A Composting Experiment

A good friend of mine loaned me a contraption called an Urban Compost Tumbler. It is essentially a barrel that rotates on a base.  You can easily turn it around and around in order to stir the contents. We're going to experiment on this third method of composting and see how it goes in comparison to two other methods we use.

We employ a couple of different types of composting methods, namely, a compost pile where we throw everything into a pile and let it rot.  This has a few negative aspects.  First, in order to compost, you must turn the pile in order to aerate the compost.  This helps the bacteria decompose the contents of the pile quicker.  This is also time consuming depending on the size of the pile.  Secondly, throwing waste in a compost pile, especially food waste, attracts varmints like rats.  Although we do compost using this method, the pile now only contains leaves and cow poop, so as not to attract vermin.

I've primarily switched to a composting method called Trench Composting.  It is easy to do.  All you have to do is dig a hole.  You can read about it more here in a post we did a while back: Trench Composting  Trench composting incorporates food waste, paper, coffee grounds, etc. directly into the soil.  The bacteria in the soil and earthworms immediately go to work breaking it down.

So here is the Urban Compost Tumbler.  Since this is a loaner model, the cost for me is FREE!  If you were to purchase this bad boy, the price tag is $379 on Amazon.  Holy Moley!  You have to produce an awful lot of compost in order for this thing to pay for itself.

The Urban Compost Tumbler

So... we'll get started with the experiment.  THIS ARTICLE explains how to compost using the Urban Compost Tumbler.  One of the important things to consider is your ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen.  Some places call in the brown to green ratio, with brown being carbon and green being nitrogen.  We are going to start with a 25:1 Carbon to Nitrogen ratio by weight.  I'm not set up to weigh it, so I'm just going to estimate.  Carbon is much lighter than the nitrogen component, so most of the contents will be hay.

As far as carbon is concerned, we have an awful lot of hay that gets wasted by the cows.  We're going to try to convert some of that waste to compost.  You can see Clarabelle in the photo below and can witness the wasted hay all around the hay ring.  They are sloppy eaters, for sure.  We'll salvage some of that and put it in the Urban Compost Tumbler.  I gathered a heaping tub of wasted hay for our carbon component.

Wasteful bovines aren't efficient eaters.

As far as nitrogen is concerned, we'll use a by product of our laying hens - chicken poop.  We have two chicken tractors that some of the hens roost on out in the pasture.  We push the tractor each day and the poop fertilizes the grass.  We harvest the poop under the roosting bars of the hen house to fertilize the garden and, in this case, to add to the compost tumbler.

Harvesting a chicken by-product

I entered the hen house with a wagon, a tub and a shovel and in no time at all, emerged with a full tub of poop mixed with feathers for our nitrogen component.

A tub of chicken poop

Now that we've gotten our carbon (hay) and our nitrogen (chicken poop), we'll get things started.  It was 70 degrees outside when I got this started.  According to what I read, you need it to be above 50 degrees to start microbe growth.  Once the pile heats up and starts "cooking" it will reach up to 130 degrees.

Recipe ingredients for compost: chicken poop and hay

I unfastened the lid to the compost tumbler.  It is well constructed and heavy and built to last.  It spins easily on its axle.

The interior of the tumbler

I added the ingredients to the tumbler, alternating hay and poop to the 25:1 ratio by weight. Obviously, most of the contents of the tumbler is hay with chicken manure distributed throughout.

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About 3/4 of the way full to leave space for mixing/tumbling

Then we'll add some moisture as that is very important in composting.  I collected some rainwater and poured that on top of the mix.  It is important to add rainwater and not tap water as tap water has been treated with chlorine to kill bacteria.  You don't want to kill bacteria in composting - you want bacteria to flourish. 

Rainwater

Then, I fastened the lid and began to spin the tumbler.  Each day, I'll give it a spin.

From what I read in THIS REVIEW we can count on finished compost in 14 weeks. We'll see if we can achieve those results.  If we make some nice compost, we'll incorporate it into the garden this spring and then will continue making batch after batch.  Stay tuned for a status report coming in a few months.

How does your garden grow?

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
   How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row.

The old nursery rhyme asks an important question.  In my garden, I don't have any silver bells or cockleshells growing and my wife will be pleased to know that I don't have any pretty maids in my garden either.

So, how does my garden grow?  Well, it grows green and healthy due to nitrogen.  But nitrogen must be "fixed" first.  Here's a little bit about nitrogen that I learned:  (Source: Wikipedia)

Nitrogen fixation happens when nitrogen (N₂) in the atmosphere is converted into ammonia (NH₃)  Atmospheric nitrogen or molecular nitrogen is relatively inert, meaning it does not react with other chemicals to form new compounds.  Fixation processes frees up the nitrogen atoms from their diatomic form to be used in other ways.

Now, I was never very adept at chemistry, so a lot of this is outside of my grasp, but what I do understand is that nitrogen is essential for life because nitrogen is required for the basic building blocks of plants, animals and other life.  Nitrogen fixation is essential for agriculture.  In an earlier post, we discussed how nitrogen fixation occurs naturally in the air in lightning and is the reason why rainwater is so much better for your crops than tap water.

There are other natural ways to fix nitrogen.  There are plants that contribute to this, specifically those in the legume family.  In my garden clover fulfills this role.  Clover contains symbiotic bacteria called Rhiozobia within nodules in their root systems that produce nitrogen compounds that help the plant grow.  When the plant dies, the fixed nitrogen is released, making it available to other plants and fertilizes the soil.

The other day I was weeding in my garden and pulled up some white dutch clover to make room for a row of corn and witnessed this:



Nitrogen producing nodules on clover roots in my garden

Can you see the little white nodules on the roots?  Those are producing nitrogen.  How cool is that?   I'm growing my own fertilizer!  This is referred to as "green manure."  Here is a close up photograph of the nodules: 



This is so very beneficial.  So what I do is feed the top portion of the clover to our cows that methodically line up at the garden fence whenever I'm weeding.  And the root part of the clover?  Well, I turn that back under in the row to provide fixed nitrogen to fertilize the soil for the next crop. 

This enables your garden to grow!  You really want to grow legumes in your garden to keep this process going.  Hopefully that will translate into something like the potatoes below that have "shaded out" the rows.

Irish Potatoes "shading out" the rows

As a young boy we grew soybeans on the farm, first row-cropped, then drilled.  Shading out was a much desired stage of growth.  When that occurred, you didn't need to cultivate anymore because the sunlight couldn't reach the soil between the rows and thus, no weeds could grow (Hallelujah!).  Nitrogen is a key ingredient promoting green growth and accelerating this process.

Kyle, Kyle, why the smile?

How does your garden grow?

With nitrogen fixed by white dutch clover, making potatoes shade out the row!