Share The Seeds
Gardening Area => The Eco-Garden => Topic started by: Radium on June 03, 2015, 07:06:19 PM
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Since childhood, I played all of my day in the dirt and mud, and had a thing with burying various organic matter (old notebooks, roadkill, veggies) deep in the ground, and digging them up after 1-2 months to see how they look like after decomposing.
Making compost is very delightful to me,
So much that having a compost making facility is one of my dream jobs.
Too bad I don't have enough space anymore to play around the dirt as I did when I was a kid; Isn't apartment life boring and bad?
Anyway, the need is the mother of innovation they say.
We can discuss about various composting methods here, trying to make them more efficient, or bring totally new methods into existence out of nowhere.
I like to turn kitchen scraps into compost in the shortest time possible, and I'm not afraid of even the craziest ideas.
One way I was thinking about recently, was dissolving the scraps (well, the soluble parts of them) in strong sulphuric acid, and then neutralizing the acid by adding a calcium containing base, draining the resulting mix, and then letting it to rot in the bin.
Would this make it shorter to turn into compost?
This way most of the material is turned into a pulp, which then is dried and shattered to get a powdery mix, thus greatly increasing the surface area in the shortest amount of time.
And all that acid/base reaction will produce a lot of Calcium sulphate, which is the good old gypsum, and has nothing to do to plants but goodness.
Sulphuric acid is cheap like dirt where I live, and a good source of a calcium base is egg shells (which is 99% Calcium carbonate).
BTW, today I ground lots of +10 years old legumes and grains into a fine powder using a coffee grinder, and mixed them with finished compost and let them sit to turn into more compost.
There's heaps of bread leftovers and scraps here, thrown away in large amounts, and cheap like DIRT (literally).
I can grind them as well and make compost out of them if my current experiment using grains and legumes powder composting turns to be a success.
If a single tiny seed can provide the seedling with anything it needs to grow for awhile, then it's packed with all necessary nutrients, and thus composting them alone gives a balanced nutrient-rich soil?
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That first paragraph sounds so much like the beginning of some hillbilly-killer-horror-movie :P
I wouldnt mess with chems in my compost, makes it pointlessly expensive and will add salts. A fast method is a black box suspendet in the air in full sunlight, making the contents really hot which improves the first stages of composting, but I guess to make good stuff youll never get around that nice pile full of worms and time.
Since this is a continous process I wonder why you worry about speed, first in first out ! dump everything on top and use what comes out, how long the process took shouldnt matter then as its a constant flow.
Personally I like to have different compost piles, sorting things that go in a little and monitoring the outcome, like: eggshells go here all green goes there kitchen waste here... in the end measure EC, look at texture, see what plants think of it, check pH... then you can consider that data when making a composition.
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lol ;D
Nothing is more delightful to me, than the sight of my own deep brown rich soil filled with active life.
I should have been born out of city.
The city life is not for me, and I totally believe I'm wasting my life here in this asphalt and concrete jungle.
I plan to move into a sub-urban area in 4 years, to live the life for real.
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im pretty sure you can just set it in a garbage can with a bunch of calcium hydroxide....but aside from crazy chemical ways of making fast compost why dont you look in bokashi? thats a great way of compartmentalizing to compost prosess into something fantabulous, mix that with vermiculture and your pretty well set
as a primer on bokashi i will gift a basic recipe out here... start with grain, soak in water , use or disregard grain to whatever purpose (worms). take the soak water and mix with milk..preferably whatever sort is economic, i solicit grocery stores for their milk that they plan to throw out because of sell by dates, but you have to assure them that its for you compost not for consumption or they most likely wont give it to you, mix milk and rejuvelac and wait roughly 12 hrs or so, the curds and whey will have seperated, get rid of the curds (worms) now take the rejuvelac that is also now whey and mix with mole asses. about 50/50....keep an eye on it as it can get quite lively at this stage....once this has fermented for awhile you have your primary innoculant, you dilute it somewere between 1-10 and 1-100 or even 1-1000 could work...i like to go on the stronger side though...(only dilute how much you want to use at once and save the concentrate somewhere cool) one youve diluted you make your actual bokashi at this stage you collect all the dry materials bulk wheat bran or rice hulls or grass clippings or dry leaves or sawdust/shavings and you hydrate the dry with the wet and let them ferment in a SEALED container this is an anerobic transformation that goes against classic composting tecniques, you want to not have pooling liquid at the dry phase just enough liquid to saturate the dry stuff...once the ferment is done it should have a pleasent sweet smell, you can let it dry it out some if its too wet to handle conveniently, you can then use this to cut into kitchen compost or composting toilets or whatever, it will reduce foul odors and speed up decomposition and increase to potency of the finished compost....you can also feed it to worms if you like i hope this helps
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I do composting like this:
Indoor- Acceptable kitchen scraps are fed to worms. Everything else, except for coffee grounds, are thrown away.
Outdoor- All lawn/ yard waste that is unsuitable for reuse is composted. Coffee grounds are added to the compost.
I never really saw the need for fancy composting systems, but that's just me ;)
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Bokashi sounds like too much work.
Since yesterday, I started to simply put my kitchen waste into freezer bags, seal it completely, and put it into a large metal drum on the rooftop under heavy hot sun (to keep them safe from naughty crows)
They will be digested anaerobically there, and after three months (according to my experiment 3 years ago) nothing will remain in the bags but a BBBLACK and nasty smelling slime.
I plan to go into two directions from there.
I will open half of the bags, and try to compost the contents aerobically like fresh kitchen waste.
And I will leave the other half alone, to sit in their bags for a full year.
After that, I will compare the results, and then choose which route is the best for me, by comparing manufacture time and compost quality, smell, and texture.
Each day I fill 2 bags on average, full of various green materials, and also bread leftovers.
This method suits my needs better, because as an apartment dweller, almost all of my waste is greens, and this method actually works better if you only throw greens to the bags.
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Ah yeah in case my description isnt good enough, this is what I hear being fastest: (http://auktionmaster.ad-tuning.de/image_db_585195.jpg)
But as I showed above I am not interested in composting fast at all, if the process took 1000 years, that would be fine as long someone started it 1000 years ago and maintained it 1000 years. Also "red dot design award"... honestly ? A s**tload of plastic where no plastic is needet and a design that is determined to break and end up in the rubbish. Besides that, it would be stuffed after I mowed 1/100 of my lawn. :D
And it even looks s**t !
What I really like is either make a pile, just dump loads of stuff there, or take 4 wooden beams, take a chainsaw to give them a point at one end, drive them into the ground in a square configuration, attach wodden boards to the outside to give you a "box" shaped thing of desired dimensions where you dump everything in from above. Some people want a lid too, darkness and moisture and heat might speed things up. As soon as its full remove a board at the bottom, there is where you will take out good compost from now on.
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That looks like a plastic trash can with air holes and a crank on the side ???
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Since compost takes a loooooong time to make, the sound decision would be starting multiple and huge batches, to get a large amount of it after waiting for so long, which is certainly impossible with that Red-Dot composter.
Personally I need a lot of compost to fill four 7 gallon pots I'm having at the rooftop, because I want to grow tomatoes in them next year.
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Still not getting it... "too long" ... it can be a continous process, if 1 kg of waste turns out .5 kg of compost after x time and you feed y mass into the process every day, you will, after waiting x time only once ! be able to extract .5 y from your process every day.
Im not exactly getting why you are botheres with the duration, its a natural process it takes time, maybe it can be sped up but it wont matter once it is running. So better start now :) start simple but soon ;)
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For those that have not already, look at some of the Geoff Lawton videos about compost. While many do not have the space and /or time for a large compost heap the basic ideas can be scaled down to any size garden.
geofflawton.com (http://geofflawton.com)
If you have the time and patience, Bokashi is fantastic. Unfortunately it is far too time consuming for any larger farms / gardens.
Lactobacillus, this is a great thing to add to most any compost. Cuts down on overall compost time and keeps the smell down during the "active" phase.
theunconventionalfarmer.com/recipes/lactobacillus-serum/ (http://theunconventionalfarmer.com/recipes/lactobacillus-serum/)
nobody
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What is it supposed to do ? Nitrogen ? Uhm honestly ... hows it going to make any difference, or are you going to invite several hundret friends to take a P on your compost ? :)
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What is it supposed to do ? Nitrogen ? Uhm honestly ... hows it going to make any difference, or are you going to invite several hundret friends to take a P on your compost ? :)
Lulzzzz
A pee party is gonna be awesome!
And it seems like a legit way to recycle the nutrients in the pee, specially all that urea.
I totally wish I could draw a WWII propaganda style poster using this text:
Folk, don't feed the enemy,
compost your pee, before ragheads steal it and make urea nitrate.
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I know a few people that pee on their compost piles.
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I can imagine :D Uranium sure is one of them. Its just that too me its the drop in the ocean... then again yeah it depends on your composts size and your drinking habits (altho more drinking doesnt mean more nutrients to be veeeery exact) if you compost stuff in some few-liter containers then I could imagine it makes a difference.
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Hahahaha I love it!
I know there is nitrogen among other trace elements in urine. Also, probably bad and harmful leftovers if you eat unhealthy.
The pee helps catalyze heat through the nitrogen which helps the breakdown for sure. Blood meal may be a quicker start but think of all the water saved by not flushing.
Flush??
People who flush down their products by water are doin' it wrong man!
Here we use squatting toilets, which don't have any water floating inside it, everything you drop will either go straight to the hole or if it sticks to the walls, we just aim our ahem,,, water bio-pistols at it and shoot it down the hole by urine.
We just use an sprinkle of water for washing our arse and pistol.
Almost everyone here has been doing that since ancient times.
Some arseholes are importing western-style toilets recently equipped with flushes and build them into the new luxury apartments they're constructing.
These people deserve to be shot in the face with bio-pistols >:(
For you westerner fellas however, you can either get an squatting toilet (which has superior health benefits for flexibility and strength of your legs and core, plus easier and more complete shitting, thus reduced chance of colon cancer and saves you a lot of OOOOUUMFing when you're doing it)
But if that's hard, I guess you can just save the urine in big container, and once there's enough urine, use it to flush the shit down.
But since the system is designed to keep some fluid there, urine will go bad and your restroom will get stinky, unless you find a way to disable that configuration and make it to flush all of the fluid down the hole.
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THIS ! Already the best thread on STS... feels like reddit.
BTW: there is squatting toilets with a siphon and flush and I do even know of people who squat ON a regular toilet of "western" style.
More fun toilet facts ? In germany you can roughly determine the age of a bathroom by the toilet installed, as there was a german physicist who invented and videly advertised a toilet built "back to front" that lets the user, on rising from the throne, get a better look at his recent sucess. The idea being: That particukar physicist worked much on ailments that can be identified by looking at feeces. Also he advertised that doctors should, if it seems possible a patient has a symptoms that qualify, equip him with a tube & scoop so he could conveiniently ... Also this style of toilet is comfortable to any well equiped man, as otherwise he might run in danger not everything swings freely. Needles to say: The look-at-your-feeces went out of style again :)
Uranium, does your local squatter crapper have a link to the sewers or does it have a cavity ? Maybe you wanna tap it for your experiments ! :D
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I guess I've already earned myself a very big weirdness score here, but to make it worse:
I admit to investigating my fertilizer for any unsual thing such as worms because I literally live in dirt everyday and had acquired Hymenolepsis nana as a kid probably because I played in soil used by Afghan refugee construction site workers for schitting and penistol target practice.
The very same guys did finally connected all of the block's toilettes to the sewer system after centuries of well based toilets which required constant costly emptying each few years.
The funny thing is that our toilet never got full and we never had to call the shit sucking crew, but our neighbor had to call them more often than others even though they were just 3 people while other neighbors were at least 7-8 each family.
He finally got suspicious that our cavity was somehow leaking to their's, and decided to file a lawsuit against us but the judge commanded him to eat less to shit less and closed the funniest case of his career according to himself.
The poor neighbor was fat, sounds like someone didn't like fat people that much...
The irony was the judge had a huge stomach himself but macaroni arms and legs which caused him to develop a severe case of X legs deformity.
Oh, and did I said he went through six months of bureaucratic hassle to just hear that command?
I wanted to also add something else but I don't remember what was it,
.......
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Hmmmm
Ah we're in the composting thread, yeah I wanted just to say about my brother, unlike me, he's afraid of dirt/soil and was expressing his dislike towards my composting projects, so we parted the balcony and I added lots of gypsum to my open aerobic to-be-composts to diminish any smell and pretty sealed the others.
The picture is our balcony, to the left hand are his useless plants, and to the side are my useful fellas.
The arsehole believes all ethnobotanicals must be wiped out to reach world peace, wtf I can't even make the connection.
Oh no I remember now the thing I wanted to say is that my awesome herbalist grandma repelled the worms out of me by giving me lots of Espand (P.harmala) tea.
I stopped shitting worms just after a week. (H.nana reproduce into huge numbers, and the excess gets pushed out.
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Someone give this man a custom user title! "The Storyteller of STS" or something like that. As for that neighbour paying for your crap... we had a similar situation with heating in the building I live in. We used to have nice 20+ degrees during winter and paid very little while the neighbour kept walking around his apartment in double sweaters and thick, woollen Bosnian slipper socks but had to pay 3x as much as we did. We actually thought that the higher quality windows we had caused the difference. However...
After many a year the building's manager realised he had mixed up heating valve numbers; the neighbour was paying for us. Luckily we arranged the thing quietly and the unfortunate neighbour now finally enjoys his savings; not that he knows what caused the sudden change in his heating bills one year...
In the same building the municipality sold an apartment to a couple. But they gave them the wrong set of keys. Now they have a lawsuit by the state hanging from their necks due to "squatting". To make things worse they completely renovated the apartment but may very well have to move down the corridor into a somewhat dilapidated one.
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Well, I have more stories to tell if you enjoy them.
Did I tell you the story of the 4yo Radium going to a jewish toy-shop to buy a toy truck? and how he cut all of his cash notes from the center, making each into two halves, thinking it would double his money?
I was getting familiar with the concept of money just recently, and it was the first time I was given cash to personally buy something myself.
BTW, here's two pics of the typical modern squatting toilet used here.
At past centuries, people molded their own when building their houses, sometimes even shaped it with their hands.
http://forum.persianbax.ir//images/imported/2012/05/193.jpg (http://forum.persianbax.ir//images/imported/2012/05/193.jpg)
Art? lol
http://www.miyanali.com/patch2image.php?patch=usr/gaem-decoration/gal95.jpg&379126298 (http://www.miyanali.com/patch2image.php?patch=usr/gaem-decoration/gal95.jpg&379126298)
P.S:
I admit that I sat on the toilet in the wrong direction for years, until someone at school bring it up and said how he is having problem with urine drops bouncing back into his face.
I said why don't you aim it straight to the big hole?
Then I got weird stares from everyone around.
That day I figured I was sitting backwards, but seriously, there's no authority on that, and no one's right or wrong.
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Your oath ... ;D
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Alright alright :P
But what was wrong with that post? tell me to not repeat it again.
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as far as I remember the oath limits you to only botanical subjects :D poor you
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Damn :P
Alright people, if you want to hear more stories you must wait for my autobiography book to come out ;D
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Hey fellas, I have a question:
What happens if I fill a completely air-tight container with food scraps, and let it to sit?
Does the composting process halt if the pressure inside get too high?
I want to know exactly what happens to the materials, once the pressure has reached very high, which makes the production of more gases nearly impossible.
And assume the container is made of tank metal plates, thus impossible to explode from pressure build-up.
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Hey fellas, I have a question:
What happens if I fill a completely air-tight container with food scraps, and let it to sit?
Does the composting process halt if the pressure inside get too high?
I want to know exactly what happens to the materials, once the pressure has reached very high, which makes the production of more gases nearly impossible.
And assume the container is made of tank metal plates, thus impossible to explode from pressure build-up.
Fantastic question! I highly advise you to try it out and post pix of what happens.
Since the container is airtight, Oxygen levels may become depleted and Carbon dioxide levels may rise-IF this happens then the kinds of mold/bacteria/fungi/etc which grow in your sample will change as certain species use Oxygen for respiration, CO2 for photosynthesis and sometimes revert to glycolytic fermentation (metabolizing sugars into alcohol and lactic acid for energy instead of using oxygen). I don't think pressure will get dangerously high, but it may build up depending on gases released by decomposers. may emit heat as decomposition takes place and you may notice a hint of alcohol if you decide to give it the ol' smell test.
Pressure buildup may slow, but probably won't completely stop, fermentation. If anything, I would set up one compost heap without any air exposure and one with air exposure and see how they differ over time.
PV=nRT,
-Sherdan1
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In my new place, I will most likely have no place to perform even the slightest smelly composting.
So the only option is picking PET bottles, filling them with stuff, and close the lid HARD, and hope to get compost.
But I guess the activity of ANY type of organism inside the bottle will totally STOP after awhile, and there remains semi-digested stuff, waiting for the lid to open and let some fresh air in, to continue the digestion process.
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Sorry but, make sure you have a pressure relief, especially on a PET bottle, since nothing will cone to an halt, your PET bottle will simply burst Im afraid.
Keep in mind tho: in general gases can be considered compressible, liquids and solids not. That means in a full bottle catastrophic pressure build up will be reached sooner than in a 1/4 full bottle.
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Okay, what happens then to each of these two scenarios?
1. The PET bottle is filled with kitchen scraps, and then enough water is added to leave no place for air inside the bottle.
2. Instead of the PET bottle, a heavy-duty metal container is used, kitchen scraps are added to it, and no water at all.
What happens eventually to both of the scenarios?
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Why do you change both parameters in the theoretical "observation" ?
Well your kitchen scraps arent bone dry so both come with water and both will decompose.
The bottle will first go round and later burst, most likely.
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Why do you change both parameters in the theoretical "observation" ?
Well your kitchen scraps arent bone dry so both come with water and both will decompose.
The bottle will first go round and later burst, most likely.
Yeah both contain moisture and decompose.
You mean even the container made of panzer plate will burst eventually?
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Most likely not, The question would have to be "whats the pressure achievable" , I dont think you can make anything burst that way, there sure is a limit when the conditions dont allow further decomposition by some means.
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In my new place, I will most likely have no place to perform even the slightest smelly composting.
So the only option is picking PET bottles, filling them with stuff, and close the lid HARD, and hope to get compost.
But I guess the activity of ANY type of organism inside the bottle will totally STOP after awhile, and there remains semi-digested stuff, waiting for the lid to open and let some fresh air in, to continue the digestion process.
The use of sealed PET bottles as a means of avoiding a smelly compost is not likely to have a successful outcome for you. The sealed environment with in the bottle will produce some of the foulest smelling "compost" possible. Are you looking to use this compost? Or simply produce if for the sake of experimentation then dispose of it? If your goal is to produce a useable compost that does not smell you are going to have to do so in a high oxygen environment, use worms, or employ bokashi as previously mentioned. Even these have some odor, though what is considered "smelly" and what is considered "not smelly" is a subjective opinion.
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I've made oxygen-less compost before, sure it smells nasty raw, but leave it to dry and stay in sun for a week, and all the smell will be gone for good, then moisten it and use happily.