Composting

I think you need tougher worms. I raise worms throughout the winter. Starting with one bin, I'll have four or five by spring, if it's like last year, and my worms eat coffee grounds. A few days after I add some coffee grounds in a corner of the bin, the worms will be crawling over it. Even then, it's about balance. I certainly wouldn't feed them all of my coffee grounds (I wouldn't want to keep them up all night) but the rest of it does go into the outside compost piles. I even empty the grounds and the compostable paper from K-cups into my compost containers.

 

On the subject of balance, if you grew up on a farm that included horses or cows, you might be familiar with manure piles. Our manure pile was on one side of the barn, and it got pretty big. Although everyone knows that manure is great for compost, you could dig to the bottom of that manure pile and it was still manure - dried perhaps, but still manure. It didn't begin to compost into the soil until it was mixed with a bunch of other stuff, which would occur after dad spread it out in the fields.

 

Such are the downsides to being an Internet Expert, huh? I figured you (and your worms) had experience with this.

Seek and ye shall find...whatever opinion you choose.

 

Oh, I kind of do that, anyhow. When I created the planting areas along the sides of my yard and driveway, I first put down a few layers of newspaper and cardboard since the only thing I was planning on planting immediately were lingonberries, which are shallow-rooted. That discourages the weeds some. Plus, I bury compostables in the empty areas between plants, which kind of serves the same purpose.

However, I have shredders capable of shredding cardboard. As I have mentioned earlier in this thread, I use the boxes to avoid having to turn over my compost pile. Each box is filled with compostable materials, which includes shredded paper and cardboard, as well as kitchen waste, leaves, and so on, including air. Since the cardboard on these unshredded boxes composts at a slower rate than the shredded stuff, the material inside each of these boxes is composting, and because sealed boxes don't compress as tightly as they would if they were shredded, I don't have to turn over the pile. Every box is an individual aerobic composting environment.

That's pretty much what I do. A layer of filled boxes and bags is covered by a layer of leaves and shredded paper, except that the leaves aren't available in the winter. I live in Maine, so I don't usually have to water anything down but, during the rare dry period, I do. In the winter, we have layers of snow and ice, which melts in the spring. I use large compost piles so that some composting continues throughout the winter.

I do that, too.

No, that I won't do. I've done that and it's a lot easier to remove the plastic tape beforehand. Before filling the boxes with compostables, I remove any plastic tape and replace it with paper-based tape. Plus, I seal the boxes, which reduces the mess that would otherwise be made by raccoons and other critters. They can get in if they really want to but I try not to add a lot of stuff that would overly tempt them, like meat. In a smaller compost pile, it might be easier to let the box compost around the tape, and pull it out later. In a large pile, the tape blocks the composted material from sinking to the bottom where it can be harvested.

 

Shredded paper and cardboard, strips of paper, paper towels, coffee grounds, food scraps, etc. When available, I add a layer of leaves to the boxes before sealing them.

 

Actually, I use most of it to build up the soil level in my yard. The town that I live in was created by a paper mill, which is no longer in operation. The part of town that I live in, the original part of town, was built on a base of coal ash, which is a waste product from the paper mill operations. They filled in a swampy area with coal ash, added a few inches of soil, and built houses. So, anything that I plant has to be in above-ground planters because when I dig down in my yard a few inches, I hit coal ash, which is more like rocks than ashes. Trees that will grow here have to be either species that can root horizontally or whose roots are tough enough to work their way into the coal ash. For example, I have choke cherry trees along one side of my house. The young ones do well and produce cherries, but once the tree gets large, it falls over. Birch trees do well, but they will extend their roots a long distance horizontally.

I have been here for more than twenty years now and have managed to build the soil up some. Sometimes I'll buy different types of soil when it comes on sale in late summer. Our town maintains a compost pile that produces very good compost, and it's free to residents. While I still had a pickup truck, I hauled a lot of compost here from the town's site, but it seemed kind of crazy for me to be hauling compostable materials to the transfer station while hauling compost back here, so I produce my own compost and reduce the number of trips that I have to make to the transfer site.

I also raise composting worms through the winter so that my compost can get a good start in the spring. Of course, the ones that I have out there don't die off during the winter, but I add to it.

With a reduced need for the compost, what you have looks perfect to me.

 

No, I had no idea. But then, we only paid $14,500 for the house, which was a 3-unit apartment building at the time. We have municipal water but we don't drink it, except to make coffee with it sometimes.