentrated nitrogen source to kickstart a carbon pile. And that's a trick you can use.
Common Composting Issues
00:26:57
Speaker
But yeah, it's, it, I'm trying to think, I mean, usually I run into folks, they'll have a lot of one or the other.
00:27:04
Speaker
and they have to be aware of that, so yeah, conversations. Yeah, when I was helping my parents get set up with theirs, they are mostly, they're in a very urban context, and so they tend to just have more green stuff to put into the pile. It's like a table scrap kind of situation. And so I just always, I instilled in them the value of having a nice square bale of straw around. And so that way, when they were adding things in, they could just keep a layer going.
00:27:32
Speaker
I'm gonna say this for, I told my best friend this who also lives in urban Florida and was very excited about their tumbler complex and she's having trouble with the Browns, right? Keeping enough Browns. And I said, well, I know you get a lot of Amazon boxes, so there you go. And that was a mind blown moment when I was like, shred it up, take your tape off, any staples, like you don't want anything,
00:27:58
Speaker
sticky on there, but no glossy. No glossy, no sticky. No wax cardboard. No waxed cardboard, but a lot of the Amazon boxes I get are perfectly fine to go in the compost, but the key is just kind of shred again, shredding those particles and making those particle sizes smaller. And she was like, you have solved two problems for me, all of my Amazon boxes and my compost bin. So it's a win-win if you're an avid,
00:28:26
Speaker
Amazon Chopper, just saying.
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, we're all in the e-commerce lifestyle now. It's just box after box. What else am I supposed to do? I wonder that's a good news. What am I supposed to do? I gotta buy stuff for fun. Yeah.
Compost Bin Designs
00:28:42
Speaker
I wonder if there's a, there's a shredder out there for boxes. I mean, yeah, us having this conversation makes me wonder, is there a gizmo that like chops up large quantity of boxes that they can be great. Okay. Okay. I ain't anger.
00:28:57
Speaker
Thanks. I like it. Well, we've talked about all the materials. Alexis just turned her loose. Yeah. She will chew it and spit it out and start the combos file.
00:29:13
Speaker
All right. So we've talked about what not to put in it, sort of how to balance those things that do need to build the pile. We need to build the pile. Yeah. We need to build the container and the pile now. How are we going to do that? I mean, just getting started, you've got a big pile of Browns and a big pile of greens. Now what? Well, I would start with, you know, the very simple ones, which are what they practice at really large scale. So they can't really build a structure for this thing. Um, the windrow is really functional.
00:29:39
Speaker
You add to one side, you take off from the other. But you have to have the space to kind of build this thing out and let it grow and subtract from it. And it's going to move around as you do that.
00:29:53
Speaker
So that's relatively simple because you know if you have just a pile then how do you know like where are you taking from it and where are you adding and that kind of a thing. And that's a common thing I see people have that question like how when do we end this thing they haven't you know they may not have thought about it as a process but they've gotten a single pile but they want to harvest the entire pile at one time and we keep adding new stuff and that's a common scenario they're like but we what do we do with our stuff to let the one stuff you know
00:30:23
Speaker
Get finished. That's kind of where the multi bay, the classic three bay compost. We talked a little bit about that if you guys could talk about that. Why three bays? Well, that's one of the reasons to me. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like the windrow that doesn't move, right? This is exactly. If you need some infrastructure or you have the space for some infrastructure, you're creating three bays. And the size of them are going to be kind of scaled up, but for like home size,
00:30:52
Speaker
I mean, they've got some measurements in this great publication, HO 75 for home composting. Talks about like four to five feet deep, three to five feet tall. Personally, the ones that I've helped set up on like a kind of a shoestring budget.
00:31:06
Speaker
The size for the depth of the base was the same. The depth and the width was the same as loading pallets. Yeah. We just use loading pallets around the side. And that's also good because those are open on one side, aren't they, Josh? Yeah, exactly. They're open at the top and they're open at the front, but then you have three sides essentially and then three bays side by side. So these are stalls are another way to like, if people are having trouble thinking of them as a bay, you can think of them as like these three sort of stalls that are all
00:31:37
Speaker
connected and you know but they're they have a little divider between them which might be a palette or it might be cinder blocks or I mean it can be anything just kind of separate these bays or these stalls and you start with the first one and you put all your crap in it first and then what do you do?
00:31:55
Speaker
Well, you layer, right? Like you layer. Well, that's how I would do it. It's kind of layering like browns and greens and keeping it loose. So there's lots of airflow. That's the other thing about these bays is you want them to be, to hold the pile in place, but they're not, they don't block airflow, right? So it should be open. That's why pallets are kind of nice, but also people make them out of
00:32:17
Speaker
Oh, I can't remember the name for it, but like we called it like rat wire. Yeah. Chicken wire. Yeah. Chicken wire, but kind of thicker. Okay. Gotcha. Hardware cloth. Yeah. Hardware cloth. That's the good technical name. Rat wire. And also, I like the sizes we're talking about because remember, these have to be functional. And if you're turning them by hand, I've seen there are some compost piles out there where they've totally enclosed it on all the sides and left the top open.
00:32:42
Speaker
and they've gotten too tall and they could not reach in and turn that, which I don't think it's a good idea to enclose it on four sides anyways. It makes it just tougher to aerate that with like a flat fork or an English fork.
00:32:55
Speaker
And that's what I use kind of aerate piles with and recommend that for homeowners is that if you're actively managing that, don't make it any taller than your armpits or preferably lower. Yeah. Because number one, just sheer volume of the pile gets unmanageable, but also you just literally can't work it. It's kind of like almost like a square foot garden. If you make it too wide, you can't reach the center. The same is true for a compost bin. The same principles apply.
00:33:20
Speaker
You can use the same bin system if you want to go a little bit larger. So say you're doing market gardens or your very small commercial scale you can use like if you've got a bucket on your tractor, right? So make it wide enough for your bucket to get in there and turn it. So really think about how you're going to turn it. I think is the most important thing when you think about what kind of compost bin should you build or buy is like
00:33:43
Speaker
How are you going to actually manage it? The easier that you can make it to do that, the more successful you will be in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because that is one of the recommendations, right? For if it's too stinky, it's like you turn it or flip it, which maybe we should talk about that. Like when we say what turning the pile means, because it doesn't mean turning it
00:34:05
Speaker
clockwise or something like that. You're just getting in there and flipping things over and mixing it up. Adding air into the center of it. Somebody call it compost fluffing of whatever you want. Yeah, that's a good term.
00:34:20
Speaker
One way I've seen the three bays used and I never thought about them being used like this is they had, of course, the third bay was the finished compost ready to be used. This person had their system down, but they had one of the bays always empty. One of the other two were always empty. I was like, why is the one always empty? They said, we completely take the material out of bay one, throw it into bay two, and by that throwing,
00:34:41
Speaker
And I was like, dang, that's a lot of work. They produced amazing compost. Yeah. And ever since then I thought, well, that's the golden, I mean, that's the, that's the standard is that you're flipping bay one and two back and forth, back and forth. And in the process of moving from one side to the other, you aerate 100% completely. And then the third was just finished. Nothing else goes in the third. It's finished. It's done. It's stabilized. It's sitting there ready to be used.
00:35:07
Speaker
And when I was out on Oregon, I think, and something I hadn't thought about, all the compost, you know, people that were serious about it had roofs on them that were on hinges that they could fold back and forth. They said, well, it rains so much here. Compost piles get just soaked. And these were three bins. And I think it was a demo we were looking at and just made such perfect sense that in a rainy environment like that, they got a lot of daily rain.
00:35:34
Speaker
Uh, is that they had, there was a three bin and they were using it just as I described, but in addition to that, they had a roof on there that they could just flip back and forth, which was way cool. I mean, they were pretty serious about their compost, but yeah, that's the, the three bay system. You said you've seen it used like that also, Alexis, as far as flipping back and forth. Okay. Oregon also. Yeah. Yeah. That's the style. I mean, to me, moving it from point A to point B and then from point B back to point A makes a lot of sense as far as.
00:36:02
Speaker
making it this mechanistic process. It's very clear when it's done, when that process is done, whereas if you're just fluffing it or something, I'm like, oh, I don't know. Did you get to the bottom or did you get to the complete fluffage? I don't know if that's- The way that I've done it, and I did this in part because I started composting when I was
00:36:23
Speaker
still a highly not settled graduate student or undergrad student, I guess. And so I was moving my bins with me across. Thanks.
00:36:36
Speaker
And so I have, I got the like really heavy duty garbage cans that are like the brute style garbage cans. And I cut the bottom off, you know, buy a 50 or $60 garbage can and immediately cut the bottom off. It's pretty awesome. That hurts. Yeah.
00:36:54
Speaker
drill a bunch of holes in the sides to create like some airflow stuff and I sit it upside down on the ground almost like a cylinder sort of like a Pringles can with no bottom. Build up the stuff in there layering over time, you know, take your vegetable scraps and your brown matter, vegetable scraps and your brown matter and layer them, layer them, layer them. When it gets full, I take and I slide the whole
00:37:18
Speaker
Pringles can off of the thing, move it directly to the right, scoop and refill it from the top to the bottom, turning it as I go. Nice. And so it's basically like you can create a new bay by just lifting the can off and moving it. Yeah.
00:37:35
Speaker
It has worked really well and I just still use it in our yard now. A bay system would be cool, but the advantage is it's highly portable because you just basically have some empty garbage cans. I have two cans, I think two of them like that. I would say that the higher quality can was worth it because I did that like
00:38:02
Speaker
15, eight more years ago, I don't know, between 15 and 20 years ago. The plastic hasn't disintegrated yet. They are still rocking and rolling the same way that they were day one, which is pretty cool because they've been out in the sun quite a bit. That works for me. It's not high volume. We fill those up pretty quick, but it is a way to manage it.
00:38:25
Speaker
So that, that leads me to a question I don't think we've talked about. Where do you put your bin, whatever kind of bin, whatever kind of system you decide to use, where is the ideal place to put it? The front street curb. Right beside the neighbor's house. As close to your neighbor's house as you can get. Yes. No, that didn't, yeah, no.
00:38:47
Speaker
I think some place where you have to look at it, first of all, I mean, it's kind of the garden theory to me. If I have to look at it, I'll pay attention to it. And if I pay attention to it, I'll manage it. If you're going to at least pass it. Yeah. And so that you can add your, it's somewhere accessible. That's one thing that I didn't do the first time I did this was it wasn't.
00:39:03
Speaker
and an accessible place. And so then I would collect it all in a bag and it would sink by the time I got that bag to the actual compost bin. So putting it out, a lot of people put it out right outside like a kitchen door or something like that, or at least like on the path that you walk if you're going to the barn or something like that can be really helpful. But what I was thinking was, do you want sun or shade?
00:39:26
Speaker
I do. I like sun. I like better than shade. I've done both. And if you're working the compost, then a little bit of shade somebody informed me once. They're like, in the summer when you're working this compost bin, a little shade's not bad. I think you make either work as long as the area, the pad that it sits on is well, well drained. That's more important than sun and shade to me is the drainage of the general area.
00:39:50
Speaker
If you have a wet area, you're not going to have a good time with your compost sitting on there. It's always going to do bad things on the bottom of that pile. And I would say, I would say if you put it in the sun and you still have to actively manage it no different than you would in the shade, but I think it'll speed the process up just a little bit. Right. Cause it gets warmer. Yeah. Heat is what helps break things down. It keeps the microbes active.
00:40:11
Speaker
you can get the temperatures up a little bit higher because you get the sun baking in. That's why a lot of- In the wintertime especially, yeah. Yeah, a lot of the compost bins you'll see if you go buy one are black and they hold heat.
00:40:25
Speaker
And that's another question we get. Can you compost in the winter? And, you know, technically it's a three by three pile. If it's active, you know, it is going to maintain a core heat and continue to do a moderate job. But composting does in Kentucky. If it's just a standard homeowner, compost pile is going to slow way down in the winter. So it's, it does have a certain amount of seasonality to composting or I mean, if it's not at least a three foot high by three foot wide, it's not going to self insulate in.
00:40:53
Speaker
And just about almost completely go dormant. It's the microorganisms are going to be in there. They're just not working as active. And then, you know, that'll kick back off in the spring and summer months. Just be aware of that is that composting does slow down the colder it gets.
00:41:14
Speaker
The last system we can talk about, unless somebody has others, are these ones that you're going to buy? These tumblers you can get at box stores. I have one. It's on a stand so that I can get a wheelbarrow underneath it. That was part of that functionality to me, is that I can get a wheelbarrow underneath it to empty it.
00:41:34
Speaker
because where I have mine located because of the way my brain works is unless it's literally right outside my kitchen door, I will not put it in there. I tried the whole, I had like a little compost pail and I was like, I'm going to take this and you know, dump it on my way walking up to the barn. Never did it. It got weird. There was a lot of flies involved. So the only way I have successfully composted is if I make dinner, I put it all in just like something and I walk 10 feet away and I dump it in there. And so
00:42:04
Speaker
I have one that's on a stand and it doesn't have necessarily a handle to crank it, but it has these things where I can just easily turn it because I don't want to go out there with a pitchfork. I'm not going to get as much volume out of it because it's not as big, but mine actually does have bays, which I think is cool. There is a divider in there that does allow airflow and it's vented.
00:42:27
Speaker
One side, you know, I started I fill it and then once it's you know full I leave that one alone and I start me other Bay and with the theory of Once one Bay is full. The other one should be close or ready to go So there's always an ability to have something to put in there and then I turn it just manually kind of pulling it the barrel around you roll that tumbler like on the full one and
00:42:52
Speaker
It depends on the time of year. Um, but I, I actually try and rotate it at least once or twice a week when I'm, when I'm taking stuff out, just because what I want to do is make sure that this new stuff I just put in got incorporated into that. And so it's just a little bit easier for those microbes to get on it rather than it just sitting right on top. So those enclosed systems, do you have you, did you have to add water?
00:43:19
Speaker
Because I have enough food scraps moisture. Compost feel like I mean, we've not touched on that. And that's a basic thing. We probably should. Moisture or something like that, which feels like I've heard it described as I think you told me this, Alexis, like a wet sponge. Wet sponge. Yeah. What's that bread?
00:43:40
Speaker
Well, mine's not actually closed. Oh, and that's right. And I actually have to keep, you mentioned the lid. So I saved the lid, which is much bigger and overhangs the bottom because it's sort of like a
00:43:55
Speaker
as to keep water out most of the year. Occasionally when we're in drought and we get a couple of rainfalls, I'll take it off. But a lot of times I'm trying to keep it open. You're managing the moisture kind of though then. Yeah, you have water. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Benefits of Composting
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that depends on where you live and where your years is located. So if you do get a fair amount of rain throughout the season, then you probably never need to add water to your compost, unless like Brett said, we're going through a drought and then you may want to hit it with a hose or something like that.
00:44:25
Speaker
But very rarely, at least in Kentucky, do people have to add water to their compost if they are putting in enough greens. So if you're not putting in enough greens and you need to kind of kickstart it again, you can add water to help with that process. Yeah, and if you had the wood chips and you were adding the nitrogen, you would definitely want to add water.
00:44:45
Speaker
Now, the one thing we cannot skip over before the end here is why are we doing all this? And I guess really what I'm asking is some of the uses or some of the benefits of compost. And that's a question I get. So anybody want to tackle that? As a prelude to that, I think one of the things that I think one of the reasons why we thought we had covered compost before is because at a very core theoretical level, we did, we have.
00:45:13
Speaker
in our conversation about soil. We talked about carbon and nitrogen cycling in soil. We talked about how, for instance, if you cut down a cover crop and you lay it down on the soil, at times it will actually, quote unquote, bind up
00:45:30
Speaker
the nitrogen that's in the soil and make it unavailable to plants so all of these processes are kinda part of the same there they're playing on the exact same dynamics in fact that you have to add nitrogen in some cases to the soil in order for a plant to have enough to grow.
00:45:47
Speaker
In some cases, you need more carbon because the organic matter of the soil is too low and you're trying to build that through time. I think as a prelude to the why or how this fits, it fits into this much bigger picture both
00:46:04
Speaker
with plant physiology, with soil health, with waste management, with fertility, all of those things. So that would be my connection making to these other things as a prelude to maybe some of the other reasons why we do it or how it- Like an amazing modifier in other words.
00:46:22
Speaker
Yeah, I and I like to use the term conditioner when I talk about compost rather than like necessarily soil. I think there's a little bit of a misconception sometime like especially people who you know, maybe want to use their compost for
00:46:38
Speaker
their houseplants or their raised bed garden or on a smaller scale like that where they're probably making enough where they could fill you know their whole pot up for their houseplant or most of their raised bed with compost and that's not really what you need to necessarily be doing. I like to think of it as a conditioner. It's basically like a
00:46:58
Speaker
shot to the heart of adrenaline for your soil of good microbes, lots of nutrients, things that will improve what is already there. And so that's why when we tell people, you know, adding compost into a garden, you're really only looking about an inch over the surface is all you really need because it's a conditioner. You're not trying to change
00:47:23
Speaker
immediately change the physical appearance of your soil. Does that, does that make sense? And I find it's amazing for like, you know, folks install these raised beds that are usually peat based mixes and those don't last forever. They, and I found that that's an amazing use for compost is just top dressing that continuously.
00:47:43
Speaker
And if you read all the literature, that's one of the recommended practices, common recommended practices, because it does so many things like Brett said, it's got the, it enhances the ability of the soul to hold nutrients.
00:47:53
Speaker
It, uh, the organic matter just will hold water in addition to nutrients better. So it'll do all those things. And every now and again, I will run into folks and they're like, well, you know, we do it for the fertilizer value. And I, and I usually don't think of compost in terms of just like the, it's mass ability to have nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all the macro nutrients. It's like 1%, like it's typically very low.
00:48:16
Speaker
depending on what you put in it. As Brett said, it's all of those, and you, Alexis, it's all those secondary, and they're not really secondary to me, there's all those other things that compost does and its ability to condition and modify the soil profile with just a little bit, you know, continuously added throughout the years, just makes such a huge difference.
00:48:35
Speaker
I feel like it's like taking a vitamin. The compost is like you taking a vitamin. You still have to have a healthy diet. You still have to drink plenty of water and do all those good things. But the vitamin just gives you that little boost to improve how those other things work. Just soil structure, just alone. Just if you take a heavy soil and just over the years, I've seen compost make such a huge difference over many, many years. But just the things like structure.
00:49:02
Speaker
that's well that's the key thing you're saying there is over many years that yes almost all like like in life almost all things all important lasting changes no subtle they take time they take little bits of commitment you just stab me in the heart
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah, no, they're not flat. It's like cubic yards of 30 day old compost. I was hoping to end this on a high note and you're saying I'm the problem. It's me with my expectations, man. But yeah, yeah, Tom. Yeah. And I think, you know, I would add, you know, add something Alexis is talking about here. And this is an interesting phenomenon that I've been able to observe, like within my lifetime, I think.
00:49:49
Speaker
You mentioned it's like a vitamin and I would add it's like a vitamin plus a probiotic. Yeah. In the sense that like our understanding of the, of the microbe communities has expanded so drastically, like the era of the microbiome, which I don't know, started probably 20 years ago, where we're understanding, you know, moving away from just pure germ theory and antimicrobial, antibacterial, et cetera.
00:50:14
Speaker
That's another piece of the puzzle that you can only really adjust gradually over time with this dedicated management of other aspects of the soil ecosystem and reduce things like reduced tillage or things like cover cropping or whatever, keeping the soil covered, not letting it lay fallow and bake in the sun and crack and all the other fun stuff.
Composting's Environmental Impact
00:50:40
Speaker
It's just such a, you're playing this very interesting caretaker role in the sense that you are growing and supporting and developing these microbial communities in the compost, but you're also doing that in your soil. It's just like you're playing this very interesting stewardship role. And it's something that I think people have been doing for a really long time. But
00:51:04
Speaker
I find that aspect of it to be pretty cool. And in addition to the, I think the most slam dunk reason for most people, if I were pitching for them, why they should compost, it would be on that waste management side of just, let's just keep a little bit of, we're filling up landfills like crazy and some of it doesn't, some of it can go back out and become part of the soil structure and the root structure and the flowers that you're growing or the whatever else it can, you could put it back into the cycle.
00:51:34
Speaker
So I think that's, yeah, those, those are the main reasons. I think I, I would, I do it, or I think that we, one, one might consider doing it. I like the spinner things, especially like the, or the things. Yeah. I don't have, we don't have one, but I think that they are.
00:51:53
Speaker
People just get the sense of like, they have to do everything all the way or nothing at all. And I and because for us, you know, we would fill a tumbler if we put all of it in, we would fill a tumbler pretty quick. But honestly, we'd probably turn over compost a lot quicker. And maybe it wouldn't actually end up being an issue at all in the long term.
00:52:11
Speaker
Um, but if someone wants to do that, I was just so jealous. You were saying like, Oh, I could just, you just turn, I mean, for you turning it is just like, whoop. Yeah. That's so cool. And, and yeah. Well, I knew I wouldn't do it otherwise, you know? And so that's what it comes down to is like, what are you actually going to use? And like, I've used enough different ones. I use one where it was a tumbler, but it was sat on the ground.
00:52:38
Speaker
and made sense. I thought, oh, this will last a longer time. But then when I was trying to get it, that thing's heavy when it's full. So then when you're trying to get it into a wheelbarrow or somewhere, it was difficult because you're still pulling it out of one huge shout. Yeah. So, um, that was my, uh, I got a, uh, career ladder bump.
00:52:58
Speaker
So I was impressive enough and I got the bump and I was like, I'm gonna buy myself a rain barrel and a compost bin. All right, Alexis, treat yourself day. Horticulture goals, horticulture goals. Various horticulturally affiliated barrels. Yes.
00:53:21
Speaker
some people would go to Maui no not this girl vacation what vacation I'm gonna compost this summer
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's good stuff. Good stuff. Awesome. Well, if you like that, if you want to know more about composting, I think one thing that I am pushing for, and hopefully everyone agrees, but we're going to do it, period, is talking about vermicomposting maybe in the future. I love that because, again, whether you're going to be commercial or even if you live in an apartment,
00:53:53
Speaker
Firma composting can be something that you can do to, you know, and it's fun because you got pet worms and I think that's fun. I am a big fan. I've had my worm bin for 11 years now and they are my children. I have millions of them, but anyways. Fun little teaser for that episode. I'll share the full story then.
00:54:19
Speaker
Worm Ben did play a key role in my courtship of my wife, Annie. So the plot. I can't wait. We're going to have that. So if you want that sooner rather than later, leave us a little review and tell us we want to know about the worm courtship.
00:54:37
Speaker
And while you're there, you can give us five reviews that are five star reviews so that we can do this worm courtship story. I'm here for that. You can also shoot us an email if you've got questions about compost, maybe which one you're going to
00:54:51
Speaker
By or what you're thinking about maybe what you can add or any problems that you're having, you know Feel free to shoot us an email.
Engagement and Future Topics
00:54:58
Speaker
We've got that email in the show notes And we one of us and all of us will see it and at least one of us will help you most likely all of us will go in together on that so happy to be do that for you guys and then you can also follow us on Instagram at hort culture podcast and you can send us a message there if you think of something and
00:55:15
Speaker
It's a good way to find information we share from other organizations around Kentucky and other info as well. So it's not just, hey, we have an episode out this week, but some of the other things that are happening that you plant peeps may be interested in. So please check us out on there. And we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you'll join us next time. Next time, next time.