150527 – Richard Mudhar

Remarkable win on beans with compost extract

Last year we made compost and compost extract for use in the polytunnels. The extract was also looked at with the microscope. Most of the compost after making extract was used in polytunnel which has tomatoes in it. These look healthy and were praised by another local gardener, but there’s no control. However, we did have a control on the extract applied to the beans in another polytunnel.

If you look at the picture at the head of this post, on the RHS of the picture is the control. This is what we would have grown normally.

in the middle on the top you can just see a blue ribbon which is where application of the compost extract stopped. On the left are the plants where compost extract was applied to the ground, it ran out at the blue ribbon point. Same plants, same time planted, and the same set of seeds. The difference in vigour, height of growth and yield is remarkable and clearly to be seen. Continue reading “Remarkable win on beans with compost extract”

Lettuce timelapse

We tried growing lettuce seeds in compost 150527 and regular commercial compost. Right from the off you can see that out compost has a much coarser consistency, which is not ideal in seed compost

We then tried a timelapse view of some lettuce seeds growing, using a Raspberry Pi to shoot one image a day

This isn’t night and day, but I do feel the seeds grown in our compost are slightly less leggy than the commercial compost, but both are perfectly decent growing media.

the seeds grown in our compost are on the lower right

Lettuce seeds are terribly small and fine, nothing can be said about the clustering or evenness,

Using the microscope to grade compost and compost extract

This is using Elaine Ingham’s microscopy techniques to investigate thermal compost – some of what I saw. I am at an early stage of being able to do this, so any errors are mine and not Elaine Ingham’s 😉 The principle is to classify organisms by their morphology – aerobic fungi tend to have a colour, diameter wider than 2.5µm and/or have uniform septa. Spiral structures are bad, indiciative of anaerobic conditions, and ciliates (hairs all over the body) also indicate anaerobic – bad- conditions. Apart form the spirochete most of these are good.

spirochete – bad sort of bacteria. 250x I saw only one and this one inactive!

This is on a 5x dilution, the recommended intial conditions (use 1ml of compost and make up to 5ml total with water left to stand so the chlorine has gone).

Composting win

If at first you don’t succeed, try again 🙂 The requirements of Elaine Ingham’s thermal composting are quite demanding, keeping the heap at over 55C for more than three days to kill weed seeds and pathogens. The previous attempt got really close then seemed to dry out, this appears to be a issue with using a lot of woodchip which is a difficult material to wet. This time I used less of it.

I used a higher proportion of green material, and more of the high nitrogen clover too. I filled the wheelbarrows with woodchip and then added water until it overflowed, then left it to soak overnight

this achieved over 55C for three days - the dip is when this was turned — this achieved over 55C for three days – the dip is when this was turned on Thursday evening

After it had been over 55C for three days I turned this heap, wetting the material as it was turned over. I should be able to turn this again on Monday, assuming it holds above 55C

Composting – take two

Time to put some of the learning from the last time into practice, with thanks to Polly for help with wrangling the materials –

The clover which it the high-nitrogen component because it fixes N from the air is on the black plastic. Loads of wood chip is in the bin and the wheelbarrow. First we put sticks in the bottom to improve airflow because the whole point of thermal compost is to keep things aerobic

We needed to wet the material. In the video tutorials Ingham recommends standing the material in water overnight. We wetted is using a fine spray on the hose

A heck of a lot of material goes into a compost pile – thanks to Polly and Lucia who helped at the working party Continue reading “Composting – take two”