Dave Wilson Nursery Fruit Tube
Hi I’m Ed Laivo of Dave Wilson Nursery. We’ll be looking at a project today that the Farrax Work Center is actually undertaking, the Sacramento master gardeners will be doing a compost demonstration, a compost systems evaluation and we’ll go back and take a look at that right now.
My name is Chuck Ingels. I’m farmer advisor with UC Cooperative Extension in Sacramento County and we are working with Dave Wilson Nursery to demonstrate and conduct research on these compost bins and tumblers.
We’re going to be conducting a trial looking at how efficient these bins are and the ease of years will give a qualitative and a quantitative analysis looking up for final material. We’ll do a nutrient analysis on the material. It comes after and beyond and we’ll test the temperatures as we go along and I’ll see what kind of material we end up getting out of them.
Let’s review some of the units that the Sacramento master gardeners will be working with here. This is a 3-tier system, drops down so that you can put fresh material in the top. This is a tumbling system. This is a matter of tumbling system with a unique feature. It collects the compost tea so that you can use that as a fertilizer.
Here’s a two-bin tumbling system with a large capacity. This is an old style, just a double bin compost system, fresh material goes in here and then of course it’s transferred into this side of the unit for completion. This compost system tends to be a very popular one and this a little bit more advanced, higher volume unit probably has a little bit better longevity. It manages the simple tiered system that you can actually take this down and make it smaller if you want to or shorter if you don’t need the larger capacity.
And these are the units that they’ll be working with to try to come up with which one is actually the most efficient and then we’ll actually look at how to make all of these systems as efficient as they possibly can be.
We’re currently looking for materials to use because we want to get enough material to fill all of the volume of all these bins and tumblers. We’re trying to find lawn clippings. We’re going to get straw to use, kitchen waste. In order to do this on a large enough scale, we have to import the materials and we want to try to do it all at once so we can mix it all up and put the same materials in each bin.
So, there are lots of different bins and tumblers and their various costs and so we’re just trying to see which ones are actually the best to use and then which maybe are the most economical considering how much their costs as well as how efficient and easy to use they are.
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