These videos provide some of our experience and stories with composting and the use of compost. There may also be personal stories and reflections among the videos.
Thank you John Paul! This was a great summary of your findings, very helpful! I realized a couple of months into my own trial that I didn’t account for the fact that the dried food scraps are super concentrated. I guess that you can imagine what happened 😂 I will try again with that in mind, as well as your numbers. Many thanks!
There are lots of ideas and plans for DIY composting bins available. I really like the insulated bins with a suspended aerated floor because they allow air flow and hold the heat much better. Its a bit more complicated to build that as a DIY project
Always thankful for your videos, as they provide certainty. I'm from the UK so have no idea what screened yard waste overs are. Could you let us know please?
Yard waste include tree and shrub trimmings including leaves and branches. May also include some lawn clippings. This is shredded and composted. The screened overs is the woody bits that are screened out after the composting process. In this case, they include everything that did not make it through a 1/2" screen. Hope that this helps.
Apparently it can, but may not be allowed commercially in certain areas. See also an article from 2020 that discusses this: www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/15/5959
Hi John Paul, and thanks for these fantastic videos! I'm also experimenting with composting the residues from these machines, because I agree with you that their product should not be called compost. I'm doing small static aerated piles.
Thanks for your comment, and I would love to hear about how your composting trials have gone! I will be posting a video on composting dried and ground food waste in the next couple weeks!
Feeding the machine residues to my worms worked well, though only in a thin layer otherwise it warmed up significantly. I’m not sure what the resulting salt content is, I’ll have to send a sample for testing sometime. I guess it depends on what went in to the machine. As for the ASP trial, I mixed the machine residues in with too many other feedstocks to get a good sense of how it composts. I will try it sometime with just one carbon feedstock and see how it goes. I got the impression that the stuff seemed to reduce the porosity of the mix… the pile has stayed above 60C for over two months now, the first month with aeration, second month without. Unfortunately I no longer have an oxygen meter. But I could see that the feedstock material had not broken down much after the first month.
Thank you for this excillent information. I want to know, incase of chicken manure, is it possible to decompose within 3 weeks to get odorless mature compost? Thus, chicken manure contain several times ammonia than cowdung or kitchen waste. I use compost turner in composter pile every alternative day.
It's not likely very easy to achieve with just chicken manure by itself. If you would wish to speed up the process, it would require actively aerating it, mixing it at least 2 x weekly, and adding water or other liquid material. Chicken manure contains so much energy, and hence requires a lot of air, which dries out the product quickly. Hence the need for adding water and mixing it at least 2 x weekly. Just turning the product with a compost turner works, but it takes a much longer because the oxygen drops to 0 within minutes after turning. I hope that this is helpful.
Hi Mr.john I really appreciate your efforts on this content and it's 100 % benfit to my I'm very interested in wast management so thank you so much , may Allah bless you ❤
Yes, bokashi is an anaerobic process that stabilizes the food waste by lowering pH. We don't get significant weight reduction, and I am curious whether the methane potential changes.
The idea at first with methanisers was good. But the problem with industrial methan plant is that it they act like the whole agro-industrial mafia; importing trashes full of plastic from HUNDREDS of KM away, and work even more by growing even more corn for this said "clean" energy. Everithing agro-industrial big owner touches become toxic and bad for everyone. It works only because of european subsidies they stole from honnest small scale farmers. They pollutes our rivers and take all water, lands, subsidies, governance for themself and gonna put humanity at risk of extinction for the short therm profit of a minority of heritocrates.
So how do you get ground a dried compost from you kitchen scraps ? In my case, what i found the best to do with my kitchen waste (after giving it to the chickens that gives eggs) is to lift mulch anywhere i need to feed a garden plant, dump the fresh food waste of the day under, and cover the much back. Each times, i do it somewhere different. In this way, all the potential of the foodscrap is super valuated by the microfauna that you just favorize its habitat, so they work the soil well each time.
As always thank you for sharing your knowledge. I have a new idea for aerating my next compost pile with an aquarium pump. Instead of using a solid PVC pipe I was thinking about using a plugged flexible air hose with very small pinholes. This way I can coil the hose with the pin holes through the entire pile, maybe even in multiple patterns at different heights, while I am building up the pile. And then the air will be somewhat evenly distributed through the entire pile. Maybe the hose will get squeezed by the weight, but there is only one way to find out. So I am going to try that with my next pile. A big 👍
Sounds interesting, but remember that hot air rises, so generally we just need to provide air in the bottom, and as long as the mix is porous enough, it should breathe just fine!
There’s so much experience derived wisdom here! Coating surfaces, remixing and perhaps wetting after 1 week, ideal temperature zones, specific oxygen % ranges, specific measured maturity tests, yeehaw! Thanks for sharing! Come hang out at USCC please! I, and many others I’m sure, would like to buy you a beer.
It all sounds good ! But check out the revelations in Australia with the dispersal of ASBESTOS in composted products ! Impossible to remove all plastics and these products should not be allowed to find there way back into the human food chain .
John Paul: Great comments as well as great explanations and nice photos ! What exactly is the initial biomass that you are composting ? (leaves, branches, garden clips) I am impressed as I saw no foreing matters (plastics, etc.) I am curious to know... 20 pads to process 20 000 tons per y ... what is the main limiting factor to operate efficiently the proposed system ? Is it the initial blending step (300 t/d) that prevents you to blend and spread the biomass onto the pads or is it the TIME of the year you collect the biomass to be composted ? Or is the collection strategy adopted by the city ? ... Denis, from Montréal, Qc, Canada
Thanks for your comments/questions. The material being composted is the source separated organics from the City of Edmonton. It goes through some preprocessing at the City before it comes to the facility. The material varies from mostly food waste during the winter and mostly grass and food in the spring/early summer, and leaves and food during the fall. One of the limiting factors is loader operation.
Thank you, John, for creating and sharing such useful videos related to composting. For day-to-day operations, I concur that Solvita and Dewar Tests for the compost maturity are practical given the financial constraints of a small community/producer. However, for industrial or municipal composting, I would recommend the O2 uptake or CO2 evolution tests whenever there is a change in their composting recipe, or to cross-check sometimes the results of the Solvita/Dewar test with the O2 uptake/CO2 evolution tests. All you did was great!! I look forward to watching the video on the self-heating test. It was a pleasure working with you. Thank you very much for providing me with that opportunity. I look forward to working with you in the area of biodegradability/composability of bioplastics in Saskatchewan.
Am dead sure you are not using tags while uploading videos. If you did your viewership and subsciber counts bot would have gone up significantly. I think you are just uploading and then giving the title.
Thank you I would welcome the opportunity to chat about a simple method we can use in Mali, West Africa, to test compost for maturity. Distilled down to basic principles. Thanks
Ok how to compost stabilized dry grinded kitchen and garden waste. Adding microbes converts dried food/garden waste into compost? If yes which microbes.
Composting dried and ground kitchen waste is not as simple as just wetting it up and turning it. Its best mixed with yard waste or wood chips at about 10-20%. I used 10% dried food waste with 90% screened yard waste and added water to make a mix with 60% moisture, and an air-filled porosity of 450 kg/m3. The yard waste adds the microbes and the porosity, and the food waste adds the energy!
John Paul I got some organic commercial compost like this and spread 2" over my garden rows. I have drip tape watering and neither that nor surface watering wets this compost well. My seeds aren't germinating!! Any advice? Thank you.
Thanks for your question. If the seeds are planted in the soil underneath the compost, they may be a bit deep, its best to remove the compost from around where the seeds are. Its not recommended to put seeds directly in the compost layer, as the electrical conductivity in soome composts may be high.
I found your videos by searching compost too dry. I am subscribing and liking hopefully more people will find you a different way! I will be adding another video to my interesting by others playlist which is a library for gardening information. Thanks!
Greetings from south east Asia. Thank you so much for making these videos so scientific and evidence-based. There are many videos about composting out there that provide simple principles, techniques, and tips from experience but not many explained the science behind it in such a compelling way that you did. I have watched a few videos of yours and wish that I have found them earlier. 😂 Can’t promise I won’t aerate just to feel like optimizing is done, but I will fight the urge
This is a great video intro but I wish there was more information shared. Some questions: What is the "cleanliness" of the final output (eg: 99% plastics free, or completely clean) of the Compost Liberator? What is the process used to seperate plastics (especially micro-plastics) from food waste? Where can we follow-up to learn more?
Thanks Paul. I understand that over time the temperatures and oxygen will increase. Because of the cost of composting real estate in a high rainfall climate, my goal is to obtain mature compost in a maximum of 4 weeks. I don't have the luxury of waiting 9 weeks!
