Let’s make this the place to share all our questions, ideas and results of any type of composting we can think of. Whether you’ve been composting for decades or just forgot to empty the green bin and doing bokashi by accident, let us know how and why you do things the way you do. Share your stories and your photos. Your designs, or designs you found online or perhaps in some cool old book you stumbled upon. Anything goes.
To kick off and introduce ourselves, why not drop a short messages on what your favourite composting methods are?
Nice introduction :)
My compost is not much to brag about, but the earthworms seem to like it a lot, so I guess I must be doing something right.
Hey! I’m living in a row house in Taiwan. I’ve got various aerated barrels/buckets going, using guinea pig bedding for browns, and composting all our kitchen scraps and various vegetation from our rooftop gardens. In the garage I’ve got dog waste composting (with wood shavings/coconut coir), and I set up and am managing a park leaf/grass composting system across the street. I’ve killed off several batches of worms over the years, attract soldier flies and sometimes beetle larvae help process materials.
Can you tell us more about your dog waste compost system? I don’t love the way I do it now and your way sounds easier!
Sure! First of all, our dog uses a tray, rather like a cat. We fill it with sawdust or coir (and sometimes planer shavings), and it soaks up the urine. We scoop off solids and put them into a barrel that I drilled a load of holes into for drainage/aeration. I have 3 sizes of container: a 20-litre bucket for collection, a 110-litre barrel and a 200-litre barrel, which I cycle the materials through as each gets filled. That makes turning easy, and gives me over a year to age everything. The compost then goes to fertilize fruit trees, so no direct contact with food sources.
This community has got me think more about things I can compost than I ever have before lol. I do trench composting (the lazy man’s method), and have mainly been using food scraps, but now I want to look into getting a bin. You all have bitten me with the composting bug.
Worm composting is my traditional composting method. The other method would be chop-and-drop composting but accelerated through the use of coppice and pollard cutting techniques by planting trees/shrubs densely and intended for that very purpose (but mainly pollard due to herbivore pressures).
I had to lookup ‘coppice’ and ‘pollard’, didn’t expect to learn something new within the first five posts on this community. If you know of any nice introduction video on the topic, please post it to the sub.
An ancient technique that fell out of favour in the past 400 years. If you really get into the historical side of it, there are archaeological records of coppice timber being used thousands of years ago. It’s very solarpunk.
As for videos, I have no idea. I’m a qualified arborist so my knowledge of them started by figuring out tree physiological response to pruning and then working out the techniques from there. In the past few years there has been a significant resurgence in information and if you lived in Europe, you would have been exposed to it more than any other continent for years prior. I’d bet there are videos, technically I should be one of the people making them.
There was a book on the history released recently: https://www.williambryantlogan.com/ - called Sprout Lands. It’s not a technical manual, more of a flowery piece dedicated to the discovery of the cultures that performed it and why it worked from a functional sense. Worth reading.
And, unless it’s on FB, the only place I know of discussion for it is https://www.teddit.net/r/coppicing - maybe if Lemmy picks up and a “tree” community (not cannabis) gets going. There are probably some arboricultural forums still plodding along but we all know how centralisation went for them. Composting isn’t the right niche for it, farming, while associated, isn’t either.
Managed to find a copy of Sprout Lands, and reading the synopsis I see ‘living hedge’ mentioned. In season 2 of Clarkson’s Farm (Jeremy Clarkson trying to run a farm) there’s a match organized where folks make traditional living hedges, something I had never heard of but found fascinating. So thanks for this recommendation, sounds right up my alley.
There is an excellent video on YouTube on the hedge laying process. There is a old guy, I think in WWII assisted by a young person (young lady if I can assume gender) and it runs through the whole traditional technique. He smokes the entire time while working.
If you read about hedgerow loss through England and Europe, you can see what a negative effect that has had on ecological outcomes. Sprout Lands goes into how cycling trees for product, rather than clearfelling improved areas over time, animals and plants adapting to the changes over thousands of years. Fire is also a coppice technique and in Australia, indigenous people did it for so long, animals evolved with the changes.
I’ll have a look for video now and edit it in if I find it.
Here it is. Throw it into your frontend of choice:
Please consider making a dedicated post for that (or any other similar) video if you find it, sounds like it deserves its own place and that way more people might find it.
c/farming? Where do you think it’s relevant?
Did you want to make a trees community before the cannabis people take it?
Good question. I have no clue how much content/traffic we would get on such a topic. We could do c/Trees but maybe c/Arboriculture is more accurate?
Let me have a look at which communities are already there now, maybe something fits.
I’m currently doing a three-bin system for the kitchen scraps and yard waste (with some added horse manure to get things going whenever I fill up a new bin). That one actually gives me some amount of compost I use in said yard again.
Three months ago I also started a wannebe-Johnson-Su like bioreactor, so a cylinder shaped pile of shredded leafs and wood chips. It’s only 80~90cm in diameter and roughly 1m high so nowhere close to the actual Johnson-Su design, but it’s what I could make with the leafs/wood and the materials I had lying around.
Lastly I’ve got a very small vermicomposting setup, a bucket with the bottom cut out and some thick wire going back and forth for the bottom. This is more of a small scale continuous flow setup, which I have not harvested yet. Not too sure whether this thing is gonna work out, to be honest.
