Extreme Composting

Hey that is a good idea, thanks. I run the garden hose and/or the sprinkler on my piles but allot of it runs off. I have been trying to think of different ways to get the water to the middle, your way will be very efficient. I'll still use a hose vs the 5 gallon bucket.

__________________
Patriot Guard Riders http://www.patriotguard.org/

”Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe.”
~Noah Webster

all my piles are made that way.

Anyone heard from mudburn? His last blog post a few years ago was about trying a "Back to Eden" garden. Anyone know how that went? Doesn't look like he is posting on HsT anymore.

__________________
You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.

I think he wised up and returned to his private life........

__________________
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Barry Goldwater.
III

If you are using a tractor with your pile, it is very easy to make a trough in the top. Kind of like when you make an indention in your mashed potatoes for gravy. I put the edge of my bucket straight down and wiggle it to make the indention. Then all water put onto the pile is directed down into the middle.

He had a blog detailing the construction of his home, including videos. I believe he included links to the blog or website for his project in a few posts within this thread. He built the home with the help of his dad and it is an impressive result.

__________________

The mention of Mudburn made me go back a re-re-read a few of his posts. His defense of extreme composting vs Wild Thang was excellent and reminded me of a more recent bout of those with extreme envy. Someone should go add a ton or two of baking soda to his piles to see if we can get him agitated enough to come back and update us on his progress.

Mudburn's gone? I just started re-reading this thread from the beginning for the second time (up to pg.12 now) and I've really enjoyed his and Forerunner's posts and pictures from the early days acquiring and building machinery to move more material at a time. Especially since I'm in the process of upgrading from an 8N Ford and a small pickup to a loader and beefier truck and trailer. They are gonna' be one at a time additions since I refuse to go into debt to get them.

Forerunner, Thank you once again for starting this thread. Most useful and entertaining thing on the internet imo.

Allen

Between DEKE and Allen......I don't know whether to laugh or cry......

I do miss Mudburn, though.

He understood.


Hang in there, felluhs.

There's nothing quite like someone from a ways away coming in and asking how I got so lucky to have all this black dirt......right in the middle of sand and timber soil hill country.














.

__________________
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Barry Goldwater.
III

Yep and his last blog post was in 2011 about starting a "Back to Eden" garden. And I always wondered how it turned out.

__________________
You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.

I never understood why people come out of that video believing that compost and mulch are new ideas, our that wood chips are the only good mulch. One person that tried it was planting right in the wood chips with nothing underneath, and it did not go well.

Oh I know it's not "new". At the time I knew mudburn was following in the path of Forerunner with compost and I was curious to see how all of it turned out. They both had awesome blogs and I miss reading them!

Curiosity, plain and simple. It's like reading a good book that someone tore the last chapters out of! You want to know how it ended!

__________________
You are confined only by the walls you build yourself.

Yeah, the average person in this thread is better educated about compost than the average person that references the "Back to Eden" video.

Well the weather was fairly decent this afternoon so I started a new pile. Wood chips (old) mixed with horse and chicken manure and oak leaves.

It's only about 11 feet long and 3 foot high so far. A broke down old guy with a shovel,pitch fork and a wheel barrow just don't make head way very fast.

I get most of my compost material pre mixed. It grinder tub offal. They load it for free and I pile it up right off of the trailer as high as I can throw it. When it get that high I move the trailer up a couple feet.

I do turn it sometimes with a FEL though. That's more fun than work. I need to turn - er move a pile out of the way. I'll put it more across the slope to catch the run off and cleat a path.

Oh yeah! A front end loader (sigh) As soon as I get my hands on one of those beauties this is gonna' go a LOT faster.

"Back to Eden" is based on the thought that if small is good, then extreme is the best. In the forest of Eden, soil is built at the rate of one inch per thousand years and done by a single leaf or twig at a time. Woods dirt is really great. If one could go to the extreme and supply a thousand years of leaves and twigs at one go, then it should be many times greater. Looks good on paper but so does something else if one has been constipated for a week.

Martin

I've never seen Back to Eden, all I know of it is the tidbits I see described here. But I used to know a guy in South Florida, 25 years ago, he might have been an extension agent, master gardener I think. He had the local chipper guys dump almost every day on his couple of acres of personal arboretum. He would faithfully spread the stuff around and when I saw it, he had been doing this for years.

Some of the older, larger trees sat in a sort of chip well that was 2+ feet deep. To get into his little jungle, you had to walk up a chip ramp that was 1 to 3 ft high. The ground was quite spongy because of the immense amount of organic matter. If Eden adds an inch per thousand years, he had 25,000 years worth. It was sort of extreme sheet composting. Very impressive.

At some point you may as well call that hugelkultur?

No, hugelkultur is a form of garden construction which employs a base of large pieces of aged or rotting wood or logs which sole purpose is moisture retention. Compost or manure is layered above that for fertility and then covered with soil as the planting medium.

Martin