Third time's a charm for the hot compost pile

Post date: Oct 26, 2012 11:15:7 PM

Well, another hot pile has been started today, which should hopefully give us nice finished compost in time for spring.

The first hot pile was a success, and produced some very nice compost. The second attempt was less successful, it dried out too much and just kind of stopped. But all was not lost because it is pretty easy to kickstart a compost pile.

So we took the contents of the hibernating pile, and mixed it with the freshly fermented scraps from the tumblers and the earth machine. A cubic yard of compost is supposed to be able to remain hot enough to continue decomposition all through winter. We shall have to wait and see. So far, it has not really shown too much promise, but it is early days yet.

The Earth Machine does not really hold its temperature well through the winter, so we are putting it up for the winter. We will start using it again in the spring. This means all scrap must go into one of the 2 tumblers. They have signs on them to indicate which is the active tumbler and which has been set to cure. Hopefully this will do us through winter.

We have already had quite a few pumpkins dropped off, which is great, but please remember to cut up the pumpkins into 2 -3 inch pieces, because a whole pumpkin is not going to decompose in a hurry.