Composting 101: Four Types of Compost to Know & Making Compost Tea

[Music] [Music] if you're like me you've often wondered why certain compost works better than others well in today's video we're going to get into composting 101 i'm going to talk about all the different types of compost yes there are more than one type of compost and then i'm also going to show you how i actually make compost here at my place and with that in mind you may be wondering what this giant pile is right here well this is three cubic yards of compost that i picked up locally and so today let's talk about what makes this compost good and what makes other compost more troubling and how to get the most out of your compost there are four different major types of compost there's inoculating fertilizing nutritional and mulching this right here is something that i would consider an example of a nutritional compost and reason why i'd call it nutritional is because it's actually a 50 50 blend of green waste compost which is like you know something like you would make at home just greens and browns and then it's also cut 50 50 with a 100 organic manure based compost so that manure based compost is made with a dairy manure if i recall and the nice thing about it is first of all it's organic which i love to get whenever i can but the manure actually has a ton of nutrients and it's really good for soil life and manure tends to be a little hot and when i say hot i mean it can be very high in nitrogen and it can actually burn the plants so the reason why this is a 50 50 blend is because they wanted to temper that manure base in the original compost by being a nutritional compost whenever i add this to the garden i'm getting a lot of different benefits i'm getting the benefits of the manure which is acting as some sort of level of fertilizer and i'm also getting the benefit of all the greens and browns so all this together is going to form the perfect thing for supporting soil food web life and really what we're going for when we're doing organic gardening organic farming is we're trying to feed the soil so that the soil in turn can feed the plants for us rather than having to rely on chemical fertilizers so i will mention that this i think i mentioned at the beginning actually that i bought this as three cubic yards originally that's an important thing to note is that if you've read the grow bio intensive book by john jevens one of the things he's a huge proponent of compost but one of the things he mentions is that it's literally physically impossible to produce as much compost as you need for your garden so every once in a while you're going to have to buy some compost if you guys follow somebody like charles doubting then you know that even he buys compass and he makes massive quantities of compost so don't feel discouraged if you feel like you need to go buy compost it's not bad it's just something that needs to happen every once in a while and the nice thing about compost is that it's taking waste whether that's yard waste from like say clipping these bushes behind me and it's combining it with dead material to create nutrition and that's kind of one of the most beautiful things because you're closing the loop on green waste and you're actually giving something that benefits your garden while we're sitting here on this pile i'll mention you'll see that some of the some parts of the pile look dark some parts of it like lighter color and the reason why it's dark is because i've been watering it whenever you have a large pile of compost like this you want to make sure that you water it every once in a while and the reason why you want to water it is because if it becomes too dry if it becomes like bone bone dry many of you have probably experienced this with peat but when organic matter tends to dry out it can actually become hydrophobic so that means it's going to be scared or repel water so it's important to make sure that you're maintaining some level of moisture in your pile i'm probably going to water this once a week or maybe i'll use it all before then i have a lot of garden refreshing that i need to do but yeah it's nice to have good compost you can get locally if you can find it organic go for it if you can't you know do the best that you can but it's really nice to have as much compost as you need makes gardening a lot easier compost type number two fertilizing what you see here is a big plate of composted chicken manure now you'll know i didn't say a hot plate because this is composted chicken manure now it is really important to mention that if you are buying a manure-based amendment like a chicken manure you really do want to make sure that it is composted uncomposted manures are what are considered hot they still have a lot of microbial action they're still breaking down because they're still fresh so usually it takes you know six months to a year to be composted entirely and you could tell that this is composted because it has all these little woody bits in there and there's nothing really discernible in terms of manure or anything like that in here now one other thing you might notice is that you're picking up a smell of ammonia and that makes sense because ammonia is a form of nitrogen so all that checks out it's not really the most pleasant part so let's get into what a composted chicken manure is in terms of a fertilizer so composted chicken manure you can look up online it ranges anywhere of like an n number of six to four i'm going to just go ahead and call it a 422 in terms of a fertilizer so imagine if you had a organic granular fertilizer those are usually in the range of something like four two two four three three etc if you were to go build a garden bed you wouldn't go and put two inches of organic fertilizer on top so it's the same idea with a fertilizing compost it's something that you use sparingly as needed so for instance if i am planting corn i do like to reach for the composted chicken manure because chicken manure tends to be high in nitrogen but otherwise i might add a little bit on top of the surface of a bed and then try to rake it in but i'm not going to go ahead and build an entire bed out of it so that's kind of the main distinction of a fertilizing compost it's something that you use sparingly and it's something that's very high in nutrition comparatively all right so i'm on the floor here for you guys but we're going to talk about compost type number three which is a mulching type compost so if you look around here you can probably see already the top of this bed here has a lot of these really woody bits so that's something that would be closer towards a mulch it is still a compost because it is a mixture of greens and browns but you'll find that mulching compost tend to have a lot of more big woody material in there so things like municipal compost i would classify sort of more towards a mulching compost it's not going to be very nutritionally heavy like the one that i showed earlier that has a little bit of manure added in but they still do serve a great purpose for one thing is they're easier to come by and the other nice thing about them is that really you could add as much as you want anywhere and you're not going to really kill plants by burning them you're not going to over fertilize so they do have a purpose it's one of those things that you'll often see in a like no-till garden bed design is you could add you know sometimes four or six eight inches of this kind of compost on top and then plant right into it now do keep in mind that if you are using a mulching compost you are going to want to amend it so you're going to want to add either some sort of composted manure or some organic based fertilizer that's really all i wanted to say about a mulching style of compost one thing you'll note is that this kind of woody material like if you do bury this too much you will have some sort of nitrogen lock out so you do want to make sure that you're staying on top of your fertility other than that it is something that's very useful to have it's something that i would actually consider putting in my pathways because it will actually reduce the water use and it will still provide some sort of fungal and soil microbe hotel for lack of better terms so plenty of reasons to use it but it's not the first thing i'm going to reach for if i'm going to be building a new garden bed i'm going to lean towards that nutritional compost so this beautiful structure made out of pallets here is my finishing compost bin so what i mean by finishing compost bin is i start all my compost in these green yard waste bins and i kind of let it cold compost i don't really pay much attention to it once they entirely fill up i actually move them over here and i'll let it sit for another three to six months now that last bit of three to six months is where all the magic happens so in my green bins there's tons of really coarse straw but you could see that once i'm at this stage here and i should note this is from the end of summer i'd say probably july was the last edition i really added here and it's all gone it's all been broken down there's really not much discernible that's kind of one of the definitions for when compost is finished is if you take a handful and look at it can you identify any of the bits in there and honestly i can't the only thing i can identify is straw the other thing is when you take it and take a nice whiff of it it should smell good it actually it does smell good it doesn't smell weird doesn't smell bad doesn't smell like something that's been sitting wet for too long and it just kind of rotted has this kind of pleasant earthy smell to it and that is really perfect so now what i could do is i could take all this compost here which was filled up to here so now it's dropped by half in volume and that's after it's already been initially composted so just something to consider actually a quick caveat is that when you're building your compass piles what you see isn't what you get what you get is at the end of that six month road usually half the pile that you started with now i did mention at the beginning that there are four different types of compost i would maybe consider homemade compost type number five i don't really know where to classify it i'd say it's probably somewhere between inoculating because it is normally quite alive it's for instance going to be way more alive than anything i could get from my local municipality i wouldn't really call it fertilizing because there's no manures in here but i might call it nutritious and inoculating and that's because there's quite a lot of nutritional matter left in that huge pile of greens that i added all those tomato plants they have been sucking up nitrogen the whole season it's not just like the municipal compost which is just a random collection of greens that are collected from people's yards i know what's in here it's a mixture of mostly plants that i grow here so that's great i'll say that homemade compost is probably some of the best stuff you could get but like i said at the beginning there is a caveat that you'll never be able to produce as much compost as you need so anything that you do produce just treat it as a bonus i'm going to use this as maybe like a half inch topper to my beds and the bulk of my beds are going to be built with the compost that i purchased before we move on to the next thing i just found something cool i wanted to show you guys this is an avocado pit so this is something that we stopped putting under compost it's not really something you should add but when you have a lot of people you never know what's gonna end up in there now it's pretty cool is that this is actually broken down quite a bit some sort of creature has been burrowing and tunneling through it so even something like a avocado pit eventually will be broken down into nothing so compost is really a beautiful thing compost type number four an inoculating compost this is the good stuff so what is an inoculating compost an inoculating compost is something that is so dense in life and when i say life i mean things like fungi bacteria archaea amoeba nematodes any sort of protozoa anything that's beneficial to your soil food web is going to be packed in here now when you think of something like inoculating what that usually means is that it's inoculated with that material and that in this case it is so this five gallon bag is absolutely loaded in fungal life among other things so this is sent over to me by andy from sd microbes it's a local company it's actually going to be the first company that i'm doing a little affiliate partnership with so we'll hook you guys up with a little discount if you guys are curious in this but basically the main idea here is that you take this five gallon bag of inoculating compost and then you could use it in teas or extracts or just straight up to inoculate your bigger compost pile so this five gallon bag here i could in theory use to inoculate that entire three cubic yard compost that i purchased so while this is a lot more expensive than any other compost you could buy the way you use it is that you stretch it by getting all that life and transporting that into a or not transporting it magnifying it into a much bigger sense i'm gonna take this five gallon bag and i don't know how much of it i'm actually going to use but i'm going to go ahead and inoculate my entire compost pile with it beyond that i'm also going to use it to inoculate any of my garden with it the way you could do that is by by either making the tea or extract you could just water your garden directly with it you could put some in the planting hole as you're transplanting you could also take your transplant dip it in that liquid before you plant it and the basic idea is that this has so much life in it that that liquid is going to carry a very significant amount of it and whenever you spread that liquid then that's going to propagate and further spread that inoculation so the way you use this is really sparingly it's like a little seasoning at the end it's like your salt to finish your meal so very excited to use this i'll go ahead and show you what it looks like and then we'll also get into how to actually use this so this particular inoculating compost is called bio vast compost and again i'm very excited to use this um if you don't want to purchase it yourself you can actually make an inoculating compost on your own this is a very common popular tactic for knf korean natural farming where they use imos indigenous microorganisms to create a very alive compost mixture which they can then use in teas and extracts to spread around their garden so i haven't actually gotten into that yet something that i've been wanting to try but i just felt like i need to learn one thing at a time so this is going to be my opportunity to kind of get into it and learn what this actually does for my garden so now we've talked about the four different major types of compost and i wanted to now focus on the inoculating compost the one that i was very excited about earlier so what we're gonna do today is something that i've personally never done before i am not an expert on i've read about it i've listened to some podcasts watched some videos on it but this is absolutely the first time i'm doing anything like this and that is making compost extract or tea and the reason why you do this is that it's to take something like this which is you know on the pricier end but extremely beneficial and good for the garden and try to magnify this and i messaged andy over at sd microbes and he mentioned that a 1.5 cubic foot bag of this is enough to apply tea to five acres of property so this here should be way more than plenty for me to fully inoculate the three cubic yards of compass i just bought while also being able to inoculate my whole garden so i'm very excited to hear that so anyway before we get into the compost brewing there's a couple things that matter and that's the equipment so this is a just a paint straining bag i picked this up at a local hardware store so that's what the compost is going to sit in it's going to make the end product easier to separate and then apply i got some of this by recommendation from somebody at a hydroponic store it's a catalyst that has things that fungal populations like to feed on things such as oat bran sea kelp wheat malt and it has a little bit of molasses again i'm not going to get too into these details because that's an entire video on its own and i'm also not an expert so maybe in a few months after i've practiced this i'll go ahead and do a video maybe a full guide and we could really figure out how this works and my thoughts on it then but for now i'm just gonna do it i'm not sure if i'm doing it entirely right but we're gonna do it anyway so what i pulled out is this is a air pump this is what's normally used for an aquarium and these are two air stones so the idea is that this pumps air in through here the stone diffuses the air and it creates a ton of bubbles i'm going to use quarter inch irrigation line to connect these and this has two outlets so the basic idea is you take some compost put it in here throw it in your container put water in here and there's a special caveat and we'll go over why i have this measuring cup on the water in a moment here but you take your compost put it in there you might throw in a little bonus thing like this totally optional don't need it whatsoever then you drop your two air stones in and you let it brew and the reason why you're putting the air in is the air is agitating so it's creating the mixture and it's also providing oxygen so that the actual contents of the brew doesn't go anoxic so no oxygen and that is an important thing because if you do create an anaerobic environment you could start propagating things that aren't beneficial to your garden things that do grow in a low or no oxygen environment so you want to at least provide some sort of oxygen during the whole process to try to inhibit the growth of anything like that so anyway let's get into the actual process and before i set all this up i'm going to talk about the water now so in here i have about two to three gallons of filtered water and i did just recently install a garden water filter again that's gonna be a topic for another video it's something brand new so i don't have much to say on it but basically whenever you're brewing a active tea like this you want to make sure that you don't have any chlorine or chloramine now chlorine is if you only have chlorine in your water that's totally doable you could just let a bucket of water sit out overnight and most of the chlorine will off gas but chloramine won't and it needs to be filtered out unfortunately i checked with my local water municipality and our water does have some chloramine in it so i decided to get the filter but anyway what i have here is a chlorine test strip and so in here i have the water that i just filtered with my new garden water filter and then in this cup here i have just straight tap water so i want to do a quick test of the chlorine and see and make sure that a i actually do have chlorine in my water and b that the filter is actually removing that chlorine effectively all right so there are the two test strips i'm gonna go ahead and do the tap water one two three hold it level then do the filtered water one two three and hold the level all right so i don't know if the color is going to come out very cleanly but the one that's closer to my thumb there is the straight tap water so already i could see that it definitely has chlorine it's probably somewhere in the three to five parts per million range whereas the one that i just filtered has none so the test is zero the color basically didn't change so that's step one complete now we could go ahead and get the brewing going i decided to take this draining bag out for now and i'll actually just strain everything at the end i think it'll work better if everything's allowed to kind of just bounce around in the water more freely so there's about a little over half a pound of the biovas compost and like i said this is like probably two and a half gallons of water um andy recommended about a half pound to five gallons but for a more concentrated tea you could just do a higher ratio of compost so that's what i'm going to just go for today um so i'm gonna go ahead turn on the air pumps start getting the mixing and oxygen going and then i'm gonna just dump this in at least i'm pretty sure that's all i have to do i might try to help give it a stir one thing i'll note is that i was recommended to have the air pump above the water that way if anything happens like if power shuts off the water won't go back into the pump and ruin it so that's why i have this elevated here so i'm gonna just actually try to take one of these air stones just kind of swirl it around so there's a lot of different ways to do this this was not the method andy recommended he recommended something called like a type of pump called an air lift pump but i already had this on hand so i decided to just go ahead and do this instead this might not be as effective some people get really really intense about compost brewing it's what i've noticed in doing research but i'm brand new to this so for me this seems perfectly adequate i'm going to go ahead and add that six teaspoons of catalyst and yeah so basically i'm gonna just let this brew it's recommended for a compost tea to do 12 to 24 hours there's something called an extract which is like a quick soak so you're not really propagating things as much you're more just kind of extracting it and that's a two to four hour brew so i'm not entirely sure what i'm going to end up with today i might just try to do an extract off of this but yeah we'll see check back later so tephra and i have now been patiently waiting for four hours i'm gonna go ahead and call it this is gonna be more of an extract rather than a tea since i only had it in there for four hours but i really just wanna try it so i'm gonna go ahead and strain this and then go try to apply it to different parts of the garden and next time i will do a full 24 hour brew but i just realized that my timing tomorrow morning i don't really have time to deal with this so we're gonna stick with an extract for today all right so now i'm gonna go ahead and deactivate this and i'm going to go ahead and bring this paint strainer into action i have no idea how it's going to work or if it'll work um but let's find out all right so i know cleanliness is important here both of these buckets haven't been used for anything else before so that's a good start but basically what i'm going to do now is pour this bucket into here where hopefully this mesh will filter the majority of it and then i've decided that anything that's in the little straining sock it probably still has a lot of life in it so i'm going to go ahead and take the remains of this compost and just throw it into my compost bin and basically with the idea of that inoculating my compost all right so let's do this a lot of it's actually still inside the bucket here i'm gonna go ahead and give that a squeeze cause that seems like a good idea all right okay so that's what's left and it's going to be hard to tell since it's a black bucket but now i have this nice brown liquid so hopefully this is full of a lot of beneficial life now we're going to figure out how we're going to actually apply it to the garden so i just did a little test with that little hose on siphon and i'm not convinced that it's actually siphoning fast enough so i'm going to switch to my old reliable which is the ez flow the way this works is basically you fill it often i mean the only way i've used this before since i've never made compost tea before is i filled this with a liquid organic fertilizer and then you put this little guy on top and it lets you select how fast it's releasing fertilizer from slow to one to two to fast so i have it on fast right now since this is already basically a dilute fertilizer screw it on and what's going to happen is as the water comes through here it's going to pressurize this vessel and then force some of it to come back into the stream so as i'm watering it's definitely going to be siphoning out the material and you could tell because this line color will be the color of whatever's in here so you know that it's actually moving through the other reason i really like this is that it comes with these little pressure reducing rings and what that means is that i could actually use this on my drip irrigation so even though my drip irrigation doesn't flow very fast this is still able to siphon up and inject fertilizer wherever i want so i'm going to fill this right now go water in that three cubic yards of compost and then once i've done that for maybe 10-15 minutes i'm going to go ahead and run it through my drip in this garden and then run it through my drip in the other garden so that way i'm going to basically try to use this as much as i can and inoculate my whole garden as fast and easy as i can it doesn't really get any easier than this honestly you just put your stuff in here turn on the timer which i have hooked up in line and i use two quick connects from hoselink so i only have to buy one of these one of these one of the backflow preventers and then i just go around quick swapping quick connecting in across my garden so i'm going to go ahead and do that now all right so usually i'll put this whole quick connect system over by the faucet um so that it's not this awkward but i'm going to leave it here so that i could just show you guys what's going to happen so what i'm going to do is turn on the water and as i do that what's gonna what you're gonna see is that this line is going to turn brown and there it is so that's brown so i know now for example that the the water is actually siphoning through there and it is actually drawing that compost tea into the system so now the water that's coming out right here is actually loaded with that compost tea so here's the easy flow setup on my drip line irrigation so this part of the garden i don't have any way to get pvc over there easily so what i do is i take my hose link and i quick connect to my drip main line right here but since i want to fertilizer injector in this case inoculate i have the quick connect to a timer which is set for two hours to a backflow preventer to the easy flow siphon and then quick connected to my drip line so now i'm just gonna walk away for two hours and after the two hours the color in this line is going to start becoming a lot more faded and that's because this is getting diluted constantly as this is as the water is flowing through so that's how you kind of know that it's actually working is that the color whatever you're putting in here basically should have some color and the color will become faded over time so now this is the the fun slash boring part is going to be actually applying this i'm going to do this by hand over here just because i don't have drip system on this but i want to try to impart as much of this material in here as i can one thing that i should probably mention is that i have already been watering this pile and that's important because if i was just to dump the solution onto dry compost it's going to have to do double duty first it's going to have to rehydrate and there's not going to be anywhere for all those beneficials to want to live and thrive so this has already been pre-wet some somewhat and now i'm just basically inoculating this pile so i've taken that inoculating compost i've put it into a solution and now i'm inoculating this nutritional compost so basically i'm supercharging this compost by using a very small amount of the other one so this is the best use case i could think of because now instead of just having a five gallon bag of inoculating compost this whole pile will begin to be inoculated so that's really all there is to it guys uh after this i'm gonna run it through all my drip and get my whole garden inoculated as best i can and over the next couple months i'll keep you guys updated but i think that's all we have to talk about today so with all that in mind i just want to say thanks if you guys enjoyed this video if you learned something please give it a like if you haven't subscribed you know please do because there's going to be a lot more and you guys are going to want to see the update in a few months on how this worked so thank you and garden hermets out [Music] you

Channel: Jacques in the Garden

Views: 21,892

Keywords: jacques in the garden, epic gardening, compost, chicken manure, inoculate, fertilizing, homemade compost, compost tea, brewing tea, gardening, microbes, organic matter, manure, beneficial microbes, biovast, urban Gardening, gardening tips, feed the soil

Id: BQMn8gwFVkE

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021