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[Radium]

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?

[BubbleCat]

That first paragraph sounds so much like the beginning of some hillbilly-killer-horror-movie

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.

1 Like Radium likes this.

[Radium]

lol 
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.

1 Like MadPlanter likes this.

[teonanocatl]

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

2 Likes solaritea and Radium like this.

[chamomeleon]

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 

2 Likes BubbleCat and bloodysafety like this.

[Radium]

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.

1 Like BubbleCat likes this.

[BubbleCat]

Ah yeah in case my description isnt good enough, this is what I hear being fastest:

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.

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.

3 Likes bloodysafety, chamomeleon and Radium like this.

[chamomeleon]

That looks like a plastic trash can with air holes and a crank on the side 

1 Like BubbleCat likes this.

[Radium]

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.

[BubbleCat]

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

[nobody]

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

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/

nobody

1 Like fairdinkumseeds likes this.

[BubbleCat]

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 ?

[Radium]

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.

[New Wisdom]

I know a few people that pee on their compost piles.

1 Like Mangrove likes this.

[BubbleCat]

I can imagine 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.