Would love to see some plans and or ideas about such an oven.

So would I. All I can figure out to do is build a large typical solar oven so that I can do about 20 gallons a batch. That should give me enough seed starter potting soil.

Thanks for the reply. I hadn't considered row mulching. I'll try that.

YES therapy; much needed for us "Drooling Lurkers"



...hmm... drooling in the compost... :idea:

Waste not-want not.

:thumb:

not to worry, drool is perfectly compostable!

:happy2:

Whoo Hooo - Got my first Compost Book. :walk:

Thanks a lot FR, now I've got to 'spain its presence on my coffee table...

What a conversation starter, already !!!!

:bouncy:

Tell 'em I sent yuh. :shrug:

On second thought..........

It looks like I've made a good connection. There is a local wild animal sanctuary that is clearing the sand pines from a couple of hundred acres. Sand pines are mostly useless, fall over easily, even the pulp/paper mills aren't happy to get them. I parked my chipper at his place for the next 3 weeks and he has 40 - 50 college spring breakers coming to help clear and chip. The kids won't get to operate the chipper, too dangerous, but they will carry the logs to keep the chipper crew busy. I trained the crew today; all 3 of them had experience with chipping and still had all their arms and legs.

In an hour we blew about 5 yards of chips into my dumper. He's promising me a full 11 yard dumper every day for the next 3 weeks. He already had 50 trees down which is maybe two loads. We'll see. It's only 10 miles from the farm which is another positive.

The closest I can come to that is the occasional run where the electric coop comes through, clearing brush under power lines. They have dumped a few loads on my two acre lot up the road (right off the highway) but usually they dump a few miles off at a centralized locale and I load and haul at my leisure.

Doesn't happen often enough, though. :grump:

I'm very green jealousy. My chip source seemed to all but dried up. Got a load today though. Unfortunately it isn't 11 yards. Maybe 3 at best.

I have a big pile of chips from wood we had cleared on our land a few weeks ago. It's beautiful. I can usually get a free load from tree crews in the area. I need to look for them again soon.

Looks like my new wood supplier, the animal sanctuary http://forestanimalrescue.org/, is working out well. Monday, 2 short loads, maybe 15 yards total. The problem was the chipper was blowing chips everywhere. We probably chipped 25 yards but only 15 stayed in the dumper. Then it occurred to me to use the dumper roll up cover tarp to serve as a back stop. You can see the tarp sticking up in the background of the photo. So now the chipper blows into the tarp and the chips fall into the dumper with very little leakage.

Yesterday a solenoid that activates the hydraulics went out, so no chips. It took all day to find the right part and get it to the farm. But today we got 3 full loads, 30+ yards, in about 4 total hours of chipping.

The college kids helping out are Forerunner's neighbors, from Illinois State U. Good kids, almost all of them are full of hustle and hard work. We had them bringing 16 ft logs, 8" diameter, out of the woods. They would put 4 to 6 kids on a 200 - 300 pound log and carry them to the chipper. The kids with less hustle would pull brush and tops to the chipper. My chipper never worked so hard, grinding almost non stop for the 1.25 hours needed to fill the dumper.

This is about a 3rd of the kids involved. They broke into 3 groups and the other groups were building pens and pulling fence for future additions to the sanctuary.

deke01 is a slave driver...lol....you cheated though...forerunner raised all his help....roflmao

There is a method to my madness. I'm assisting these kids with understanding the value of their education. At the end of the day I asked for a show of hands for who was ready to drop out of college and I would hire them as a full time chipper operator. I got lots of groans and moans, but no takers on the job offer.

Get em any way ya can. Forerunner can I have your crew next?;)

Good luck getting them all in one place at the same time. :indif:

What Northern kids wouldn't want to be in Florida in March?

Here's a fresh one for yuhz....

What are some of the average prices per ton in your various areas of the country, for quality, finished compost ?

Retail and wholesale......

I don't know about per ton, but the local landfill here composts all the city tree trimming and such as well as that sort of stuff that people bring in. They sell if for $10 a pickup load.

For being in a very conservative, backwoods redneck area, I can't believe how much composting goes on here. All the local ranchers use every bit of their winter feedlot waste on the summer pastures and hayfields. While in some ways that's awesome, it makes it a bit harder for people like me who would love to have all that stuff.

Now......don't be knockin' those backwoods redneck composters.

:indif:















:grin:




Yeah, municipal operations can sell cheap enough due to subsidizations and the fact that they pretty much have to get rid of the stuff, anyways.
Telling, though, how all them backwoodsers know the value and make full use of their own.

:thumb:

If you really need some raw materials to get a good pile up and cookin', come see me sometime.

Heehee, I'd love to come see your operation someday, but you're a fair bit away from Montana. And I hate roadtrips. All that sitting and sitting in the car when I'd rather be out doing and moving. :)

I do what I can here and have a much-smaller-than-you-but-bigger-than-some operation going. I have piles big enough to bury a goat, it's a start. I just have to move much more slowly than I would like and make excruciating choices each year about what/where gets to compost available. :bored:

This way I never get bored because I have nothing to do. Or something. :huh:

I get most of my compostable material pre mixed. Have to drag it 25 miles though. Right now I'm hauling compost that distance. Will be hauling for a couple weeks maybe a month. Between 8 and 12 yards a week.

Finished compost like what I get is $5 ad cu ft. I love the black gold I get for free. That makes what I get worth bout $350-$400 a trip. Not bad for 2.5 hours of my time and $10 for gas.

Costs them less than taking it to a land fill.

I found a dead sheep next to my pile today! I guess my neighbor figured it out. Now my microbes have a sheep to go with their sawdust.

Yer on the map, now.....

:thumb:

I've done zucchini and tomatoes in nearly pure (not all the way finished) manure compost with tremendous results. Just can't water them very often...

Thanks Forerunner for starting this thread. I finally managed to get through all 180 pages of it. I suck at making compost but at least now I know why my composting efforts suck so I can fix it.

I've now know:
1. My pile is way too small. I don't have near the mass of 2 pickup beds full. Maybe not even a half a pickup bed. Which means DH was right when he said the pile was too small. I hate it when that happens. :(

2. I don't have near enough nitrogen in the mix. No wonder my pile is just laying there saying, "you want me to do what?". Will need to find a source for more nitrogen. Haven't yet convinced DH to start communing with the pile so I'll have to practice my feminine wiles on him.

3. We have zero equipment so making the size pile with a garden fork and shovel is either a) going to kill me or b) get me in the best shape of my life. Not sure which yet.

So thanks for the great thread. I'm looking forward to creating a decent pile now that I have a clue what I'm doing.

What happens when you water them too often ?

Welcome. :)

Don't sweat the manual pile building (euphemistically, that is.......)
A great deal can be accomplished in a month, just working at it a half hour or even less each day.....a few five gallon buckets in a car trunk or pickup bed, at a time.
Pace yourself at the beginning.
The maniacal composter bug will bite soon enough (about the same morning you first see steam rising from the pile) and you'll be hauling, shoveling and pitchforking like there's no tomorrow.....

Root rot I think. I'm not a great gardener so I'd not know for sure but I think they basically drown as the stuff holds water too well.

Aha.

Well......mixed with soil, compost is said to be great for drainage, as well as moisture retention during dry spells.

I suspect the same is true of straight compost that is truly finished working and thoroughly mellowed.

Yeah, the key here is unfinished doesn't drain I believe... It does however hold enough water and goodies to grow killer tomatoes, or at least the few times I tried it.

Have some mold/fungus growing on top my compost this year. Its spotty/blotchy in I'd say 12/18 inch circles. Compost is dry on outside until the inch of rain this morning. I'm sure it won't hurt anything. Just interesting. Just turned it under. My month old pile has already shrunk bout a foot.

my compost is on fire, is that ok?

Just asking about the quality of compost that's been burning some, there's no chance the fire could spread or catch on.

It's a pile about 40 feet long, 20 wide and 15 feet tall. It's smoldering a bit in the middle. Most of it is old hay I couldn't sell for water damage and moldy. It's got old compost mixed in too.

I'd put the fire out if I could, but whatever burns will just be straight ash, which is good for acid soils and raises your potassium level.

Needs lots of water. Mine is currently drowning from the rain. Got to turn it over some. Dang that's lots of forking. But its easy forking cause its all down hill.

Just cleaned out the winter bedding from my neighbour's chicken coop. I get to keep it for compost. His girls waste a lot of feed the way they are set up. I got wondering what effect that might have on the pile and on the finished product. I just put it all in a low spot to rot down and make the basis for a small garden in the future. I will likely toss on some other manure and used bedding.

Have you had any luck with composting round bales of hay? I have 36 4x5s left over from the first cutting from last year and noting to feed it to... this past winter I took two and buried them under 4-5' of wood chip compost from 4 12 yd loads of chips the summer before. they were thoroughly composted. But I was thinking the hay would be additional bacteria fodder.. this spring I uncovered them and still had 2 round bales... for the most part no composting happened.

I'm thinking now I need to rent a tub grinder from our local dealer... if it's used and doesn't have a down payment on it, it, can be rented.


my biggest issue is being 25 miles from town... t's hard to get anyone to haul anything out to me...

the City of Fayetteville charges 20$ per 4yd scoop for they're compost... they do it right monitoring temps ect.... they got rid of the guy that would just load you for 20$... durn..

none of the other municipality's near here really have a commercial program..

We have a two phase need.... mulch for moisture retention and grass reduction around the plants.....
This has me thinking green manureing... planting/drilling cover crops in the aisles between the berries of Sudan cold grazer rye and clover and mowing them with a side discharge mower onto my berry rows....this would work as mulch and as a soil builder over time.... if I fertilized the cover crop well I could get several tons of it on the rows in this manner... mow bi weekly until the Sudan says quit...

have you had experience with this?

Bob, I'm going out on a limb here to answer your question. If your chips are already composted, there probably isn't enough nitrogen left to work on the "browns" in your hay. We usually have 1-2 round bales left at the end of the season so I ask the neighbor who puts up the hay on shares to place them near the garden or where I want a new growing space when he puts the new hay in the barn. I don't have the equipment or physical strength to actually compost them by mixing with other ingredients even on that scale rather than your many bales. However, I do throw fresh manure on top of the bales--I have him place them flat side down so I can unroll the layers to spread as mulch--and keep them watered if there isn't adequate rainfall . That seems to encourage low temp composting from the top down although I have come upon sections that are steaming when I spread the mulch. I've never had a problem introducing weed seeds from the bales I handle like this but do when I spread the cleanout from the hay feeders which tells me the weed seeds are there. I usually leave those bales a year or two before I put them on the garden.

I don't have experience with Sudan but I mow in such a way that the clippings are thrown along but not onto the bases of the fruit trees and berries and so far so good. Our yard out near the berries has a lot of red clover that makes a terrific mulch/compost layer.

All that hay should do wonders for your water retention. After all the rain of recent days, I've been spreading an old bale this afternoon and it feels like I'm walking on a sponge.