Composting

What do y'all do to winterize your gardens? This is going to be my approach to the potato patch as winter approaches.

As municipalities contract with large waste haulers to comply with a California composting law, local composters say they're being driven out of business.

Getting ready for winter, though it is pretty mild where I live, and thinking about composting in place. Anybody done it? Would it work where you are?

what's up, everyone? i'm Andy, a new moderator of c/composting. i figure i can at least post a heaptalk thread for us to talk about our composting efforts. where are you, geographically, and what challenges do you face? what kind of composting setup do you have?

Hi all:

I got this message from an old colleague. TL:DR - they are looking to set up a good sized pile, but are looking for PDFs that show how to do this and how to start.

I don't have any experience with setting up piles themselves, so any insight is appreciated.

I am wondering if you know of or have a user’s guide for setting up and operating a medium size compost pile on the ground? There are lots of user’s manuals for backyard composting in bins, but that is too small. I want to set up a medium sized compost pile on the ground so that mixing can be done with mechanical equipment or many people with shovels. Covered with a tarp to keep moisture in. Know of any PDFs? There are websites that describe this, but I need to have a paper copy.

https://piped.video/watch?v=rpmzUPhVBG8

Here is a video of the slide deck with the presentation audio if you would like to both see and hear the presentation I gave. Canonical youtube link is here

Here is the slide deck with presenter notes if you'd prefer that - it links you to the google slides but if you're very averse to them please feel free to contact me (this is my handle everywhere) and I will happily send you a .pptx file.

Hi everyone!

First time posting here and so happy that there's a community about composting!

I was having a look at the different posts and saw some about critter IDs. I just wanted to let you guys know that iNaturalist lets you create projects and I follow this one https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/home-compost-exploration, which turned out to be useful sometimes.

It's great that you can contribute uploading pictures of whatever you find in your compost, and pretty fun (if you're curious) to see what other piles attract all over the world. You can also filter by location, of course, and see what you might find in neighbouring piles.

My city collects waste food for composting. There is /no seeds/ rule, likely because whoever uses the compost wants to control what they grow.

I make veg. broth by boiling veg. scraps for ~30—60 min., some of which are loaded with seeds. I’m wondering if the boiling kills the seed, in which case I wouldn’t likely cause problems by tossing the boiled scraps into the city’s compost.

I've been working on composting using another method besides trench composting for about two months now. I've enjoyed it so far, and been honestly trying to compost anything that is possible to compost. One thing I noticed though, as a moved from my brief time using a bucket (there were some holes), to a pile, is that I didn't see worms anymore. So I come to you composting experts to ask how can I bring more worms to my shady compost pile on clay soil.

Hey there everybody

For folks who are unfamiliar with us, we’re a small scale plant nursery that follows permaculture and regenerative agriculture principles. We’ve used tons of wood chips over the years and we’re getting ready to receive more over today and tomorrow. What would you like to know?

Earlier today I posted to the farming community to ask about a photobash of a village I'm working on. One of the suggestions I'd received in my last search for inputs was a centralized composting solution, which I think makes sense for a solarpunk community. Everybody contributes organic waste and everyone benefits.

I started doing some reading about options from a random state website so I guess you can assume that's the absolute upper limit of my understanding of composting at this time. I just want to represent it well and if there's any good talking points that could go into the picture's text write up to drive discussion, I'd love to include them.

One thing I saw was that with aeration, you can do negative pressure systems which suck air from the compost windrow to pull in fresh air - if you did that, could you divert the compost offgassing (which should be a decent amount of CO2 right?) into the greenhouses to boost the plant growth without burning fuel?

Thanks for any input

Piped video

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/2967556

I know I can send soil samples to my local university extension office for testing, but how do I test soil for glyphosate-based herbicides, lead, arsenic, and other contaminates?

As a citizen scientist I'm about to get into composting more on my property and would like to know more.