composting methods and why i do what i do

[RUNuts]

I've been looking. Not a lot of leaf baggers around here. I am happy with the wood chips. I do keep my eyes open for gardening opportunities.

What are your thoughts on palm tree cleaning material? Neighbor strips his trees yearly, so I can get that. But it is thick and fibrous. Most people just leave the grass clippings on the yards too.

 

[baymule]

Get the palm tree cleanings and toss in to the parrots. Let them process it for you.

 

[chic rustler]

compost.....i never have enough.
I have a couple piles. They may heat up once for a short bit but go cold for the most part. Mainly kitchen scraps and some other stuff on occasion.

I've switched to deep litter in the chicken coop, but I find it to be slow going because it's so dry. I have a chick grow out pen that's 4×12 and covered in chicken wire. The deep litter there breaks down fast because the run gets rained on. So far it's the best producer.

I recently started a deep litter type situation under my rabbit hutches with wood chips. I'm hopeful it turns out well. I got tired of losing all the nitrogen from their urine to the dirt with no profit.

Oh. I forgot about trench compost. All of my slaughter waste gets buried in the garden in hopes of baiting worms in. I don't plant on top of the trench or hole until the next season.

That pretty much sums it up for my place. But I'm a noob and haven't gotten all my systems in place yet (or figured out for that matter)

 

[flowerbug]

@chic rustler try tomatoes on it the first year... if it is down a foot or two by the time the tomato roots get down that far it's done being hot.

as for chicken processing of things, some designs put the chicken run uphill, pile the stuff for them to process at the top of the run, let them move it downhill for you, by the time it gets to the bottom it's done.

if it is dry and sandy soil add a little clay (it doesn't take much) that will help hold moisture and nutrients in place.

worms love bunny poo. bunny poo is one of the few garden amendments that can be used fresh on gardens and won't burn plants.

i've never seen sheep poo. do they do pellets or plops? does it smell good like horse poo?

@baymule, yes, if you can get free woodchips they are wonderful material if you don't get too much other stuff ground in with them. sometimes the crews will chip plastic containers and that's a pain to pick back out if you don't catch it.

same with bagged leaves. sometimes people rake up the leaves and there's a lot of trash in them and then shred them to get more in a bag. what a mess that can be if you don't know that before you dump the leaves all over. i no longer pick up random bags from along the road because of that. too much work later picking trash out of the gardens. one load a friend brought me had so much trash in it i found a clock, kitchen knife, motorcycle headlight, and all sorts of other things too. what a mess... had a similar problem with compost i brought in once before inspecting it. mistake. still picking plastic/glass/metal out of a garden from that... last summer i did a pretty good redo on that garden so i hope i finally got it all. shredded plastic candy bar wrappers. shredded aluminum cans. bits of glass and plastic. diapers. ick...

@RUNuts i think that kind of environment is similar to their natural habitat where they have stuff to pick through and look for bugs, etc. dogs like anything smelly. it's like some people and stinky cheese. someone told me they like to roll in dead things because it masks their scent. um, well, no, cuz then you can smell them coming a mile away...

 

[baymule]

Sheep poop small round pellets. It makes food compost, it scatters out good in the pastures, never any of those big poop piles. There are dung beetles here in the warm months and they do a great job of burying and breaking up the dung. They can flatten out a pile of horse poop overnight.

 

[RUNuts]

So Crazy Lady wanted some coconut milk. Poked a hole in it and stuck in a straw. Then she wanted to eat the meat. We opened it up and nothing inside. Tossed it to the parrots. They picked the inside apart, but there was no meat? The hull has been sitting there since Thanksgiving. Neat conversation piece in the flight cage.

I tell people that a swallow probably dropped it.

Bought some of those small pumpkin gourds and they wound up in the flight cage too. Ate the seeds, but picking at the meat only. Worm food. Really livens up the floor with the splash of orange. Yep, lots of stuff winds up in the flight cage.

 

[digitS']

This is the greatest part of what I bury to compost in place. These are garden plants at the end of the season. What I am likely to have done is to have pulled all the plants from 3 beds, dug out one of them and filled that trench with all the plants.

The bed is refilled with soil and left for the winter. If I dug into it in March, there was probably still some green leaves - things like cabbage. By fall, some of the stems and roots can still be identified, altho not much. There's no real need to dig it out again in the fall season #2. That's a substantial amount of organic material and not much of it has gone anywhere. It's better if I go on to bed #2.

It's a good thing if I can dig the #1 bed out in fall #3. However, if I do, I have fallen one bed behind. Remember, I started by clearing 3 beds. So ... I let it slide another year ...

Partly, I compensate for a single bed in the veggie garden by using it for potatoes. Not only do I use compost from my small, on-site compost pile for mulch as the tubers bulk up but I harvest them by digging out the entire bed, slowly thru late summer. Instead of replenishing the compost pile, I refill the trench as I go with the summer compostables.

In the big garden I'm leaving it ALL to the tractor guy. That may change because he almost completely thwarts my plans for planting in 4' wide beds with permanent paths between. Physically, I'm not up to redoing the whole thing after he has leveled it! Still, he gets the frost-killed plants into the ground fairly well. Fertilizing is by the bag, in the spring and through the growing season.

So you see, there have been several garden locations for me each year. Some, I use the compost in place method. It's preferred.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

@digitS' i would much rather like to leave some cover up top to prevent erosion and protect from wind/frosts/etc. alas, Mom is in the raze and scrape to bare earth camp of gardening. if there is anything left on top she thinks it looks messy. i tried to grow winter wheat and winter rye one year and she liked that until she saw how many seeds the chipmunks were moving around. i liked it, nice looking plants, grew them in a few gardens until harvest and realized i didn't have the inclination or machinery for further processing so ended up burying them somewhere.

great for spring planting in the clay in any gardens i turned weeks before. all those roots did wonders... not been able to plant them since. oats don't survive our winters so would have to be planted in spring.

at one time was interested in perennial wheat, but not gone any further down that road.

 

[digitS']

I grew winter rye several times. The timing of the sowing has to fit with your plans in the spring; otherwise, rye can be rather hard to deal with. Small plants don't make much contribution and can be difficult to kill. So, it's like dealing with a weed! I like tall rye sown about 1 August but that is a little early to take garden beds outta production. It was easiest for me to pull the plants by hand but that left me with a lot of work including digging out wet spring soil to bury the rye. Still, I would be happy with it on a small scale.

Once, I grew field peas. That didn't work. I figured that they came through the winter with about a 10% survival rate.

Yes, I have to keep the property owners happy with the look of the winter gardens since they live there and graciously make the ground available to me for 6 months out of the year. There is a concept that some gardeners employ called "dead plants for winter interest." I suspect that they really wouldn't go for it so I'm unwilling to do anything other than lay bare the ground.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

@digitS' i have some timothy waving in the breeze now which is doing some of what i consider decorative interest. Mom considers it a mess.

i will be digging it all up again come spring/summer anyways. strawberries and thyme are cover crops around here now.

but yes, we try to keep the landowners mostly happy and hope they allow us to continue on our beany journeys come next season. it does help a lot that she like beans too...

as for trenching/burying, yes i've done that some years in one garden when i was expecting a lot of debris to bury. not had to do that much recently, but now as i go through the larger gardens getting them back into shape i'm mosty burying as i go other than the few grass/weed roots that must be dried out before they can be left for rotting.