MAKING AWESOME AEROBIC COMPOST - FAST! S4 ● E76

they were making berkeley compost and really knew three material raw material instead straw and they're getting manure from cows the last few days intensity of quarter come back to after so we have a really great chicken focusing day on monday really good flow and what that about 250 birds in just less than four hours and we're thinking about the process but i I purchased 135 and the two with me were did 115 so there's a you know where here's a learning example to where people get to try things out that was not fully optimized as you would be with a team doing the same ol all the time and so we're thinking about you know if we had three of us wearing that speed that's nearly 400 an hour and then that would bring up David scolding and plucking and so this mean maybe having an automatic scolder or someone additional platen so the scholar could be running at full speed even then as I said that we've got that would equate to 200 birds an hour which is still a improve you know but it's been working very nice really good workflow really smooth people doing an excellent job nearly all like 95 percent a bird averaging about two kilos this week nice process and today we've been getting into pop the assessment for land purchase and also thinking a lot about people's individual farms and projects most of the in terms of gada farm or a project or wanting to start one so we're going through doing like almost off the cuff off the cuffs design consultancy thinking thinking about business thinking about practicalities making sure everyone's on the right track thinking about the economy etc so it's been 48 hours from the point miss filling still got about 35 centimeters to go that tells us that there's at least 30,000 liters of water in here so so obviously filling up the soil base down until they're due care line it to a big limit up perhaps forty five thousand meters good so far we pick this up an old bond sale for back to Anna Faris's twenty-year finicky remembers own feed roller and we're just thinking how we go to the making no time to loose my hands regardless you here we even met any other green Matua to relatively high nitrogen probably styling ratio of 2024 the one amazing stewards are brown materials about two hundred to one have some wheat straw this needs a lot of moisture on it the key to getting good aerobic compost exactly methods awakened a comma everything needs to fill moisture ever see these slides and mostly made it monster I will need to soak the straw quite well and the lab manure which is mostly water to and will go for about so ever so disturbed by mass and water this layer primarily and then make a pile as a layer cake with equal layers of maps of each we do and we'll expect that to heat up to 55 to 60 in four days of so typically an indeterminate age for example a monitor we're going to make Tom boxed out the whole point of making compost when we're talking about composite aerobic okay and when compost piles end up like that one which you can't see like this one there's two wet it goes anaerobic and the whole point of this is to make this is a bacterial compost all quick compulsive bacteria base and you can orientate them to fungal more by adding more carbon like food for fungi and certainly by not chelating it with things that rich in fungi like forest floor leaves etc but this is a bacterial compost good for compost tea so our passes or for our gardens which is typically where we're using all the compost anywhere so we're mixing different materials this is relatively high in carbon and we're using green material its relative behind nitrogen and we're going to add animal manure we got this Kalmia fresh cow manure and a bit of chicken manure high in nitrogen too but also in microbes to kick-start the whole thing we're going to aim for I've made the circular base with straw just to give us an indication of the size and we're going to do a layer cake with layers of brown there's a green there's mineral start again and we need everything to have a film of moisture not wet but the film of moisture like when you take a finished compost like the one here you would want to squeeze a handful of that and if a few drops come out or there's a film of water on your hand that's totally fine if it's dripping water it's too wet it'll be anaerobic and it will be producing phenol certain alkaloids alcohol all this plant toxin stuff so everything living or dead is got carbon and nitrogen in it fits different ratios and when you write these down it's always carbon-nitrogen so for example something strong would be a dead animal like dead fish might be like seven or eight to one that's relatively very high nitrogen even though it has more carbon than nitrogen green materials like this are going to be something like eighteen to twenty four to one and cam in your horse manure we're typically used for this kind of compost is maybe fourteen to sixteen to one that's relatively high nitrogen legume plants like pea family etc would be high in nitrogen maybe sixteen eighteen to one as soon as we jump up to woody sort of materials or saris dry carbonaceous materials that changes a lot straw here might be 250 to one wood chips maybe 500 to one is to carbon which to lock down the nitrogen so the whole point of compost is to lock down nitrogen which is volatile we know it's needed in high quantities of lunch and that is super volatile it's trying to fly away as nitrogen gas or as nitrate which is why chemical fertilizers which lock it up to a heavy metal in the old days it has a salt based format to lock it down it's very inconvenient to keep in a sack in a barn it doesn't want to stay still whereas carbon we know is good for cleaning things like cleaning water and it's stable and it's solid in the environment so we using carbon to lock down nicely the way that we do air robic compost typically is we need to get a third either one without in ratio now what does that mean well it depends what you put in it but if you take a third mass of brown material green material and manure you're going to end up with about that ratio and that's with horse or cow manure which is typically what you find in large quantity you can use any manure you could do this without manure at all you know using leguminous plants I nitrogen plants like pea old pea plants or whatever and but it's easier to get the starting ratio right if you work with common woman tears like sappy green things dr brown Zing's and fresh horse of cow manure it doesn't have to be fresh like in hot countries at portugal you'd buy it in dry fat that's totally fine too it just needs a lot of hydrating so if we make this in portugal with dry straw drying manure we have the hosepipe on almost all the time if we're doing it here i'll just water the straw layer in that fit because the plant is 70% water like you were manure it's mostly water like you are so it's a lot easier to add water later than to take away water okay so our job is like getting the materials in the right mix shredding them up to give them surface area you don't need to have done that you could do it by hand you could do it lumpy it will just end up as lumpy compost you also work but the finer we make it now the bed the compost in its finest and then we keep it in a range it'll heat up over a few days typically like the rule of thumb for this compost is called a ting de compras of berkeley compost is to get it up to 55 60 degrees which typically takes four days or so and then we monitor it and we keep it in there by turning it every second day and the process of turning will take the outside layers that the hot cold and not really done anything and put them in the middle now and take the hot in a bit put them on the outside and that way everything cycles through the pile multiple times when we need it to a to break down and become like plant-available so anything that's plant available has been through biology and anything that's been through biology is now available to plants that's how they evolved to uptake it with the carbon material we could use cardboard we could use or we could use the best thing would be for slowly because they're super high and easily in precursor which promote with that each turning cycle if you remember in the soil food web we're talking about we don't have many deciduous tree leaves but in many of your countries they blow them up from the parks and put me in their storage some take that we've even bet it's full of fungi and it's more readily broken-down than something like straw but we don't want woody material in this it won't break down in time and and what I like to do is build these edges really straight and make it a nice shape because the piece that gets hot is the central column so we want the maximum central columns basically to aid break down and if you like Organic Standards in the UK I know like anything that's been at 55 Celsius for three days can now be labeled organic so horse manure with antibiotics and stuff like that they just get denatured so anything you want to put in your garden it's best to put through a compost first whether it's fire char to inoculate that and fill those little pores within pores with microorganisms or rock dust or anything and you just put it through your compost first and then use the compost so we're making this one now so that we can make compost teas and things it might be we end up using an old pal and I'd like to sort these old piles out and I thought we'd wait and do it together these are two piles made and they've had green material added to them after they started which is not ideal they can't catch up and this pile is just really wet and anaerobic and it possibly had too much water put on it or it got rained on or whatever the power behind is quite good it's finished it's lumpy but it's good enough to make tea with we can look at under a microscope and so what I propose is we mix this big pile with these little piles and make two new paths we're aiming for like a meter to a meter and a half cubed at the maximum because otherwise the we can't manage the thermal mass unless you had a big window maker like a tractor powered compost Turner you wouldn't be able to keep it within the heat range so it's got to get to 55 in the middle but if it gets above 60 odd you start killing off microbes some of them you'll start burning off nitrogen primarily and then you'll even start burning carbon and you can tell when you're doing actually pile is like half the size when you come next day so it might shrink in volume a little bit when cell walls flee nature but it shouldn't lose math if it weighed 600 kilos when we started it should weigh 600 kilos on the end okay we're putting a tarp over it to stop evaporation and to stop rain as well to keep the moisture level in the range that we want it and based on all that we then just monitor the oxygen and the temperature and the water content and that's how we steer it so if it's - if nothing's happened in four days and there was was there enough moisture we can feel that okay there's enough moisture therefore there's not enough nitrogen so we can add something like chicken manure it's concentrated and strong you know maybe twelve to one carbon to nitrogen if you just made it with chicken manure you would have thin thin layers between thicker layers of green and Browns really strong right you know you can burn plants with chicken manure but when you make this 18 day compost you can't burn plants with it it's been synthesized through microbiology so you can't burn the plant by giving it too much it's impossible anything can grow in this material and if it's too hot and it's shrinking rapidly then we need to slow it down which we could do by adding carbon or turning it more often to cool it ok if it smells weird anaerobic you know that pile of anaerobic sludge at the bottom and a garden that maybe you had when you're growing up that's not compost that's anaerobic sludge that compost should be aerobic it should in at three weeks time this should be finished homogeneous dark brown mole cheese sticky which is the byproducts of fungi bacteria etc and should smell like forest floor alive and vibrant and it will have you know if we took one center leader and diluted it in the soil sample and took a drop of that at 400 times microscope it will have phenomenal amount of bacteria quite a lot of protozoa and after that time you'll start to see nematodes and things green materials covered in protozoa if you went and just wipe the dew off leaves in the field you will find lots of protozoa obviously manures full of bacteria and some of the organisms will come later it's bacterial focus if we wanted it fungal we would take things that are good for fungi development like rock dusts maybe we would take leaf litter and we would up the carbon contents and maybe 40 45 percent and not term it so much because the one gets a hot and so you know it's good to master this we've made these in every climate zone I've made hundreds and hundreds of these piles and you can't really go wrong as long as you make the ratio right and you make it big enough someone sends me photos of piles like this or like really small and then wonders why they don't work but it's like you've just followed this rule someone wants to make it quicker by making a basket and turning it into a basket so you don't to shape the edges but like in that compost reactor you can't touch it you can't smell it you can't sense like what's going on with it and that's why we make it out in the open because then you really know when you're turning it you know which bits hot because you can feel it so you put it on the outside so you know you've done everything if you try and automate it you won't make a good compost the reason I like this compost is that it's the most diverse and life rich compost you could make like there's no way of making compost that will have as many species and there's many volume of organisms half the mass of the finished pile is life when you really think numbers you remember we talked about 100 million bison in a herd and you can't possibly picture what that means well likewise half the mass of this is bacteria that's intense amount of life we just created so we're like creating this chemical biological explosion and then our job is to monitor it by taking the temperature and checking with our hands to feel a moisture level and turning it a lot to reintroduce oxygen so there's two processes going on that the meter files the ambient temperature organisms are active and they are taking this up to maybe 3540 degrees and then they sort of go sleeping and dopey and the thermophiles wake up and they take it up to they would take it up to 70 75 maybe so we need to stop that process by flipping it which mixes it all up even more introduces oxygen and cools it down a bit at the same time so it goes through its cycle and over if it heats up in four days I would expect it to reach its peak temperature after about seven eight days and then slowly come back to ambient temperature and that's when you have used it as soon as it comes back to ambient temperatures when it's most life --fill you could say so let's start about this size and we'll go for equal piles of green brown manure and then we could be watering every time we put a straw lever and we go for a lemon or now and we're just getting the rhythm of people throwing and distributing different materials and we'll water every stroller when you get to about halfway up here is the point where you might put in food scraps or you might put in a clicker which could be made of old compost and knock you light in the box or it could be a dead animal so we've composted jobs and foxes and badgers and owls and rabbits and all kinds of animals now you can decompose an entire Labrador in about seven or eight days even the bones will disappear so you can garden and get rid of what with at the same time I mean but it's amazing how quickly like this is what's happening on the forest floor just in the perfect recipe quickly you know there's animals shipping the dead leaves there's fresh plants as sugars flying around you know animals dying because this Carmenere it's totally fun to put your hands in it's very good for your skin and I'm going to get the hands on in a minute but we want this layer equal all over but it's equal by mass right it's heavier it's mostly water but if you put a kicker in you always put it in the middle of the pile because then when you flip the pile it's all matically back in the middle because you want to cover it up to that flesh will specify and it was now real bad first couple of times returning and then after a few days there won't be any flesh of the bone and even the big leg bones of a dog will disappear in seven eight days it's pretty amazing to witness like it you know really recalibrates you understanding of microbiology so what do you what are you saying you and they cure the animal flavor in the middle yes because then no rodents would come clean the kitchen scraps they tell me in sappy stuff or the other stuff does any okay now as we're making equal less it's just with pulling these layers outwards like I want to form my edge like next time we put straw on straws very textural and lumpy and so it's nice to pull that a material out and perform a good edge a lot of people push material in and then the science go like this but then you don't have such a big column of working stuff so that's why we make its Lindbergh the least perfect area for the biggest problem is it one yeah and this is exactly the sort material the farmers shoved in mind wound when they cut my hand really deep as an old folk remedy it certainly cleaned before us so don't be shy and it's going through a layer of straw now we're going to a third mass so it's quite a thin there to start with and the straw needs a watering to accept someone on water Judy so just we're going to build up many layers but you don't need to be slow about it we'll just get into a rhythm but you see how pulling this material out I can really form the edge a bit more just big visited and will go for like ten fifteen layers of each helpless but we want it going up we need people concentrating on the edges all the way around and that's good for water there so we're just getting the rhythm and build it up like so that's all about edges like you like you take your time now it's a job that's quicker on your own like I often have run no big guns just with 20 of these going at the same time you can turn them in right now on your own like it's it's easier with less because you can just get in there with your hands and not you know to is nice one throws and one pile do that and we got these bags come now and I'm going chicken manure we might do one more lap Salmonella and then they were chicken they're gopher and all of that but look like powerfully listen nettles are quite a good and not delay the Poisson faster we go steady on the manure you can see all the little dung beetles in here that I don't tell down the middle that the serious so this this is probably 40 to 50 our manure but the mouse has no maggots yet and the dung be also still really active as typically done by like 60 hours after the cows we found here and in the milk altitude round hat and ride solid air air no yo-yo is so moist but the dung beetles will suck a lot of moisture out of the cow manure in the air it's nice process I was like his hands on you can smell and feel and touch and maybe take turns on an apprentice but you need their their engagement with it if you want good compost out like it's not a lot of work when if you price the value of life we created it's really not a lot of work we're putting in to make so it's my preferred method there are other methods like stationary methods but they generally don't produce the less input so they don't produce such a high quality of life which is the thing missing in our soils we always have enough nutrition we usually have a lack of nice very good job interpret you know so it's where we get to be engineers and biologists and chemists all at the same time as well as physicists someone to do kicking in the edge again masala solidify that if you go all the way around getting that in nice and tightness to it we could take a shovel full of the the finished compost over there and whack that in the middle just to inoculate this with a whole range of organisms it's not necessary but it certainly wouldn't harm it in any way we'll do a layer of this one this one is covered in action on my CTS this is a thermal file it looks like a fungi but it acts more like a bacteria the sign that's been hot it's probably being left and it's the last turning longer than it needs to be it's not a problem in small amounts in fact is totally normal but if it becomes sick white sheets it's an issue you typically sit in things like grass clippings that you know someone makes a pile of grass clippings it gets very hot you can use grass clippings there's no problem in that like summer lawn cutting or whatever the green material but you typically then want to do really thin layers at a mixed up so it doesn't go slimy grass goes anaerobic very easily but you you know with the heat in this is important to understand the heat is coming from inside the pile so you can do it in cold temperatures you can do it in hot temperatures it really doesn't make any difference it doesn't go that much quicker in the tropics it would work in the winter but you don't have green material typically so you do it in the spring or whenever you need it most or do it now and lay your guns to rest at the end of the season with its order and then typically what I'll do so we're about 2/3 of the way up here I would bring it up to here and no dead animal on this one but then I would water it all around the side just watering the chicken manure in here and then we'll cover it with us our fall is to stop raining the very smart so you can measure compost temperatures with your hands about 60s or put my hand in the middle of the pile and then I want to take it away now would be hot enough but it's much better to invest in the compost thermometer it works as a bimetallic strip so you've got to be careful and long and thin you don't want to bend the Molly stop working this one's in Celsius we have another one that runs in Fahrenheit and you would want to insert this the tip is in the middle of the pile so we will always watch this we won't leave it for days whenever you make some biological reaction you need you I on it so we will keep an eye on this every day now until it gets up to about 60 and we'll turn it when it gets the fixture 65 still acceptable but you want to turn it between 55 and 60 for optimal reaction to going so we've gone with a little bit of water on each Brown there you don't add too much water it's very easy to add more water later very hard to take it away you do that by adding carbon or flipping it more often but that's just a bit of a thing typically adding the amount we've seen we would never have to add any more moisture have problems with too much it's the sort of thing that once you've made like 30 40 of them then you really know how you can start tweaking it so I really recommend people to follow the recipe follow the size and shape you can't really go wrong and then once you've done in the bunch you start to understand different elements of it really coming adapt it as you would a good aerobic compost like this you're creating colloid particles smaller than 15 microns that are then plant-available like plants can uptake and eat them as opposed to and being force-fed them so we want plant-available nutrients have been you know being through biology as it were that's how plants evolved to eat and nutrients but we're making compost like this primarily because of the life the life is more important to me than the nutrition because all that nutrition exists in the soil anyway it's just usually there are either chemical limitations or life limitations in our laning and law it says if you've got any topsoil at all you've got plenty of nutrition you're probably lacking life and so this is why I like this type of compost it's very easy you can't really go wrong if you follow the basic instructions and you make a lot of life like billions and billions of bacteria as well as hundreds of thousands or millions of photos there are hundreds of thousands and limiters so we're getting up in height it should be another thirty centimeters tall and then we call it stems and sort out the other part so the last couple of layers and then we cover this up with a part in three weeks it will look like this which is the Finnish powerful over there so its modulus you can't really tell what it's made up of and it smell like a thief our school full of long while running a cabinet system chicken manure from the winter bedding so bits in my chicken manure suspect strong and get in there down to me the tool now so it's about giving me that idea we don't want to get left so we get the right thermal mass and we don't go much bigger now just typically water the sides a bit nothing won't really happen the first thing you'll expect to see is the green material breaking down but it will be happening in that central column and we'll just type it up and leave it so every morning now we'll check the temperature when it gets up to 55 60 we'll start turning it and we'll turn it next to itself keeping the same form and straight edges I'm going to sort these piles out now by combining one of these small piles with half of that lock and make it a nice shape again and layer it up again because it was possibly wet these paths have had new material added to them that's just not going to work very well so nice job done and we can sort this one out too what do we think that's better getting there we just combined the mushy pile of the two paths that have new garden waste put in and looks better there's still quite moist that we'll need to monitor this but I think you've definitely been a good idea and we can just keep an eye on them and keeps doing them the way ones go so here we are at the pond there's 72 hours after we put the siphon in so we think that there's at least 45 50,000 litres in here which is more than we calculated with the you know back of an envelope calculation could you see the overflow there Ducks have already found their way in this is all seeded and was waiting to be planted now and it's looking good so far really happy with the results of nice days work it's been a busy few days here so we've been able to make so many videos and lots of behind the scenes work that's important for our first to see for her Matt's back for the last order of chick and to get in the box ugly we've got all this paints in the balance there's nothing out here to mix up the red thing that all the bands of painting and Sweden it's enough for the entire farm how was your day man it was really good Oscar ruling this is a female she was really pretty and she had a lot of poop nice picked up the last batch of spoilers for the year from - beautiful gear you've had a long day driving now we're going up the guys taking chicken 800 checks Matt drop them off and cows that are freezer picked up these two beautiful geese pretty nice farm - these chicks ahead along that is they're going through a large cuts of the egg and I'm in fact oh now let's get the island so Lucas is on boil is now and they put new bedding in warmed up with their food and our two boxes of 100 chicks in it so as always we introduce as well one in San Juan and goes into water so they start find it and it comes to nice and warm in here they've got food firstly morning that's all today folks I'm going to be going in here and chopping all the base of the tree line so we can mulch this this week it's a bit later than normal we normally do that in the end of April May I think there'll be some benefits to doing it late this year that the mulch will stay through the late season thanks as always for watching our videos hope you find them useful don't forget to share and like the videos and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 273,687

Rating: 4.7832208 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale permaculture, ridgedale

Id: EuN_kbQ1oaA

Length: 33min 9sec (1989 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017