Compost Update

February is winding to a close, which means that we've been following our new composting regimen for nearly two months now, and I figured it's time for an update.

Between the two of us, Steve and I have done a pretty good job of turning/rolling the bin at least three times a week. Unfortunately, our £7.50 RollMix Composter doesn't seem to be able to withstand even two months of that kind of use. There's a springy wire that wraps around the outside of the cylinder to help hold its shape, and the end of that wire popped out within about two weeks of use. After three or four weeks, the casing for that wire started to rip around the middle. At this point, I just hope that the bag itself lasts long enough for us to decide whether or not a big, rigid compost tumbler on a frame is worth the investment.

The wire on our RollMix Composter started poking out of its casing
after just a few weeks of use.

At this point, it's still difficult to say whether the frequent turning has had any significant effect on the rate of composting. The stuff in the compost tumbler does seem to be breaking down a little bit, but I don't know whether that's actually the case, or if the new additions just look brown because they have a coating of dirt on them from being mixed with the rest of the compost.

Frequent turning of the pile is supposed to help create a better oxygenated environment for the aerobic bacteria that do the heavy lifting in the initial stage of composting, but those bacteria also need heat, which is in short supply this time of year. As I'm typing this, the weather guy on the radio is going on at some length about the "Beast from the East" bringing icy weather from Russia and making this the coldest February in some large number of years, so our local population of decomposers is working at a serious disadvantage.

Whether or not the tumbling action has made a significant difference, there can be no doubt that the composition of the pile has a huge effect on the behavior of the compost.

In early January, I started adding a lot more "browns" to our compost in the form of paper. In those first few weeks, our compost smelled pretty bad and when we moved the roller, it felt like a giant lump of clay just turning over inside the bag without really getting mixed up. The unpleasant smell was a clue that there wasn't enough air getting into our pile, even with the rolling. I started adding more eggshells and cardboard to the mix, which helped a little, but the cardboard soon broke down and glommed together just like the paper, and there weren't enough eggshells to make up a significant percentage of the volume.

A bucket of fallen twigs and branches,
on its way to the compost tumbler.

After that, I started picking up twigs and small tree branches that had fallen during a rainstorm, cutting them into small pieces, and adding them to the compost. Within a few days, the behavior of the pile changed dramatically. The smell almost disappeared, and when we rolled it around, it felt like crumbly bits instead of a solid log.

As the first frosts started showing up in mid-January, I switched to scattering the chopped wood bits around our front garden for a bit of frost protection for the young transplants, and the compost started to glom together again a week or two later, with a little bit of the smell coming back. That just goes to show the importance of structure in a compost pile, which is kind of unfortunate because as I wrote back at the beginning of January, woody twigs and stems are in short supply in our garden. I've picked up most of the larger fallen branches on my daily walk to and from the train station, so I'm going to have to start expanding my search soon.

Every time we move the compost roller,
we find bunches of worms underneath, 
and more inside.

One other thing surprised me about our compost: despite the fact that the roller sits on the middle of a concrete patio, 3-4 feet from the nearest patch of dirt, and in spite of the frequent agitation, our compost tumbler is now home to a surprising number of worms! The bin isn't exactly hermetically sealed, so I'm not particularly surprised that the worms were able to get in. Rather, the mystery is how they found the bin in the first place. What possessed them to cross three feet of concrete (which is a not-insignificant distance, relative to the size of a worm) to get to our bin? How did they know that there was delicious compost inside? Doesn't the frequent tumbling disturb them?

Our worms get first crack at the
partially-finished compost.

At any rate, we now have a slightly better idea or what needs to go into our compost, even if the cold weather means it's slow going. With two months' worth of kitchen scraps, paper shreds, and scavenged twigs going into the tumbler, we're starting to run out of room. This past weekend, Steve sifted through the half-finished compost to see if any of it was ready to go into the garden yet. None of it looked particularly well broken down, but we harvested a tray of worm castings, so some went into the wormery and some went into a spot in our raised beds where nothing was growing at the moment where it can finish breaking down in situ, and the worms can dig it in for us.

While all of this was going on, I've also continued reading. While poking around the forums on permies.com, I stumbled across a series of threads about soil by Bryant Redhawk, that are just too useful not to share. One of the lovely admins has compiled a list of all of his soil-related threads, which can be found here: https://permies.com/wiki/77424/List-Bryant-RedHawk-Epic-Soil#637639

For those of you who aren't willing to read the entire thread, here are some takeaway points:

• Soil is a living ecosystem; if your soil doesn't have lots of microscopic life in it, your garden/farm will not be very productive.
• Brown:green mixture should be closer to 3:1, not 2:1
• Anaerobic conditions are the worst culprit for smelly compost; that nasty smell is nitrogen escaping as ammonia
• Larger compost heaps assembled all at once are better (but not feasible for us)
• Microbiology is amazing. Plants are amazing. Nature is amazing. Humans suck.