Ending and Beginning

We had our first salad from the garden today. I was very good.

I dug out all the old compost from last year’s compost bin (the left one) today. It took me about 90 minutes. I used most of it to mulch various plants in the garden, and dumped the rest in the West garden in an unplanted area. It should have been dug in when the garden was planted, but that didn’t happen. Well, at least it’s in the garden.

The bottom layer of the compost was pretty dense and wet and stinky and anaerobic.

The right-hand compost bin was at 144 degrees F today. After emptying out the left one, I started adding to it and will do so for the next year. The right-hand one will rest until next spring. It’s mostly coffee grounds (with the mixed-in food scraps from the coffee shop), plus maybe five gallons a week of kitchen scraps from our kitchen. I have a feeling it will be more thoroughly composted than the left-hand one was. It has heated up more, and heated up more consistently, than the left one did. The right-hand one never got close to freezing solid, and stayed over 100 degrees most of the winter, unlike the left one. My theory about that is that the peat moss I was using for cover material in the bucket toilet did not provide the readily-available carbon source necessary for bacterial activity to really take off. Isn’t that what they say about peat moss, that it stays in the soil for years after you put it there?

This entry was posted on 5 June 2011 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Composting, Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.