Making healthy Compost / Everything you would want to know !

• published: 14 Oct 2013
• views: 42652

WEBSITE: http://heirloomseedsaving.com/ Now I just wanted to show you how a compost area might look like. We have some leaf mulch here, now i spent much of the morning separating 3 different kinds of materials. There was a big pile ontop of that old compost pile there, we have a lot of these old branches, leaf mulch. What I've also done is shredded bigger branches and this pile here is green stuff, plenty of flies with vegetable, it will be mixed with brown stuff. Smaller branches, older compost pile here, lovely black stuff here with little branches which is important because too much carbon content in soil will rob nitrogen from soil. Softer branches are okay, bigger branches are not okay. Before we talk about how we make the compost heap, we talk about this heap I made two months ago. I made a video on it. We see black stuff in it, its half decomposed, twigs need to be broken, there is worms, worms are great. The compost has cooled down and some nasturtium flowers growing here. How to make it: use brown carbon materials bark, mulch, paper, cardboard leaves twigs, then comes water, fungi and bacteria make use of it. Then branches are the brown and also allow air pockets to come into compost. Air is important for fungi to break down the heap, green material we use vegetable peelings, cow manures, then add soil for worms so worms can have it to break down compost material. Eventually we go back to browns, water, then greens, every now and then we use an inoculant, which is fungi found in the forest. Worm castings or adding sweet compost is very good for and innoculum. Another thing is, different materials in the garden, weeds, food scraps, leaves, branches, if you can make sure you have a certain amount of carbon and nitrogen (25:1) if you have these quantities in the right amount, the decomposition process will do very well. Easiest way to think of it is a sandwich, brown on the outside and thin layer of green inside. Also recommend, with higher compost, make levels of brown and green, add soil in-between, up to a meter or 2 meters, turn it once a day. It will heat up a lot and adding water will cool it down. I was using a thermostat to make sure its not above 60C, but u can leave it there for a day and if its hot to the touch you should turn it and water it, if its not hot then its okay. You can use this compost for compost tea if you care for it enough. Bring in microbes from a wormery or an old compost heap that smells sweet to ensure bacteria. Throw in fungi to innoculate every now and then. Quickly here, this is hyphen, (fungi decomposing this compost). Hope that answered a lot of question in regards to making your own compost, This is different from a wormery that's a low, 30cm high heap, we feed it by adding nitrogen and carbon materials and worms as well. Now if you have any questions drop a comment on Youtube, Facebook or private message me, thanks for watching. .