any "expert composters" out there?

[Gardentree]

so along our quest to get as close to self-sufficient as possible, our goal is to make all of our own compost for the veggie beds. the current plan is to have (upon completion, some time down the road...) 27 raised beds, measuring 4'x20'. that's a lotta compost. we're looking around trying to figure out where we're going to get / cultivate all the organic material we'll need to be able to sprinkle a few inches per bed. so here's my question: does anyone out there dedicate a certain amount of their cultivated land purely for compost materials? if so, i'd love to hear your experiences, and perhaps share some numbers about yields.

one idea we had is to capitalize on a field that we mow regularly (i know, using lots of gasoline, not very self-sufficient...). i heard that you can use dried grass as the carbon, and wet / green grass as the nitrogen. if that's the case, what if we were to mow a couple of times without the bagger, and just let it dry out in place (thus fertilizing the lawn) before raking it up (so that it doesn't kill the lawn) and mixing it with the fresh grass we get from bagging it the next time. but then we started thinking about having to rake a 1/2 acre field... that seems waaaaaay more time intensive than other ways.

so what do some of you folks out there in sufficient-self land do?

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

Well, I just lay down all the barn cleanings (even the hot chicken stuff) and lay dirt and any other stuff laying around on top. Then plant.
It all comes out the same in the end, and its a lot less work for us.

 

[sunsaver]

I dont compost on a large scale, but i do use a chipper/shredder to grind up leaves and pinestraw. What i have on the ground below my forest garden canopy, is my mulch. It keeps me from having to weed hardly at all, so that stuff is off limits. I go rake up my nieghbors leaves and straw. They don't even charge me for taking nutrients away from their property to feed my garden! Leaf burning suckers!

I add green cuttings, pulled weeds, bolted lettuce, and all non-meat kitchen scrapes for the nitrogen part. Sugar or molasses and water is a good kick starter. Chicken litter mixed with chicken poo from my coop is also good at heating things up. I would expect fresh hay mixed with old hay wood work good. Just get the ratio right, about 2 dry to 1 green. I know that old hay spread about 6 inches thick over your long beds, will break down over the winter into a beautiful brown compost, already in position for spring planting. How easy is that!

 

[SKR8PN]

I have 10 raised beds(4x10) plus a 50 x 50 garden to cover with compost.

I have two compost piles.
For the first one, I use a Trac-Vac to vac up all my leaves, and my neighbors leaves in the fall, for free.
All that goes in compost pile #1 pile is leaves. I use my front end loader to turn it twice, once in the spring then again in the summer, then it gets used up in the late summer/early fall as top dressing.

Pile #2 consists of green grass clippings, small limbs and twigs,egg shells, kitchen scraps(no meat!) and any dirt/grass clumps that we have left over, plus any weeds. Basically anything green goes into this pile. It gets turned 2-3 times a summer and is used the following spring when we plant.

 

[patandchickens]

The cheapest and most land-efficient thing, BY FAR, is to find someone with livestock who would like regular Poo Removal.

Seriously.

Empty feedbags (which, coincidentally, people with livestock ALSO tend to have more of than they need ) are good for shovelling stuff into, except for semiliquid cow splats or that sort of thing. Then you can put them in the back of your car/truck on a tarp and get them home in a reasonably sanitary way. You may not be able to take a huge amount at one time if you only have a small car, but it adds up.

If you are short on homegrown carbonaceous material it is worth trying to find someone whose free manure comes already mixed-in with a SMALL amount of shavings or straw or waste-hay. You might think horse stables would be good for this, but most often when they clean stalls they are removing a HUGE amount of shavings in relation to the amount of manure, so unless you can offer to clean their paddocks/sheds for them (and then maybe add a *bit* from their bedding-rich manure pile), horse barns are not usually the most efficient source of compost.

If you know someone with sheep or goats who'd like their shed or night-paddock cleaned a bit, that would probably be ideal. (edited to add: any Canadian who wants to come clean my five sheeps' winter paddock, which is still 12-18" deep in happily-composting manure/straw, is MOOOOOORE than welcome to it -- occasionally I do wish I had a tractor... )

But, you know, make do with what you can get, even if it isn't ideal

As far as plant material for composting, unless you are hardcore super-mega-organic or very paranoid about tree diseases, I most highly recommend waiting until fall and then driving around scoring peoples' bags o' raked leaves from the curbside.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[~gd]

so along our quest to get as close to self-sufficient as possible, our goal is to make all of our own compost for the veggie beds. the current plan is to have (upon completion, some time down the road...) 27 raised beds, measuring 4'x20'. that's a lotta compost. we're looking around trying to figure out where we're going to get / cultivate all the organic material we'll need to be able to sprinkle a few inches per bed. so here's my question: does anyone out there dedicate a certain amount of their cultivated land purely for compost materials? if so, i'd love to hear your experiences, and perhaps share some numbers about yields.

one idea we had is to capitalize on a field that we mow regularly (i know, using lots of gasoline, not very self-sufficient...). i heard that you can use dried grass as the carbon, and wet / green grass as the nitrogen. if that's the case, what if we were to mow a couple of times without the bagger, and just let it dry out in place (thus fertilizing the lawn) before raking it up (so that it doesn't kill the lawn) and mixing it with the fresh grass we get from bagging it the next time. but then we started thinking about having to rake a 1/2 acre field... that seems waaaaaay more time intensive than other ways.

so what do some of you folks out there in sufficient-self land do?

What I used to do when I had a bagger mower was to mow strips acoss the field without the bagger, let it dry for a couple of days then mow the other way with the bagger. that way there was a mix of green and brown in each bag, dump the bags on the pile and turn as needed. BTW this field was my goose pasture and they left a lot of poo in nice green pellets that looked like I had a bunch of small dogs running there. My mower would pick them up so they were in the compost pile too. worked pretty well.

 

[valmom]

The cheapest and most land-efficient thing, BY FAR, is to find someone with livestock who would like regular Poo Removal.

If you are short on homegrown carbonaceous material it is worth trying to find someone whose free manure comes already mixed-in with a SMALL amount of shavings or straw or waste-hay. You might think horse stables would be good for this, but most often when they clean stalls they are removing a HUGE amount of
Pat

I have the opposite problem- not enough shavings/waste hay! My stalls basically act as run-ins- I don't bed them unless they have to be locked in overnight which hasn't happened now in 2 years. I have straight poop from the stalls and the mud paddock where they have their hay house. Every spring we scrape down the paddock- which forms, eventually, my garden dirt. The stall cleanings go in the manure pile in back of the barn which we turn monthly or so when it isn't frozen. It makes great dirt, eventually.

Oxygen is key to composting from what I have read- the more often the pile gets turned the better it cooks.

 

[patandchickens]

Val, I too don't use stalls, my horse manure pile consists entirely of shed cleanings which is probably 96% pure manure (just a wee bit of waste hay mixed in sometimes), but it composts rapidly and beautifully.

Perhaps it's b/c it's all wintertime stuff when the horses are eating *lots* of hay so their manure is noticeably more fibrous than what they produce in summertime?

But anyhow, my horse manure pile is lovely and 'finished' in 6-8 months with no turning at all. Well I mean obviously the outermost layer is just mummified road-apples but there's not much of that and I just put it on the bottom of the next year's pile.

JME,

Pat

 

[Wannabefree]

We just put all of our cleanings into a big ole pile and let it sit for several months and use it. Just poultry, goat, and rabbit muck, but it doesn't take long to have black gold

 

[Wifezilla]

I go rake up my nieghbors leaves and straw. They don't even charge me for taking nutrients away from their property to feed my garden! Leaf burning suckers!

Those dummies!