Heap of Burnin' Love

...from Will re: Most.Awesome.Compost.Pile.
first: an early morning video:

and now, an explanation.

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...