Hi my name is Ed Bruske with DC Urban Gardeners.
We’re here in my garden in the District of Columbia talking about composting and I want to talk to you a little bit about some of these terms I have been throwing out. I hope they don’t scare you and turn you off to composting. Because they’re really all different kinds of composters, all different styles of composting. Some are—don’t involve hardly anything at all. We call that compost happening because it happens all on its own. Then you’ve got people who take a very scientific precise approach to composting and they deal in something we call, Hot Composting.
Right now, I’ve got my thermometer here inserted into my compost heap and it’s not really doing very much, tts ninety degrees about inside the compost heap. Its little over ninety degrees out here, it’s actually a little cooler in the compost heap but if you were a hot composter during the compost process, you will be looking for temperatures to get up to almost a hundred and sixty degrees. And there’re two main reasons for that, one is to kill any pathogens or diseases that might have gotten in to your compost unlikely. The second reason is to kill any weed seeds that might have gotten in there and that can be a concern for a gardener. One tip I would give to everybody is, don’t pull things out of the garden and put them into your compost heap that either have gone to seed or have diseases on them. Keep those out of your compost because you don’t want to spread those into your whole garden.
But the hot composting also makes a compost happen a lot quicker. You have people out there who are looking for finished compost in just a matter of weeks, and the only way you can do that is by generating a lot of heat. Getting those bacteria there that generate that heap, going really quickly and while you’re composting the bacteria actually, will visit your compost heap in a progression, starting with bacteria who don’t like it too hot and going up to bacteria. The thermophile bacteria who like it really hot. The other method as I say, the lazy man’s method. My preferred method, is sort of a, what they call Cold Composting where it doesn’t really matter too much how hot your pile gets or how quick your compost happens as long as it happens. As long as it composts and you aren’t attracting bugs and rodents and creating smells. The next, we’re going to be talking about, activators for compost. If you want it hot, you can get it hot with activators that really turn on the bacteria.
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