first: an early morning video:
A Heap of Burnin’ Love
A few comments on our farm-scale composting effort; I have
been building compost piles for as long as we have had gardens…that is…decades,
and they have varied from small backyard piles to fenced bins consisting of a few
pickup loads of leaves, hay, debris and horse manure; all with varying degrees
of success. Probably my best composting
effort was during a period of my life when I had the time to do a lot of
fishing and composted a lot of fish waste…boy that stuff heats up fast.
On the farm in Zachary, not so much however… Due to lack of raw materials and time (plus
an increasing disincentive to hand shovel manure into the pickup truck like I
used to), when I have the materials I typically practice “sheet composting”, which
is simply spreading materials in the field and eventually plowing them in. To build soil fertility, I mostly rely on
green manure cover crops and such items as processed chicken manure and crab
meal, plus a lot of mulching. It works,
and I will continue these practices.
What has changed is that we now have these two high tunnel greenhouses
in our field, and green crops cannot be feasibly grown and plowed in under the
tunnels. Also, organic matter does not
readily decompose when not exposed to the elements. Therefore, pre-digested organic matter must
be brought in, and we need a lot of it (area under the tunnels is approximately
2,700 square feet). Just a 2-inch layer
of compost in the tunnels would require 16 yards of compost, about an
18-wheeler load, and that’s “finished” compost.
You would need double that volume of raw materials to start with.
What you see in the pictures is my first attempt at large
scale composting. I started with a large
pile of garden debris, including all of the bean plants, half of the corn crop
stalks, and all of the other vegetable matter left over from processing. Composted, this would have given me a couple
of square yards of material (a yard is a pile that is 3 foot square and 3 foot
tall). I needed more. Plus, I was having trouble locating enough
horse or cow manure to build a big pile.
My solution was to purchase a dump truck load of corn gluten from a
supplier in Baton Rouge. Corn gluten is
a by-product of corn starch manufacturing and is used widely as animal
feed. It is about 9% nitrogen. I still needed more dry material, and was
fortunate enough to have a 650-acre plot across the road, from which about 2500
round bales of hay is cut each year. I
was able to get 11 round bales of spoiled hay at no charge. That is the equivalent of about 250 square
bales, about what we have cut from our 2.5 acre field (ours is used for
mulch). The garden debris, gluten, and
hay is layered and wetted down. I added
about 300 gallons of fish emulsion to really get things going, as you can
see. My fear is that it is getting
perhaps too hot. I have a truckload of
sawdust coming that I plan to incorporate when I turn the pile, which should
slow things down a little. Overall,
though, I could not be more pleased.
Other than a mushroom farm I went to a long time ago, this is the most
composting I have seen. (BTW, the effort
took me about 12 hours so far and could not have been done without the front
end loader.)
CORN GLUTEN
and one more video because, as you can see, we just can't get enough of this...
