Composting Weeds

Warning = if you are into "No Dig" you won't like this. It is next year's cucurbits and legumes patch in my 5 way rotation. As the season progresses all my allotment weeds get stuffed into black lined bags previously used for manure or proprietary compost mixes. The bags are piled up and left to languish in the sun wherever is out of the way, until now. Yard by square yard I dig a pit, tip in a couple of foul smelling bags and then fill it in from the next square yard. This last year I collected twenty bags of weedy material. I call this fertility recycling. The runner beans, courgettes, squashes and peas seem to like it. Even the pernicious weed remnants underneath seem to get the message that they are the providers of nutrition, no longer the beneficiaries.

I do "high fibre" composting in a plastic dalek at home with the help of brandling worms. Here kitchen waste is generated and so are supplies of paper and cardboard so that the lasagne layering required to keep the greens and browns in balance are to hand. As the allotment is several miles across town the "stuff it in a light excluding bag" method seems to be more practicable. Weeds are excluded from my home compost which I use for mixing my own seed mixes and mulches. I find this a happy arrangement.

Meet My New Friends...

Kitchen Compost, Coir and Perlite:

I am determined to make my own seed growing medium and potting compost after my recent bad experience with commercial peat free products.

The coir comes in a dry brick which is easy to rehydrate.

The kitchen compost  just needs to be sieved.

Then it is a simple mixing job.  After searching the internet I went for 2 scoops compost, 2 parts coir and 1 part perlite.

Now I am ready for my end of season sowings. At least I am confident that there are only healthy ingredients in my mix.  I feel sure that I won't be buying any proprietary mix next year, which is admittedly a leap of faith at this early stage.

 

The Perils of "Peat Free"

The sickly crew

Much as I hate reporting failures, I feel obliged to record the abysmal failure of  my tomatoes and cucumbers this year.  Yellow, at best, to purple leaves,  lack of growth, prone to attack by pests or simply rotting: it has been an abject failure.  I tried several new tomato varieties, but also my failsafe Sungold, so I know it is not my growing methods.    The culprit has to be the peat free compost.  New Horizon Vegetable Compost by the normally reliable Westland.  I had noted that New Horizon "All Plant Compost" claims to have "No Green Waste" but on closer examination the Vegetable Compost misses this phrase out from the blurb.  It does claim to be suitable for growing tomatoes.  Both products have a real stink about them even before you break open the bag, reminiscent of pig slurry.  I now have a dilemma: Do I try to isolate and dispose of these products or let the contaminants dissipate/dilute on the allotment, once in contact with real soil?  It may be only by association but I went down with food poisoning for two weeks after working with this material intensively.  In the small print they do advise you to wear gloves when handling - advice I now take very seriously! 

Cucumber - giving up the ghost (There were 3)

Sungold - Single fruit on a spindly plant.

 

Old Bag Sees Light of Day

Today I am following up my  3rd December post when I added a "compostable" bag to the compost bin.  It is now four months on (rather than three) so it is time to assess the breakdown.  Taking the trusty trowel in hand I started my forensic excavation. Here is what I found:

Now compare that with the pristine beginning:

To be honest I am not really impressed with compostability. I don't think these residents were very impressed either!

Back to Black

Today the weather was pleasant so I set about the task of emptying out the mature compost bin.  At the far end of our rectangular garden we have two 'daleks', one in each corner.  Our kitchen (and garden) waste gets added to one while the other is left to rot down - with the help of brandling worms. It is high time I did this as, with slower breakdown at colder temperatures,  the active bin has been brimming full for weeks.  The end result is, at most, a third of the height of the full dalek.  Now emptied the waste can be directed to the second bin where there is plenty of room. 

Here's the same bin at the beginning of the year (9/2/19)

With dalek in place:

I have bagged up the compost for now as I have yet to decide where the greatest need is:  flowerbeds or tubs.  Most likely I will avoid the option of taking them to the allotment as this involves transport. This black stuff is like gold dust. 

Compostable Material

I'm starting an experiment today.

The question was posed: Are the claims of degradation of plastic alternatives justified?  Do they biodegrade as efficiently as they claim?

Today this bag has gone into my compost dalek, along with the usual kitchen vegetable waste.  I will leave all alone for three months when I will make my first check on progress. 

A few notes:

This was promoted as a people's science experiment but after volunteering I have heard nothing further from the organisers, so I am doing this off my own bat.

Biodegradability is different from home compostability and isn't on its own a cure for all aspects of the recycling problem - see the thought provoking article here  

I have been caught out before, most notably with teabags, which it turns out have a plastic element (glue?) to them.  Worse still the seemingly "paper" sachets some come in turn out to be plasticised and turn up years later when harvesting potatoes. 

Going down??

A month ago I said I would be monitoring how quickly my worm inhabited compost bin was rotting down. So here is an update.

9th February

7th March

9th February

7th March

All credit is due to these chaps:

Brandling worms

Keen eyed readers will notice that absent mindedly I have emptied a couple of flower pots worth of spent compost into the bin.  (I was finally clearing away my tomatoes from the greenhouse)  All the same I think you will agree it is going down well.

Invasion Earth - Worm Composting

In order to turn this:

into this

you need a bit of help from these:

Today I decided to empty my mature 'dalek' composter so that I could start filling it afresh and leave the current one (I do have two you see), which is full to brimming, to rot down.

Current Composter

Current contents revealed

Mature composter

Mature contents revealed

Aside from the full capacity I have been prompted to record this event by a most interesting post on another blog.  Hot Composting


In the course of the ensuing discussion  I realised that I don't precisely know how long it takes me to fill one bin and move on to the next.  So in some ways this post is a stake in the ground to remind me of the date I stopped adding to the current (green) dalek. The clock is now running!  A really interesting comparison would be to run one bin with worms and one without, but I don't have the means to do that at present so that will have to wait.  As the worms seem to appear like magic it might not be that easy to engineer the no worm scenario.

Currently we are still in the grips of winter and worm activity will be focused primarily on survival. The will have migrated to the centre of the bin and not be feeding so much.  Once temperatures rise there will be a lot more activity and consumption.  The worms pictured above are escapees from the mature bin.  There's not much future in mining that pile (although there are still a few hundred hidden away within).

In case you are wondering I store cardboard alongside the bin where it gets rained on and is to hand when I consider the balance between browns and greens (or carbon nitrogen ratio) needs redressing.  This is very subjective, as is the addition of water if I consider the mix has got to dry.  If the worms are all on the top it is definitely too wet  and if I start seeing ants that signals to me that it is far too dry. 

I feed my compost bins with kitchen waste  - about a caddy a day.  Coffee grounds, tea leaves, vegetable trimmings, excess cooked vegetables and paper all go in, fats, dairy, meat and bones are all excluded - they go into the Council food recycling caddy. 

Compost Time - Invasion Earth

My home composting system consists of two alternating daleks at the end of the garden  -  one at either side. It should be three bins (one building, one maturing and one emptying) but there are only two daleks (and two corners).  We cope with this by emptying the mature bin into sacks when the need arises.  So this week, the building bin was full to the brim and it was time to clear out the mature bin and start afresh. Lifting the bin all was revealed: a beautifully reduced pile of well rotted kitchen vegetable waste.  This result is achieved by the action of our colony of brandling worms, the bulk of which have been transported from one bin to the other year after year for the last twenty five years.  The resulting product is ideal for making a bed for the allotment potatoes, although it also benefits the flower borders and raised beds at home.  The earth is improving year on year.