Home Composting Seminar

so my name is Susie Gordon and I work for the city's natural resources department I'm going to just sort of give you a little preview of what the agenda is tonight we have a speaker who's going to give you a fairly in-depth presentation about how to compost but if you know me you know I can't get away without talking a little bit about trash the reason the city's natural resources department is very interested in in helping people learn about composting it's a really important way to help folks keep their trash you know reduce the amount of trash they send to the landfill and it's it's an important technique and I think more and more people are becoming aware of it so you may not know but our trash we've got a couple of landfills in the area and the landfill that there are my County operates as well as one that is a private landfill out in alt any ideas anybody want to hazard a guess as how much of our waste stream is biodegradable kind of food waste and compostable material any guesses yeah it's at least twenty percent and it's probably a little more because you can actually take wood waste and grind it and turn it into compostable product as well so as I mentioned composting is an important strategy that we hope people will consider applying to their own households but we want to make sure that you're also aware that you know the city has a very strong recycling program if you're not already using the services of your trash haulers curbside recycling services by all means give them a call because that's part of your basic service at no additional fee and recently some changes have happened to the ordinance that sort of prescribes that program one is that you're you're you can call your trash hauler now and get a much taller larger recycling bin it's either a 65 or 95 gallon cart so if you haven't already heard about that it's it's a big upgrade from the little curb side tubs the little open tubs and and then there's sort of a big change that's happened that might sound a little bit unimportant but they've removed any additional fees so your trash bill should be very transparent now and you'll be able to see the compressor your trash so we are interested in stating composting as a way to to help you reduce your trash and therefore your trash bill because the city's page to throw ground excuse me pays you through a program is structured so that the more you throw away the more you pay but you know it also creates this really important resource for all of us who are interested in doing any sort of gardening or cultivation you know we're in you're going to hear about that tonight you may already know it's really really helps promote healthy plants if you simply use mulch it's a great way to keep weeds down and and then from the city's perspective or another really important thing is that as you add these biodegradable compostable materials into your soil it really reduces to your irrigation needs so you might consider backyard composting and that might be why you're here tonight and we'd also like to mention a couple of other options that you have available at your household increasingly we're seeing that the organic growers are interested in getting things like leaves that people rake up in the fall so I've put the website up there for something we call the leaf exchange in the fall if you have a whole lot of leaves and bags that you don't want to send to the landfill there are people who would like to come and take them away for you and use them in their operations there are two commercial composters who you can patronize one is Weitzel's on West Mulberry the others hagman's on East Prospect and if you have the way to get your compostable material out there it's cheaper and going to the landfill and then finally one of our local trash haulers valued a sanitation who has a booth here tonight does offer a weekly curbside yard waste collection program and so you're wondering how well is so how well is this all working the city's efforts and its really it is having a very dramatic impact so because I'm kind of a little bit of a data nerd I put these numbers up in 2009 we're down to one hundred and sixty thousand tons of trash and that's really amazing because since you know 2004 what are we down that's from two hundred and thirty thousand tons down to one hundred and sixty so it's really going in the right direction and the cycling is increasing we're up to 75,000 tons a year that we can document and that's up from 58 so going in the right direction and we think at this point the city is at about 38 percent waste diversion but we're really striving to get to 50 percent so keep on thinking about your recycling options your source reduction and so forth so I'm going to go ahead and get started with an introduction for a debate but let me make two quick announcements first one is that we have a composting Festival on June 5th and 6th at will be held at the gardens on Spring Creek which is very close by on Central Avenue and you'll hear more about this a little later in the program a chance to come and see all sorts of booths they're going to be I think about with out about 30 booths and some more workshops and we really hope that you'll consider coming over and enjoying it it's going to be a lot of fun there'll be music activities for kids and hopefully good weather the second thing is we're going to be giving away prizes tonight so we hope you filled out a little door prize drawing card and Michelle is out in the front if you haven't filled about one already please send it you know give them give a fill it out for her we've got a green cone we've got a soil saver composting system and John Anderson has donated a couple of his starter kits for permaculture and so our speaker tonight Eddie Elliot is here from CSU where she is one of the teachers in the soil science program she is the coordinator for the CSU organic agriculture program she is the executive director for the Colorado organic producers association and she's a graduate of CSU which is always great she's very experienced in researching and teaching and she's a new mom so please help me welcome Eddie Elliot good evening it's good to see a full house who's interested in compost it's my favorite topic to talk about so thank you for coming and listening and hopefully many of you are already composting is anybody already composting raise them high good I'm gonna try and keep this presentation a little short so we can ask questions and have some answers I know sometimes people have one specific challenge with their compost bin and we can talk about those as a group and hopefully get them solved feel free to stop me if you have a burning question and I'll have some times where I ask you questions to try and relate to your per year compost experience so as Suzie said I'm going to talk to you about backyard composting but a lot of these principles can be used in different scales so if you're if you're trying to compost the manure from a horse or many cows or a couple goats or just your kitchen scraps many of these principles will apply to all of them so it's kind of a fun science that you can then take to the art form to figure out how it can be used in your specific situation and all of those materials I just listed plus any other organic matter it's such a resource so it kills me to see it being wasted we just moved in October and for a little while I didn't have a compost bin set up and so I was throwing things in the garbage and it felt like I was throwing away such resources so hopefully you feel that way too there are many methods of composting one of them is active Windrose that's a long window that you lay out in your yard or in a horse yard or depending on the scale and then you actively manage it actively turn it so we'll refer to that in this presentation we also have been compost operations or bin compost setups and that's what many of the backyard composters are using we'll talk about that too there's also a passive windrow system where you can build a pile and have some pipes under it with some forced air that kind of acts as a turning system but you physically don't turn it I'm not going to talk about that tonight but just wanted to put that out there in case you're ever interested that is a system that works and has technology connected with it and then as suzie mentioned johnny anderson over here is the worm man in town and the worm expert but I wanted to put a couple websites up there in the presentation so you can find more information on that if you're interested so many of you probably already know but I wanted to list a few of the benefits of composting my favorite is that it reduces your waste stream that I will no longer call a waste I will call a feedstock because it's much more important than the word waste references it adds but it will reduce your material by 30% so you you can reduce your trash pile it also composting also minimizes pathogens and weeds odors and insect problems if you're doing it right compost should not smell bad and you really shouldn't have insects attracted to it more than just the few good ones like like some pill bugs there are some ants in my compost pile right now but they'll go they tend to come and go it's not an ant Haven throughout the whole season also composting stabilizes nitrogen and phosphorus so it turns those two nutrients into compounds that are more able to stay in the soil they're in a form that the soil can absorb and hold on to until your plant is ready to use them so that's really good especially in times like right now when we're getting significant rainfall and the water is moving across the soil pretty quickly and down through the soil composted nutrients stay in the soil where you put them so they're not running off into water bodies or leaching down into the soil or into the water below the soil composting also produces a really useful product so all of us are making something that we could either sell or use or if it's in my backyard I always end up adding my compost to the lilacs and we have really good lilacs because my vegetable garden just doesn't need any more for now and then we all hear about carbon sequestration it's in the news it's in national Geographics it's everywhere if you are composting your food scraps you are sequestering carbon you are putting carbon back in your soil and keeping it where it needs to be and people do ask through turning a compost pile you do emit some co2 into the environment but that's that's very small amounts and it's what would happen anyways so you're doing a net good thing for the planet so what is composting this is a definition that's taken out of a really good resource which is referenced at the bottom and a lot of this book is available for free online if you go to this link so I suggest you visit it so composting is the managed biological oxidation process that turns very unlike material into a like material like particle like sighs like nutrient holding material we'll go through this definition one piece at a time so we can define each little piece of it so the managed portion of this definition that's what you do you're the manager you're the farmer of the of the compost pile so you're gonna provide carbon and nitrogen at a thirty to one ratio this is like the recipe for a compost pile give or take it's not so much like baking bread it doesn't have to be perfect but it's more like baking your favorite non baked good you can fluff a little bit and it's still going to work so carbon is a benign product it's the brown stuff in your in your waste stream so it's your brown leaves it's spoiled hey it's cardboard newspaper it's anything that I like to think if you set it out in the backyard and it gets rained on a little bit in a couple of days it's not going to be really stinky so it's pretty dead stuff the brown stuff now the nitrogen is the really alive and and smelly and active material like kitchen food scraps you might have chicken waste you might have chicken coop and have lots of chicken poop on your straw that's probably more nitrogen than carbon since it's going to be stinky and ammonia rich also alfalfa anything green out of your pastures or a horse manure that's got a lot of nitrogen in it so this is the trickiest part for a lot of people to figure out what is their carbon to nitrogen ratio and that link that I gave on the previous slide will tell you what the carbon and nitrogen ratio is for your materials unless you have something really really strange and then you can probably google it but coffee grounds they're high nitrogen so we'll talk about some more of those as we go so back to managed what do you do you provide the right recipe of carbon and nitrogen you also provide the oxygen for the pile just like you and I have to breathe eat and drink the microorganisms that are doing this car composting process need to breathe eat and drink so we have to give them the food carbon and nitrogen the oxygen at about fifty percent five to fifty percent and then we need to keep the pile at about fifty percent moisture if you're like me in this semi-arid environment that's the hardest part because we all want to save water we all want to save on our water bill but we have to remember that the microorganisms need water in order to do their job so you might be wondering how do I know what fifty percent moisture is if you stick your hand into the middle of a compost pile and pull out a big handful and you squeeze it not a death grip but a good squeeze between your fingers you should see a little film of water rise up between your fingers that's about 50% you can air a little bit on either side of that but the microorganisms need water like we do so if you don't water your pile there's those microorganisms are still gonna be there they're just going to be more in a dormant state so they're not going to be acting or being as active as they need to be to do the process as quickly as we might hope so the biological piece this is what the microorganisms do many of the species of bacteria and fungi metabolize that carbon and nitrogen so they eat the materials that we put in there and then they grow and they reproduce and then they die and they decay and they during the time that they're growing and reproducing they use that water and that oxygen and they're also really active so that's what's giving off the heat sometimes I've heard folks say do I need to build my compost pile in the Sun well it doesn't hurt to do that but these microorganisms are so active it would be like all of us getting up and running around the room for 20 minutes we would increase the temperature in this room so that's where the heat comes from so if your piles not heating the microorganisms aren't busy so that's something to remember and then again remember that composting is farming those microorganisms and you don't really need to add those microorganisms they are floating by right now in the air and if we just put a pile of compost here they would be there so oxidation this is again the word means in the presence of air and microorganisms need the oxygen to respire and the oxygen sits in the pore spaces between the materials and the compost so you have to start thinking about what are you putting in that pile you don't want it to be all sawdust because we know sawdust compacts down on itself and is really dense same thing with just grass clippings ever seen the grass mold it just kind of packs down and it's hard to break apart you have to think that oxygen and water need to sit in those pores so you have to create your pile with a bunch of very different size particle material so think of tennis balls and golf balls and bowling balls and all the sizes of pores in between where those balls sit on top of each other that's what you want your your compost pile to look like so you can use bulking material to maintain that pore space a good bulky materials leaves I think I've got a picture here this is actually Kathy duska in the back this is her leaf pile that's she uses throughout the winter to make sure that she keeps the right amount of pore space in her pile I tend to put all my leaves and up in bags put him in the back corner and use them throughout the winter because leaves are really important and easy thing to use they really like compared to some of the other compostables so what you're trying to make is a heterogeneous organic matter or sorry what you're using to make compost is heterogeneous organic matter these are the feedstocks the different stuff heterogeneous just means different in size different in type different in physical and chemical characteristics so these can be kitchen scraps which we suggest no meat or cheese or bones a tiny you know a little bit of shredded cheddar because you are making a pizza if it gets into your compost bin it's fine you don't have to be crazy about that but just try not to get too much meat cheese or bones and that just takes longer to compost and also different organisms are here to do that and you don't necessarily want those organisms in your pile bedding if you bed chickens or goats or horses or anything that bedding is compost waste hey spoiled hey spoiled feeder grains leaves grass clippings yard trimmings does anybody have any other kind of material they're wanting to compost that's not up here that you may be questioning can it be composted the question is little branches so if it's it's just going to take longer if it's any bigger than even I just trimmed my roses my little roses and I didn't put that in there mainly because I don't want to stick my hand in there later and the thorn get me or I will have to sift it out later so I have a kind of pile in the corner of my yard with nice little yard clippings and they do decay over time but I don't tend to put them in my compost bin because you'll end up pulling them out later dandelions I had definitely put all of my weeds in my compost pile if they do not have their seeds on them so mature seeds I try to put in the garbage can you know I'm not sad to put a little bag of fluffy dandelions in the garbage can but any of the leaves roots if the flowers are not fully matured into seeds I put all of that in my compost bin and you can I think you can probably berm a compost the weed seeds John Anderson shaking his head so maybe you need both systems going hey pet hair hair will decompose yes that's fine the fluffy stuff off the aspen seeds I would think that's aspen trees I think I'd be fine I would just think that very few of those seeds are gonna make it and if they do then they're probably not going to be germinated just fine and in the right soil temperature Aspen's are tricky to germinate versus dandelions i I would be more likely to put that in my compost bin the question was sod pieces of sod it it would be fine to put in there my thought would be that adding all that soil is going to make your most heavier to turn so the more soil you add the heavier your compost is and you might have to just break it up that sides going to want to grow but it will compost so just way your way your battle yes no soil will be fine in your compost pile it just makes it heavy I would almost make compost on the side and then mix it into the subsoil afterwards just so you don't end up moving it to the pile turning it and moving it back to the same spot we're trying to save our backs right ok one more yeah paper towels are fine the challenge with that is making sure they stay wet enough so they don't blow away because we definitely have wind here so you any kind of paper or bills or newspaper or anything you put in there just make sure it stays moist enough that's also really good no worm bin so what you're trying to make is a like particle define particle houmous like material so homogeneous means most of the most everything in the handfuls looks pretty much the same the final product you're aiming for has so many uses it might not look this perfect right away some times when you purchase compost it's been screened so the eggshell bit that's a little bigger than the screen will be screened out so even if it doesn't look perfect like a bag of compost I still put that in my garden because it will continue to break down and it's also more food for the microorganisms in the soil so how do you make compost you can make it at any scale with all of your backyard garden tools or with front-end loaders and big scarab Turner's you need to choose a site a mowed area is best smooth or slightly sloping and you want it to be near your feedstock source again save your back you don't want to have to carry things all the way out to the back 40 if you don't have to if you manage your compost pile nicely it shouldn't smell it shouldn't be ugly so that would be more convenient for you you also want it to be near water again this is the hardest part in Colorado so if it's hard to get the water there chances are it might not get watered enough but then you want it to be a hundred feet from a well or waters of the state so if you have a creek running through your property or an irrigation ditch you don't want any runoff from your compost pile to end up in there because it is nutrient-rich and that can cause some pollution in those water bodies so near water but not right next to a river and you want to try to control run on and run off if you have a real sloping property you can put a hay bale on either side of the the slope so that water slows down as it's coming through and maybe gets caught in the pile and any of the exit water will get caught in the hay bale this again is just keeping nutrients in your pile instead of them running off into other property parts of the property so this is not a good location for this compost pile see that big puddle that's waters of the state that's any time it rains a lot and water collects this is of just probably a very small little pond and any nutrients that get into they're going to leach down into the soil so just a picture of what not to do so when you want to build your pile you want to loosely add your carbon and nitrogen I like to either mix it up all on a big tarp or on a big flat area that's easy to turn on or you can do a bucket of this and a bucket of this and just to kind of a lasagna layer if you don't want to have to physically mix things if you're doing a kitchen your kitchen waste and leaves and you're kind of building your pile slowly that is the best way to do that is use the lasagna layer just do every time you add your bucket of kitchen scraps add a couple buckets of leaves you want to think about that carbon and nitrogen ratio so and on that link the food scraps carbon to nitrogen ratio is listed and then whatever you'll use for your nitrogen or your carbon will also be listed so you just kind of get your feel for what is what is my carbon-to-nitrogen ratio yes the question is what do you do if you don't have any leaves people seem to have a lot of spoiled hay and straw around if you have any friends that have that or check in with the feed stores put an ad up on freecycle or craigslist or the city has that leaf exchange they might still have some access to people who have leaves in their yard that want to get rid of them so there are probably there's probably tons of brown stuff out there you just have to think about who you're going to contact to borrow it or get it and then you know in the fall think about if you want to compost throughout the winter and summer and and think about your system for how you'll save your leaves if you have trees yes the question is with leaves include pine needles pine needles do decompose they have a really thick resin in them so it takes a long time for them to decompose I tend to I don't rake my pine needles specifically to add to my compost bin because again when I stick my hand in there they hurt and they don't decompose very quickly so they pretty much end up in my garden where I'm digging and planting seeds so if you can keep your pine needles somewhere else they seem to be better there so you're going to add your carbon and nitrogen and then you're going to add your new material in the same ratio so if you figure you're adding a five-gallon bucket of vegetable scraps and two 5-gallon buckets of leaves every week then in the future keep doing that and you want to add water every time you add your materials if you are finding that it's not wet enough and through this addition process you're going to be adding oxygen because you're not packing your compost down so it's just like making a cake right this is what happens inside the compost pile the red area is actually where the microorganisms are the hottest or the temperatures the hottest and microorganisms are most active the outside area is probably possibly dry more dry or if it's a cool day here the cold air is gonna blow through and cool off the pile so any of that heat that's being given up by the microorganisms might be blown out and the heat does help with the decomposition so you have to think when you do turn your pile when your pile gets big enough to where there's some thermal mass where there's it's like 2 feet by 2 feet or 3 feet by 3 feet then there is a central portion that's going to be able to stay hot once that happens you're going to be able to graph it and I'll show you how to do that so you know that your pile is actually working once that temperature decreases it's going to be time for you to do something with it again so we'll look at that but just remember that only the center is really where its most active so over the process of composting you need to get all the material from the exterior part of that pile into the center that's why turning it's really important so you want to monitor the pile and everybody who wants to compost should have a nice composting thermometer they sell them on this website they have them at Ace Hardware I've seen them in other places it's not really a meat thermometer because you probably need it to be lower temperatures I've heard a candy thermometer candy thermometer would work because it goes to the right temperature but it might be more expensive than just a compost thermometer so again heat is an indicator of biological activity and I am as I'm a data nerd so I like to graph it I just have a piece of paper by my compost pile and I kind of watched the temperatures increase and decrease so that I can recall what's happened once you've built 20 compost piles you can't remember if it's this one you remembered that detail about or the last one oh Susie's got a compost thermometer so the what you might notice about this is it's long enough to actually go down into the pile and a meat thermometer might stop where my fingers are so it's not going to get down into the red hot zone of the pile so you want to get something that's about this length or longer they are sold in longer increments after the pile temperature decreases you want to turn it to reintroduce that oxygen and add water if it seems like it's not hot anymore because once you've built the pile with the carbon and nitrogen basically the oxygen and water are the two things that are going to be used up and need to be replaced so there is a thermometer in a pile and I've lost a couple thermometers so you might want to put a long orange cord on it or spray-paint it neon green or whatever you want to do just so you don't end up buying four and again this is another picture from a friend even in the winter composting organisms metabolize enough to produce heat so if you have your pile built and it's actually it's working then you should see that it's keeping the snow melted and the melting snow is going to add the water that it needs so here is a graph of what a typical compost pile could look like so you see the top triangle dotted line that could be representative of if the first measurements you take right after you build a pile so you see basically along the bottom is the number of days from turning so along the left there it's one day than two days and it goes out and along the y axis is temperature so when you first build the pile it should heat in one or two days when you stick your thermometer in there if it's not heat heating then you need to think about do I need to add more nitrogen or carbon or maybe I didn't water it enough this is when the art form comes in it's you know play with it a little bit it's eventually going to decompose so don't be afraid to just play with it and add a few more things or turn it make sure they didn't get comp acted down too much during your mixing so you'll see the temperature increase and then over the days the following days the temperature will start to decrease once it gets down I would say realistically in my life once Saturday comes around I would see if it's still decreasing if it is since I have time on Saturday I would turn it whenever you see that the piles starting to decrease in temperature then that means the microorganisms need more water or oxygen so you can D you can turn it and add the water whenever it's convenient to you yes just covering help keep the heat in it's not necessary the heat should be coming from within covering might keep some of the moisture in that might help I know John covers his worm bins with or worm piles with carpet and that helps keep the water in since it's so dry here but it's not necessary and covering it with plastic sometimes I've noticed it starts to smell just because the the air that blows by will also increase the oxygen in the you know right inside the pile so that's kind of nice so then consecutive days the line with diamonds on it we could say is the second after the first turning and the second line that you measure so you see that the temperature rises almost as high as the first time and then decreases and we turn it and then the third after the second turning is the squares and then on down to the circles so you see that the temperature doesn't quite get as high each time but it's still rising and it's still rising above the ambient outside air temperature so whenever that line stops rising significantly you know if it's rising five degrees above ambient that's really not much there's really not much going on then you can recognize that most of your hot composting microorganisms have done their job and now the medium temperature the kind of ambient air temperature microorganisms are going to start your pile and they also add some benefits I'll show you in a second does anyone have questions about this graph it's pretty easy yeah right right if you have worms in here you would cook them so you want to think about this a little bit differently if you're doing worm compost you can either pre compost it like this to get the hot out to get the heat out and then feed it to the worms or you can have a big enough worm pile worm windrow or worm bin where the worms have a place to escape to that is not heating up so you could add your freshly fresh to be composted material on the far left side of your bin and the worms can move away to the right side where it's not hot John can give you some more information on that but you're right worms will not like this they will become organic matter instead of worms so after you see that final heating major heating rise and fall you still want to monitor it you want to make sure that the temperature is decreasing and you want to make sure that the pile is still moist if it dries out completely then the microorganisms that are called mesophilic which is medium temperature they won't be able to do their job in curing and so you keep monitoring it until you're finished with those heat cycles and then continue on beyond that and during the curing phase when the temperature curve flattens out these medium mid temperature and microorganisms take over and you want to keep it moist again and it takes about one to two months if you stop adding new materials for your pile to get to this place so you can know when you should stop adding new stuff if you're trying to get your compost to a finished place before say June 1st so why would you cure this why wouldn't you take your super-heated 4 time compost and put it straight out on your garden well if you cure it you let it continue to sit and be treated by these medium temperature microorganisms it'll assure your highest quality product so your pH of your compost will move more towards neutral which is good for the soil it's kind of a phenomenon that when your compost sits a little bit longer it becomes more neutral pH which is really kind of cool and then the the soil microorganisms recolonize the pile so that's going to help when you move that compost out into the soil and then if there's too much carbon left in your compost pile and you put it out into your soil then that carbon will hold on to any nitrogen in your soil because that carbon is wanting to decompose and we've now learned that it takes both of those ingredients carbon and nitrogen to decompose so you don't want to tie up any of your nitrogen to the carbon that's left in your compost bin so curing helps with that and then this makes compost the best for optimum growth it puts the changes the nutrients to a plant available form so I'm going to go through this really quick because I want to make sure we have time for questions when is my compost done again after the heating cycle stops and you've cured it for one to two months and you want your compost to be look like like materials you don't want big chunks of stuff still in it that's kind of a no-brainer you want it to smell have that earthy smells everyone know what I'm talking about that's a microorganism that's in the soil that is called an act in oh my seat and they have this finished compost smell so they're kind of a indicator that it's done and then if you're a data person there's this great maturity test that's available online at woods and laboratory there's a website down there below and it's only a few bucks and it's a little color-changing chart that'll show you how finished your compost is and I suggest doing this once or twice before so you know who what the process looks like and then you don't have to do it any more if you're going to continue to follow that process I've kind of gone over this when do you know what how do you do this when you're going to add kitchen scraps every week basically you build that lasagna layer you add your carbon you add your nitrogen and you keep adding it right because we all keep eating in the kit from the kitchen eventually the stuff on the bottom is going to be what's fixed what's finished so you pretty much have to dig out that bottom good stuff and then re compost the stuff that's on top so it's a little more work unless you want to have a second bin if you want to do a second bin you can stop adding to the first one let it complete its compost cycle and then it will be finished and you can be adding to the second one that's probably the easiest so now what we all know we have compost it's a great soil amendment it contains nutrients macronutrients and micronutrients and the nitrogen is released slowly so it tends to mimic what the plants need over time it's typically safe to apply 1/2 inch to an inch of compost on your soil if you know it's finished compost and then mix it in either dig it in till it in that's a pretty good ratio about 10 percent of a soil should be compost if you're making like a potting mix more is not always better because it's really dense stuff and soil need or plant roots need oxygen as well in the pores of soil and since I'm a soil scientist I have to say this at least once you should test your soil and send your compost in with your soil sample and then the lab will tell you what your soil needs and what your compost provides then it's some simple little math and you can have the most amazing garden so that's available at some labs around here I'd have to be happy to tell you afterwards which ones I like and think about compost as a long-term application for your garden only a little bit of your compost nitrogen and nutrients are going to be available in the first year but then what's left is going to be available in the next couple of years so if you add compost each year it's like putting money in a savings account so you're going to add up your nitrogen over time and that'll help your plants and again if you have questions sample your soil and you'll know what's there if you're having trouble troubleshooting again that website that I gave in the beginning is repeated here it has great information on troubleshooting if it's not heating you might need to add water oxygen if it smells bad you probably need to turn it it needs more oxygen and there are plenty other creative things that can go wrong but they can be fixed really quick does anyone have any questions the question is can you use moldy old grass clippings in a compost pile absolutely the microorganisms actually eat the yucky stuff on the materials that we put in there so they're eating the mold the challenge with grass clippings again is make sure it's mixed up really well so there are few pockets of matted down grass but that's great stuff and it's good nitrogen and the smell will go away once oxygen is introduced it just might be stinky for a little bit the question is what do you do about fruit flies I've noticed that I get fruit flies in my pile when it's too wet or when I don't have enough carbon so you're right maybe you're adding a lot of kitchen scraps and not very much brown leaves or cardboard I would try and balance that out and see if they go away also if when I've had worm bit a worm bin inside my house when I was in college and didn't have a garage I had fruit flies and I I noticed that if I froze my banana peels and my citrus before and then defrosted him before I put him in my worm bin then I had a lot less chance of getting fruit flies because they tend to be in the skins so if it's that big of a deal that's something but it was more for indoors shredded paper is a good source for carbon my challenge with outdoors is it blows away pretty easy so you want to make sure that you have either a piece of carpet or something a textile covering it so it doesn't go anywhere also if you dump a huge like garbage bag of shredded documents into your compost bin again it might act like matted grass it's gonna map down on itself so make sure it's mixed up really well so it's combined with the other nutrients and sources but it's a great no one's going to find your social security number in there I would like to hear other people's opinion I don't think shiny paper is a challenge I see it decompose nicely it's better you know the soil it cleans things up what do you think the shiny magazine paper is still being coated with cadmium other than that yeah the magazine papers but all the other shine you know the other inks those kind of things they're all soy based inks since basically the early 80s they won't you don't worry I have to worry about the inks it's the shiny stuff from magazines that is still being coated with cadmium to make it shiny hmm so take that however you want the question is do you start the process at a certain time of the year and let it do its thing during the winter I don't tend to build a pile all at once because I add to my pile every third day with a bucket of compost from my kitchen so I try to start my new pile when it's like right now in the early spring because it'll be nice for quite a few months and I'll be going out there happily and turning it and watering it and and processing it but then during the winter time I tend to mix it up really good add a bunch of leaves I tend to go get some manure or some other kind of nitrogen rich material right before I know it's going to be really cold and get it right where I want it and then kind of just let winter happen you know some people who are super avid composters or who have something like horse manure that they need to continue processing they will be out there in the winter all winter long making compost but for me my backyard I tend to have a big old trash bag of leaves and I during the winter will throw my kitchen scraps on and then put leaves on it and and just kind of let it be left alone during the winter and then an early spring I fix it I turn it and I might start a second bin if that bin hasn't decomposed enough again it's an art how much do you want to work with it if you want to use worms there they do all the turning for you but you have to manage them a little bit differently I have had experience with the soil saver which is the square the tall square one and that one works really well the challenge I've seen with that is you have to be able to mix it down low you're going to dump your materials in there and they're gonna go to the bottom and then you might so that might be your kitchen scraps and then you're going to add leaves on top of that you need to make sure they're mixed so what I started doing is dumping my kitchen scraps and my leaves into a wheelbarrow and getting those the right moisture level and then putting that mixture into that soil saver I almost busted my tooth out once trying to mix it in there and I popped up and I thought I shouldn't be mixing it this way and and wheelbarrow works better but it works great it compost great and it's real tidy so there aren't critters out there I haven't used this green one but it turns right on an axis I would kind of say the same thing just you need to make sure that your carbon nitrogen ratio is right I think a lot of us want to just throw our kitchen scraps in and not think about anything else and you have to make sure that it's not too wet and that you're adding some benign I've done it - it's real easy so make sure you're adding those leaves so that it can mix up in there and every once in a while you have to stick your hand down in there and pull something out and say what is it doing does it look right does it not look right does it smell bad I think all of these would work great based on your the backyard situation you just have to make sure you're managing those properties the one that spins here on the axis that's a circular that one I've heard that you need to turn it sometimes yourself like stick a fork in there and just flip it over because sometimes the material will rotate along the shot this the edge and it won't actually flip on itself but I think again if that was a full container of the right mixture it would it would tumble like it's supposed to you know I haven't really used one before I'm sure it's just a bag of microorganisms it can't hurt anything and it might help the process go a little faster I would be interested in you coming back and telling us what you think yeah did someone have a question over here dog dog waste cat waste we don't want to put any of that in our compost pile if that compost finished product is going to go on anything we eat so I have a dog and I tend to put her waste in a pile like in the corner of the yard and I cover it with leaves I just you know pick up poop every how often once a month really and then I put that pile in the corner and then cover it with some leaves and water it with a watering can and basically it just disintegrates but it's along my lilacs so I will never plant carrots there I will never plant lettuce there I will never eat anything from it so don't confuse the two thank you for your attention and happy composting I like to welcome everybody to our first composting and gardening festival this is the get down and dirty it's an opportunity for community members here in Fort Collins as well as the city of Fort Collins to get together and learn the back composting and gardening have an opportunity to mingle with local businesses and organizations in a really nice environment the gardens is a beautiful place to gather organic material still makes up at least thirty percent of the waste stream from our community the City Council is interested in in accomplishing a goal that was set to divert 50 percent of the community's waste stream from landfill disposal and being able to get the compostable material out of the waster was really important part of them accomplishing that goal ash companies get about two miles a gallon on their garbage trucks so if you're able to do a composting system at home it will save on how much you throw away and maybe you can pick it have your trash picked up less often so you can use what you then wasted into a garden to create more food or security plans composting is a breakdown of organic matter or the decomposition of organic matter everything rots you know all rotting things that we we're just managing that rotting system whether it be composting or vermicomposting can just go as simple as digging a hole in the ground and putting your vegetable scraps or your garden material in there we have some bins that kind of help speed up that process up it make it a little more contained and you can enter yard waste such as garden leaves and grass clippings you try to mix layers of brown like dead leaves and green which it could be kitchen waste or grass clippings and soil do you want to balance out the carbon which is brown material and nitrogen which is green and then the microbes are entered from the soil and you either naturally have worms that will come up from the soil or you can actually purchase bread wrigglers and put them in there and they also help break down it'll slow down of course in the winters we get our cold it'll start back up in the spring and then usually by May it's ready to introduce into the garden it introduces nutrients including micronutrients that are very beneficial to vegetables and other plants that's the best way to go I think a lot better than introducing chemical fertilizer this is the type of been John Anderson uses who's an expert permaculturist I'm using worms because I'm lazy there's four thousand four hundred different kinds of worms some living the soil and go very deep they'll move ten tons of soil and irrigated land in the season ten tons of soil per acre and we have the epic vxp she's as the composting world lives on top they don't even burrow into the soil I use them because they eat so much organic matter you can get up the thousand worms or better per square foot and they'll eat half their own weight every day that's cardboard that's a bedding that I used a law of cardboard they need a carbon source not just food waste all you got to do is cover it so it's stays dark and wet that's that's the beginning it's got the cocoons the babies the bedding and after you bedded in bedding the carbon source and that could be leaves or straw or sawdust and then you add food waste to that rather than building something out of materials old or new I'll take old refrigerators in career time and the worm bins they work really well they're insulated they last for years there's baby worms and there's cocoons there's a bunch of adults that's manure and they don't smell yeah it's a cocoon yeah they almost looked like seeds and I speculate three or four of those a week gonna be two to four those on average babies come on people have a lot of interest in ways to divert their organic material and especially in the fall but people have a lot of leaves from the trees that they're trying to figure out how to you know get composted so a couple of years ago we started something called the leaf exchange and it's it's a yahoo subscription program that you can sign up and I need to get rid of the leaves that you're generating and bagging up you know from your trees or if you're interested in getting leaves for instance if you like to use leaves in your composting project in your backyard or if you're an organic gardener it's a way for people to be in touch with each other and giving them get on as we say when we're told to be good stewards of the earth I think one of the things we often overlook especially in Western culture is taking care of our bodies will be as bit of a caretakers of the earth as we are of our bodies and vice versa over half of residential water use goes to landscape watering xeriscape is a thoughtful approach of using lower water using plants maybe minimizing the amount of turf that you have in your yard well there's seven principles of xeriscape and one of them is to amend the soil so what we recommend is to put a minimum of three cubic yards of organic matter compost into your soil and rutter till it in deep before you start planning your surskit garden and xeriscape can be colorful and green and it's one area that we can reduce the amount of water that we use and not really affect our lifestyle even though Americans make up only 4.6 percent of the world's population we use 39 percent of the world's musicals and 38 percent of the world's computers for example also 33 percent of the world's plastic so reducing is the best thing we can all do if we can reduce the amount of waste we create in the first place that's the number one thing we can try to do so in your daily lives just think about how you can maybe buy less stuff for a less stuff away if you have curbside recycling you can put all sorts of things in your curbside bin if you don't have curbside recycling you can bring that stuff to us at the Larimer County Recycling Center and the city of hakan's also has to drop off on River tonight Road near Riverside and prospect we are a Community Supported Agriculture you sign up at the beginning of the year and you get a share of the harvest each week throughout the summer from May until around the end of October buying local is a growing phenomenon you get fresh delicious produce right at its peak where the Friends of the gardens on Spring Creek where the fundraising arm and we hope to break ground on the Garden of Eden different vegetable garden will have instruction on how to grow vegetables how to cook vegetables will have fruits we have an outdoor kitchen planned international garden would be a great space for everybody to come and enjoy I'm really excited to be introducing grow food not lawns our bottom line is in growing healthy living soils that are free of hormones and antibiotics and toxics and heavy metals the demand is going up for organic foods 25 percent a year that's currently in this country we're unable to meet that demand when we consider that most of the food that goes into our mouths on average travels 15 miles you can see that there's a problem there then the only way to really assure safe and quality foods is to grow them ourselves as we begin to reload supply our sustainability goes up up up we're selling the green cone for the first time this year at the compost bin sale it's designed specifically for food waste it's called a food digester and the green cone is what we consider to be a companion to a composter not a competitor to a composter this is meant strictly for food weights but it's meant for any in all of your food waste so you can put things that you typically wouldn't consider compostable in here you can put your meats in here dairies oils bones you can put cooked foods in here a lot of people don't realize that using a garbage disposal is actually not very environmentally friendly at all I used a lot of water when you flush things down your drain you use extra electricity it digests the food very quickly into the soil you get very nutrient rich soil several feet in any direction around where you have this installed so it's really a very nice complementary piece to whatever type of composting that you do already or if you're not a composting type person it's a good alternative to putting your food in the trash or down the drain if you're interested in learning more about composting or recycling check out the FCC gov comm /recycling we hope to see you here next year

Channel: City of Fort Collins

Views: 14,563

Rating: 4.7662339 out of 5

Keywords: city of fort collins, Home composting

Id: ZMOqa541UT4

Length: 58min 35sec (3515 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2010