Welcome to the Grok Shop! In this video we'll be talking about compost and using
compost for your garden or to make compost tea.
Either way, this video will be applicable. So now, if you're going to grow organic
- and you should - and of course organic means not using
man-made fertilizer or insecticides in your garden and fruit orchards or
whatever you might be growing, compost is really a must. Compost is like the
foundation of it all. With compost you get all the good nutrients in organic
material that continues to break down and feed microorganisms which are by and
large beneficial and using compost you can make compost tea to further keep
adding natural fertilizer to the soil throughout the growing process. If you
have soil compaction, like clay soil, compost can help it drain better. If you
have sandy soil, compost can help retain moisture.
It also helps balance pH levels. The list just goes on and on. I mean, there's
really no question about it, you just pretty much have to compost and besides
all that - it's environmentally sound. It's nature's recycling plant and the little
bugs and critters do all the work for you! So, pretty much, it's compost for the
win. In our household, we use the bin and heap system. So, we have a little bin in
our kitchen and a big... a couple of big heaps outside. I kind of like this bin
here. We still have an old beater plastic bin but we're thinking about maybe
upgrading to something like this. If anybody's tried it out, let me know in
the comments below. I'll link that in the description. So here you can see the two
big heaps. We have one that's open for processing - or accepting new material - and
that would be the one on the right right now, and then
the one on the left would be closed for processing; in other words we're taking
compost out of it to use in the garden or to make compost tea. And as you can see
it's almost used up. So, of course there's other ways to do it you could just get
something like this plastic drum that you rotate. You don't even need a bin in
the kitchen you can just carry your scraps out directly put them in the drum
and rotate them so clearly one big advantage of these drums is it's easier
to turn the compost which is something that you have to do. The heap system
requires a little more elbow grease. I'll share the link to this one below. So, of
course when you put your compost onto your heap (if you're using the heap
system), you want to make sure to cover it up good with some good carbon-containing
materials. Leaves would be a good example of that (I mean, carbon-dominant material). So,
basically you have greens and browns, is what people call them but it's... browns are
carbon dominant and greens are less so; they have more nitrogen typically than
the browns but by keeping some browns on top you keep the odor down and it's
almost like a protective layer for it processing okay so what about all the
technical details right you know I'm gonna leave that up to some web pages
I'll put some links to a couple of my favorite ones below one is this
University of Illinois page where they talk about things like yeah you you you
want to get a higher temperature in certain cases but you don't always need
to reach that 160 or whatever talk about how great earthworms are and just other
details on the science behind it and then this one's a little more of a
layman's term type page but I like this page they break down the ratio they
propose a two to one green to brown ratio for a batch pile and
in a one-to-one ratio for for add as you go pile which is kind of how I do it but
then you can see all the different types of plants that qualify is green or brown
and what type of waste would be green or brown and etc etc I'll put links to both
of these below and I think they're pretty helpful of course there's other
sites out there as well you can hit up for more details
so yeah everybody talks about hot composting getting your pile up to 160
degrees but there's also such a thing as cold composting where basically you
don't really worry about the temperature and you let it cook it might get a
little warm and you don't necessarily have to
monitor it but everything does eventually break down it's good to have
the heat for certain reasons like killing weed seeds and whatnot you can
always use an oven to pasteurize if you need to now if you want to be real
technical with your pile you can get one of these compost thermometers and
monitor the temperature of your pile and I'll put a link to this one below but
they can be helpful if you're into that that's just not how I do it I found this
quote from this guy on the forum and it's pretty simple way to go you know
don't worry too much about all the details if it smells you have too much
nitrogen add some Browns and give it a toss if it's not warming you need more
greens add those and give it a toss and etc etc I like that approach it's more
or less kind of how I do it so yeah here you can see I'm turning the compost this
is how you do it in a heap little elbow grease like I said you want to get the
wet stuff on top and dry stuff down below you use a shovel pitchfork
cultivator pretty much whatever you got but it could be a little bit
back-breaking sometimes an alternative way I found to do this is to use an
auger on a cordless drill basically you know the idea is
aerate the soil try to get some of that wet stuff to move up so of course this
isn't as effective as turning the whole pile with a shovel or something but it
is effective at getting air down into the compost this can be pretty compacted
with moisture and that tends to slow the whole process down when those
microorganisms can get the oxygen they need to operate so this just basically
keeps you cooking at full speed
laughter I dump my compost bin always like rinse it out and take that dirty
water and just put it right back on the compost heap
if you have one of those nice stainless steel bins it should clean up a lot
better than this old bucket but oh that's not quite giving up the ghost yet
we'll keep going with it
so speaking of keeping your heaps wet you may want to consider automating the
watering process that's what I've done I basically put some quarter inch tubing
around each side so each big heap has two misters I got these flexible drip
misters hook and that works out pretty good I'll put links to these misters
below if you can turn it while it's watering even better but basically you
want to get that water evenly distributed throughout the pile those
decomposer microorganisms depend on water and the organic material to be
dissolved in water in order to process it that's how it's done thanks for
watching