150508 – Richard Mudhar

Getting ready to have another go at composting the Elaine Ingham way after the first couple of attempts at thermal compost didn’t go right, I dissected the old material to find out why.

the heap dropped to about a quarter the original size

On the plus side, the material reduced in volume to 25% of the original volume. That in itself might be telling me something, in that perhaps i hadn’t packed down the original pile enough – the composting bugs are small, and they need to be in contact with the compost to munch it, there is such a thing as too much air gap 😉

looks particularly dry, except in the very middle

Only the very middle was wet, and did not smell, so it looks like this pile largely dried out from the outside, it probably didn’t go anaerobic, and indeed was active enough to nut the smell of the chicken crap used as the high N part.

Continue reading “Composting fail – what went wrong”

Compost isn’t something I’d even given much thought to, I got it in bags from B&Q and job done.

A long time ago I never bothered and used garden soil, perhaps an instinctive predilection towards natural farming – as exemplified in shumei.

I visited the guys doing Shumei farming in Wiltshire - being Japanese they had this image of Mount Fuji on the site, though the December rain doesn't do it justice — I visited the guys doing Shumei farming in Wiltshire – being Japanese they had this image of Mount Fuji on the site, though the December rain doesn’t do it justice

At school I learned that soil has micro-orgnaisms that somehow worked symbiotically with the plants, but pretty much everything in the decades that passed seemed to run counter to that – perhaps my schoolbooks were from an earlier era.

Continue reading “Composting – the Elaine Ingham way”