Ron's Blog Post on Compost

[macmex]

Folks, 
          Ron was nice enough to write a post on composting for HomeSteadingEdu .  It's about composting with what you have on hand. Blog posts often quickly get buried. So, here's the link to it. 

Enjoy!


George


Composting: Putting The Things God Gave You to Use

[heavyhitterokra]

Bon,

You do things much the same way as I do them here. While building my Summer Kitchen, I dug the footings by hand, laid in all the underground utilities as I went along with a pick and shovel, hand dug the lateral lines, laid in the sewer pipes and hand dug the leaching field for the 4" inch perforated PVC.

Then, I hauled enough pea gravel by hand, to level the 21" inch difference in grade, by using a shovel to fill 8 or 10 plastic, 5-gallon buckets per trip, using my old, oil burning truck to haul them back home.  (Sometimes, the smoke from the floundering engine would beat me back to the house as I came rolling back down the hill on the dirt road leading home).  The kitchen is 14' x 26' feet square, so it took hundreds, if not thousands of buckets filled with pea gravel to get the leveling job done.  

The pea gravel was not located on my property.  It had to be hauled from a welling, underground spring about 3/4 of a mile North of my house.  I'd drive there in my truck with the buckets in the back and fill each one to the brim with pea gravel, then drive home, and hand-carry the buckets across our muddy lawn, to pour out the contents across the 364 square foot area that I was attempting to raise to the height of 21" inches in order to level the slope I was about to pour concrete on. 

I built the concrete forms by hand, from scrap lumber, mostly from old pallets that I found laying around behind local hardware stores.  Then, I ordered 8 yards of concrete to pour my slab and to build a truck crossing, so I could get back from my garden without getting my pickup stuck in the creek behind our house.

Doing things by hand was a thing I learned while running inmate work crews in prison where I was the Building Maintenance Administrator for 5-years.  "People can do almost anything by hand."  It just takes more time.  It took me three and a half years to finish building the kitchen, all by hand, one board at a time. One bucket of gravel at a time.  I didn't have money in savings, so I used the weekly proceeds from selling tomatoes and okra from my garden to buy lumber, concrete, and refurbished appliances.

The almost finished product of three and a half year's, steady labor and several tons of okra and tomatoes.

 One day's harvest of okra selling at the Tahlequah Farmers' Market.  (About 100 pounds on display).

 A peek at my market garden at the beginning of the season.

One day's haul of tomatoes sitting out to dry, after their bleach water bath, before market day.  (About 90 pounds worth) My peak harvest day each year is about 200 to 300 pounds, right before they lay down in late summer.  On those days, we get out our canning jars and make lots of salsa and several quarts of whole tomatoes and sauces for winter.  We do all that out back, in our Summer Kitchen.

My okra at about one month of age.  Several week's labor are required before any of this goes to market.  I plowed all this with a team of mules up until 2013, because I couldn't afford a tractor.

The outside of our Summer Kitchen, showing part of the sloping grade I had to level by hand, before pouring the concrete slab.

Turkey Day with the family, after a long season of planting, watering, weeding, and harvest.

Old Earl, plowing my garden in February of 2011.  Man!  Am I glad I have a tractor now!  I started building the kitchen in the winter of 2008.  We had our first Thanksgiving dinner, cooked inside the new kitchen in November of 2012.  All the hard work is finally paying off.  Take heart and keep up the hard work, Bon.  You are an inspiration to us all.  I love reading about your projects.  They keep me going during these long, cold, rainy days.

[rdback]

Your Summer kitchen looks awesome Ron! You should be very proud of that accomplishment.

[macmex]

Ron's summer kitchen still looks as good as in the photo!

[heavyhitterokra]

Since this is a composting thread, I thought I'd add a little content about composting ... Fortunately, the weeds that are highest in nitrogen are the same ones that are in great abundance right now, in the form of Chickweed, Henbit, and Dead Nettle. All are easily gathered this time of year and your neighbors would be happy if you were to rid their yards of all of it you could carry home.

I've been keeping myself occupied between rainstorms, by pulling weeds of that nature and piling them up for compost. I've got plenty of dead leaves lying around right now and the fact that they are wet just makes them that much more prone to composting more quickly than if they were dry.

I made some Biochar during the late winter months and have charged it with chicken litter and urea, so I'm able to add that to my compost as well.

I found an old, sun rotted plastic tub for the purpose and covered it with an old, moldy shower curtain to keep the rain off the contents. If during this dreary, wet, weather all I can do is add one bucketful of leaves or weeds to this pile each day, then my days are not wasted.

This project helps me to keep my sanity during the quarantine and is a lot better for the soul than watching TV or lounging on the couch.
The old, sun rotted tub I found in the junk pile. I've been gathering dead leaves in an old trash can, green weeds, like Henbit, Dead Nettle, and Chickweed, a little topsoil (for enzymes) and a shovelful of chicken litter from my hen house.

I lay these up, one layer at a time inside the old plastic tub. (An old barrel or any container will work). Old pallets are a good way to build a better size container. I just used this tub because it was handy.

I heap it fully as I can, packing down each layer by stepping on it with my feet.

This is some of the crushed Biochar that I made earlier. It has already been charged with chicken litter and urea, but if it had not been, the compost would charge it now. I'll add a little of this to each layer as I build up my compost pile. When I'm done, I'll cover it with an old shower curtain to keep the rain from leaching out my nutrients.

This is just a photo showing how I gather my spring grasses to add to the mix. I don't hurt myself. I just stuff a 5-gallon bucket with weeds and uprooted soil, then I carry it to the tub to be layered with more dead leaves, topsoil, bio-char, and seasoned chicken litter.

When I'm done, in about a month or so, this will be a supercharged mixture of compost to top-dress my newly bedded plants with. I've been busy all winter, collecting cuttings from elderberry bushes along the roadsides, digging samples of thornless blackberry vines, from a neighbor's yard, and planting different varieties of muscadine grapes to utilize the bare ground inside my former hog pen.


I'll use my finished compost to top-dress these plantings as the season wears on.

[heavyhitterokra]

I was asked a question on a different forum, "What causes my compost pile to get stinky?"

Stinky compost is caused by anaerobic decomposition. Two things can cause that: a lack of oxygen, due to over compaction or a lack of oxygen, due to an over-abundance of water. Healthy compost should never smell bad.

Usually, I can tell if a compost pile is too wet, by feeling it. If it clods up when squeezed tightly, or if it smells bad, it's too wet. If white, powdery, fungus is present, it's too dry.

I mix my compost roughly 50/50 carbon to nitrogen or greens to browns. I use chicken litter very sparingly, only a dusting of that per layer. I make my layers of browns and greens about 3" inches thick. I add about an inch thick layer of good topsoil to top off each finished layer of browns and greens. So, it's, brown, green, sprinkling of chicken litter, then top off with soil and repeat.

I pile the compost in a closed container until it's filled to the brim, and simply dump the container over once it shows any sign of composting. (usually within a couple of weeks). To incorporate air in the mix, I stack the contents of several containers, one on top of the other as I dump them out to be reused. When I'm done, my open pile will be about 4' feet tall ideally.

I cover my open pile with a tarp to keep rain from saturating it and leaching away my nutrients. That might not be as bad a problem in some areas, but where I live, we often get several inches of rain within a few days, often accumulating 6" to 10" inches over a period of one week. Heavy rains will wash all the goodies out of your pile, just like pouring hot water over tea leaves will do.

I'm attaching a short video, because this guy does basically the same thing I do, except I use a more balanced mixture of greens and browns. The compost I make is too strong to use straight up, so I dig a pit and mix it in with dirt or use it only as a top dressing around my plants.

[heavyhitterokra]

Well, it's Springtime again and I'm working on another pile of compost.  One can never have too much compost.