Hi, my name is Chuck Ingels, I am the farming and horticulture adviser with UC cooperative extension in Sacramento County, and we are here again to look at the results of the first batch of compose that we made from all these nine different bins.
And why don’t I just mention first that the starting materials that were used included straw, about a hay, pine needles, pine shavings, grass clippings and coffee grounds. We use these materials, many of them the pine needles and pine shavings especially where high carbon, that is high carbon low nitrogen or hi carbon to nitrogen ratio. For instance, the pine shavings had a carbon to nitrogen very, very high 180 to 1. Pine needles were less 72 to 1, but then you gets down to grass clippings, which were about 25 to 1.
The result that we got are interesting, they took about, about 6-8 weeks before we had the final compose created, and the bins that were in front of here are the open standing dense, rather than the tumblers. The bins in general have the highest temperatures recording up to 140 or more degrees.
We also did a screening, so we have mask, wire mask that was quarter inch squares in the mask. What we found was that, this presto composter provided the greatest ratio of screening material to material that didn’t go to the screen. So it did the best job of composting. It is all fairly close to the other bins, but this was our best result with this one.
We did also a visual rating, we lifted a compose and did a visual evaluation of them and found that the presto was slightly battered than any other. And this one was second; this one is the home composter. The nice thing about it is it has a lid, but notice it doesn’t have as much air circulation. Okay you want that air circulation and that’s really good. But it does have a lead for the winter. So if it is raining a lot, this will protect your compose a little bit better, and keep it a little warmer during the winter. This is the earth engine, and talk about good air circulation, great air circulation. You may have really good results also; it’s just that the presto we found did the best.
So here we have our tumblers, what we found was they generally didn’t, the bins are smaller the containers are smaller. So, you have less than mass and generally lower temperatures. And even in our current batch, we have our second batch going now, the temperatures are lower, slightly lower in a 130 to 140-degree range, this after only a week. Whereas our composters did the bins are up to 160. So generally warmer on the bins.
The enviro cycle actually did fairly well. At the end of trial, we have pretty good compose made from this. So we worked pretty well. The tumbleweed also, may be not quite as good on our first batch. Notice the air circulation is not the best, there are only four holes here and there are four on the bottom. We will talk about an easy way to turn a compose or tumbler. It is very simple to turn it, but again we want good air circulation, and the tumbler just doesn’t have quite the circulation that some of this standing bins have.
So I wanted to talk about this enviro cycle, which I have in my house and I am not composting correctly. I want to talk about the results of what happens if you don’t add both green and brown material.
So we started with material that was both green and brown, and it included some straw, some clippings from plants as well as lime clippings a little bit, and then we keep adding kitchen waste and I never quite got around. Even though I was spinning at, I never quite got around even though I was spinning it, I never got around to adding leaves or straw or something else. We kept adding kitchen waste, cut up vegetables, greens that have gone bad in the kitchen. And so, while we engine up with, is wet sticky compose that doesn’t heat up anymore and it’s really rather useless, its stinks but if you can give it some air and some more a brown to it, then it would begin to make good compose. But so you can mismanaged compose pile or tumblers just as well as you can manage them correctly.
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