Let’s Talk About Compost

Farmlife
Written By MaryJayne Zemer

Composting is a huge piece of our sustainability puzzle- it’s how we’re growing food without using chemical fertilizers, working towards a closed-loop system where nothing on the farm goes to waste, and creating a no-dig market garden that lets us build soil structure and fertility and preserve the mycelial network in our soil….

Since we spend so much time reading about, thinking about, and making compost we thought it might be helpful to gather up the tips, insights, and resources we’ve found most useful over the years in the hope that it speeds up your compost-researching journey.

OUTLINE (so you can scroll on down to whatever interests you most)

  • Composting Methods:

    • Lazy Composting

    • Hot Composting (standard methods + Berkeley Method and Aerated Static Compost Piles)

    • Composting with Chickens

    • Vermiculture

  • Composting Books & Podcasts

  • Compost Bin & Container Options

  • Where to Buy Compost in NEPA

 

Composting Methods:

Lazy Composting (is a thing, and it’s ok)

When you start researching composting, you’re mostly going to find content and resources created by people who are really into composting and therefore willing to spend more time and effort making it. But compost doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be turned or perfectly balanced. Leaves left where they fall will compost all on their own, as nature intended (yes, even without shredding). You don’t have to have special tools or fancy bins or know what your ratio of browns-to-greens is.

If you’re not particularly passionate about composting, but also don’t want food scraps and yard waste ending up in a landfill, and want to be able to fertilize your garden you might like what’s known as “lazy composting”. Googling this term will help you find resources that jive with the type of composting that’s likely to fit your needs and lifestyle. Here’s a video you might want to check out:

 

Hot Composting

We primarily utilize hot composting on the farm- it allows us to compost large volumes of waste quickly without odor or runoff, and allows us to compost a much wider range of ingredients- from animal manures to weeds, seafood shells, and animal bones. Hot composting helps us produce a finer textured compost that’s free from weeds, pathogens, and plant diseases relatively quickly.

You don’t HAVE to measure your temps when you’re hot composting, but we absolutely do. We use a basic REOTEMP backyard compost thermometer. It’s super reliable, the probe is 16 inches long, and the glass doesn’t fog up- even when it gets accidentally buried. 10 out of 10, would recommend (no one paid us to say this- we’re just a fan).

High level: getting your compost hot necessitates a balanced ratio of browns and greens, which is known as your Carbon to Nitrogen ratio (C:N for short). An ideal C:N ratio for compost is between 25:1 and 30:1. Some compost inputs have perfect C:N ratios all on their own, like shredded leaves, which means they can actively compost all by themselves without mess, odor, or issues- no additional ingredients required. Other compost inputs are higher in Carbon (like wood chips, animal bedding, cardboard, or egg cartons) or in Nitrogen (Coffee grounds, manure, veggie scraps). Adding a mix of ingredients that add up to a 25:1-ish ratio is how you build a balanced pile or bin.

The best interactive digital calculator we’ve found for helping balance C:N ratios is from The Urban Worm Company. The Urban Worm Co calculator lets you choose the unit of measurement that best fits your needs- be it ounces, pounds, gallons, or yards. It also has a nice variety of inputs listed, with the C:N ratios for each input listed to help you choose the next best fit, even if your exact input isn’t listed.

In the winter and spring we oftentimes add a layer of cardboard to the top of our compost bins to help retain heat- this allows moisture in while also retaining heat (hay is also really great for this, bonus points if a farm animal made a nitrogen-rich contribution to the hay prior to use). Coffee grounds are one of our secret ingredients for generating long-lasting heat- some nitrogen-rich ingredients act like flash paper, others (like coffee grounds) offer a nice long slow burn that help keep your pile hot even when it’s wicked cold out.

Here are a few of our fav videos on hot composting:

 
 
 
 
 

Berkeley Method

The Berkeley Method is a hyper specific batch compost method that produces a finished high-quality compost in 18 days. We’ve done it. It works. It’s also a lot of work. We’re not actively planning to do it again anytime soon, but it exists and it’s very cool. For this method you’ll need a very large volume (3 cubic ft or more) of compostable material with a balanced 25:1 C:N ratio (typically straw, animal manure, weeds and grass clippings, and wood chips). In addition to having a large volume of ingredients, you’ll also need a way to contain the pile which improves temps- A piece of horse fencing used to form a circular bin works well for this. You’ll need to turn and water this pile frequently, on a schedule.

Here’s a pdf guide to using this method: Hot Composting with the Berkeley Method.

This is a form of batch composting, where you’ll build a large-sized compost pile all in one go, as opposed to adding ingredients over the course of multiple weeks or months. We find Batch composts easy to do certain times of the year and impossible to do at others. We like to time batches for when we’re ready to do a full muck out on the chicken coop or run and also have: a full commercial batch of beer grains, a plethora of green garden waste, a bulk batch of spent mushroom blocks, leaves or grass clipping, bulk coffee grounds from our local coffee shop, and can procure a free truckload of horse manure.

 

Aerated Static Pile Composting

Aerated static piles use airflow to create large volume hot compost piles that don’t require turning, or require only minimal turning. It typically requires an electric blower and PVC pipes, and while it can be done at home it’s mostly used by certified organic farms and it can be done with or without a tractor. We’ve never made a static aerated pile- but we do think they’re pretty cool.

Note: The aeration stack that Conner from Neversink Farm used in the first hot composting video above is a really great cheat- but it’s totes not the same thing.

 
 

Composting with Chickens

Our chickens are a huge part of our compost system. We use woodchips as the primary carbon source in our chicken run, and supplement with shredded leaves and hay. As the chickens poop in the run and scratch and turn the wood chip, the run begins to compost out. We’ll add more woodchip by the truckload several times as it starts to disappear. When the run starts to look more like a chunky compost than a nice deep bed of woodchips, we’ll muck it out and compost it out as a batch compost with additional nitrogen-rich ingredients to make a nice fine finished compost.

A book we loved with cool info on this is The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery (we also totally LOVE Harvey Ussery’s design for in-ground worm bins, though we haven’t yet had the privilege of using it personally #aspirations).

Our chicken coop uses pelleted horse bedding that we’ve wet down to expand the pellets and we use a shifting shovel to shift the chicken manure from the bedded every day or every other day. With our flock of 50 layers, this gives us about 5gallons of sifted chicken manure every other day, which we add to our hot compost bin/pile. We do a total clean out of all the bedded several times times a year and this becomes the carbon source for a large batch compost.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Vermiculture

Composting with worms can be super simple and small scale, so it’s a great option if you don’t have much space.

We’ve vermicomposted in plastic totes for years and use red wrigglers as our composting worms (We’ve always purchased them from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm based in Spring Grove, PA).

In our experience, the smaller the worm farm the more challenging it is to manage- in particular we detest the small plastic tower setups, its way to easy for them to dry out, become too wet, develop fruit flies, or result in escaping worms. For growing in a tote, we recommend going with a minimum size of 18gallons.

If you’ve already got the basics down and you’re looking for really in-depth info on worm farms, we highly recommend The Worm Farmer’s Handbook by Rhonda Sherman. We had been searching for details on target C:N ratios for both pre-composted and raw vermiculture additions for years and found it all in Rhonda’s book. Her introduction on the electrical conductivity of compost based on ingredients and mineral composition triggered a fascinating vein of ongoing research for us that has captivated us over many a fireside cup of tea.

If you’re tempted by the idea of Continuous Flow Through (CFT) vermiculture, The Urban Worm Farm is based out of Plymouth Meeting, PA and makes a backyard scale system that is pretty neat (we haven’t tested it, but have heard good things about it). There are also lots of DIY systems to base a homemade design off of (video examples below). Commercial scale systems exist but are pricy, manufacturers include: Wormgear and Hiwassee Products.

Here are some vermiculture videos we found helpful:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Composting Books & Podcasts

Podcasts:

Our Top Composting-Related Books We’ve Read & Loved To Date:

 

Compost Bin & Container Options

We primarily compost in large piles and well as in a series of compost bays made from repurposed pallets. If you’re using pallets be sure they are heat treated so they don’t leach chemicals into your compost- you’ll be able to identify heat treated pallets by the “HT” printed on the side.

We haven’t tested a GeoBin out personally, but if you’re looking for a simple, affordable composter that isn’t an eye sore, we’ve heard great things about it and will probably eventually get one ourselves- this functions as a contained pile allowing you to build heat more easily and also provides a bit of protection to prevent pets and chickens turning your pile before its ready. You can also create your own simple contained pile setup with a piece of wire fencing held together in a circle with carabiners, bungee straps, or twisted wire.

We don’t use rotating composters ourselves, because they’re designed for smaller volume inputs (such as ordinary household food scraps rather than farm-scale inputs) and aren’t ideal for hot composting. However, they do provide the best protection from animals (including pets, raccoons, and rodents), are attractive and self-contained, and work great for backyard composting and lazy composting.

 

Where to Buy Compost in NEPA

Previously, we’ve had great luck with compost from Brown Hill Farms in Tunkhannock, PA as well as Lehman Nursery in Dallas, PA.

If you’re picking up compost, a pretty standard rate for purchased compost in our area is about $25 per half yard (which is a common scoop size). Standard sized 6ft pickup beds hold about a yard of compost, or roughly two scoops.

It’s worth noting that, while it’s cheap, we haven’t been impressed with compost made exclusively from horse manure + horse bedding as it tends to have a lot of weeds and our plants just haven’t thrived the way they do in a mushroom compost or a compost with more diverse inputs. Horse manure and horse bedding are however fantastic compost ingredients and we use them regularly. Be mindful of using compost from horses that have been recently been dewormed, as dewormer can kill of the native worms in and around your compost bin. We’ve found Facebook Marketplace to be a great way to find local horse stables or horse owners looking for an outlet for their manure.

MaryJayne Zemer
Previous

Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes
Next

Cooking A Whole Pumpkin