David: I am David Epstein. This is Growing Wisdom and I am here today with Howard Anderson and we are at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Albion, Maine and we are going to be talking composting and there is a lot of tools to help you compost. Let us start with, you have to decide, I am going to compost but then what do you put it in?
Howard: You have a number of choices, we sell few bins and this one is made out of lobster wires, it is vinyl coated, it lasts a long time and you can add an additional bin to it if you want to have more compost. This one here behind you Dave is made out of cedar and another one we sell is this small tumble type, you fill it up and spin it and turn to aerate it.
David: Now that may be for someone who has a smaller yard, is not doing a lot of composting but if you were doing more composting, you might want to get one of these bigger ones but obviously you cannot be flipping this upside down.
Howard: We have a fork that you can use just to put in, you turn it like shovel or this, you plunge it in there so often and just turn it like that.
David: Move the stuff around. So it is really important that we are just getting oxygen into this pile.
Howard: Right to keep the bacteria happier, alive and growing.
David: Is there anything you can use to get the compost started?
Howard: We have this Compost Accelerator. You can add it to those initial beneficials and get things going.
David: And make it successful?
Howard: Right.
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David: So aeration is important. Also moisture and ph are the other two important things.
Howard: Correct.
David: You guys have some waste in which we can monitor that?
Howard: We do. We have some moisture meters and ph meters. This unit here will make our ph and moisture are all in the same tool. We have a whole range of ph meters for the home gardeners and for our commercial growers.
David: So it does not matter what size composting operations you have, there is some ph meter that is going to work for you and where do you want the ph?
Howard: ph needs to be between five and a half and eight.
David: So if the ph gets a little too low you can add a little bit of lime to it.
Howard: The other important thing is the temperature of your compost and it starts around 50 degrees and can go as high 158 degrees and we have some thermometers so you can measure that.
David: One thing we should mention is that if you want to use compost in your house, you can do that. Just leave it outside for day or two. Let it dry out before you put it on your house plants inside. You just do not want to take it directly from the compost pile.
Come back every week for all of our tips, hints, and helps at growingwisdom.com and you can check out a lot of these products at Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Go to their website johnnyseeds.com
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