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Starting a compost area

wildlife, gardening, environment, Rural living, Pets and Vets
Breelander
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296794

Postby Breelander » April 2nd, 2020, 1:13 am

"If it is mainly grass cuttings, very little smell."

I would dispute that. The risk with grass cuttings is that it can compact and exclude air. It then undergoes anaerobic decomposition which can get get very smelly. Have you ever been near a silage pit on a farm?

Good composting requires oxygen so that aerobic decomposition takes place. If you mainly have grass cuttings, then mixing in some more woody material to keep the structure open will allow the air to flow. Turning the compost over regularly will also help. A well tended compost heap with good aerobic bacteria should smell like good freshly dug soil after a rain shower.

If your compost smells bad, this is an indication that something in the balance of your compost pile is off. The steps to composting are designed to help break down your organic material faster and, a side effect of this is, to stop compost from smelling bad...
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/compos ... ls-bad.htm

tjh290633
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296852

Postby tjh290633 » April 2nd, 2020, 9:08 am

From my experience, cutting the grass will usually fill the bin to the top. It will soon start to decompose and generate heat, compacting to a thin layer after a few days. Very thin sticks and stalks will help, but thicker ones are best put on a bonfire and the ash put on the compost.

Making silage is a different process altogether.

TJH

panamagold
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296858

Postby panamagold » April 2nd, 2020, 9:30 am

At the risk of Turnosol throwing a moody Here is Gardeners World analysis on different styles of compost systems.

Florabest still produce This one which Lidl retail. I have had one for 10 years now which I use in conjunction with other systems.

When we lived in London I also cultivated a worm box. A slow process but excellent material production in a smaller quantities than by regular composting. Great for house plants.

None of them honk.

bungeejumper
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296864

Postby bungeejumper » April 2nd, 2020, 9:43 am

panamagold wrote:When we lived in London I also cultivated a worm box. A slow process but excellent material production in a smaller quantities than by regular composting. Great for house plants.

None of them honk.

Interesting. When we had a worm box, it grew worms all right but it smelt appalling. A proper bought jobbie, not something I'd bodged together myself. And with the right 'starter compounds' and everything. Finally emptying it, at the end of its nine month tenure, was one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to do. And I've worked on a sewage farm! :?

I tip all our onion and leek waste onto our compost heap, but my wife insists that it won't produce any nourishment for the soil. (Like orange or lemon peel, I think.) Plenty of grass clippings are the way to go, but be aware that they can catch fire if they get really hot. We've had a couple of narrow escapes, and that's with an open heap!

BJ

ReformedCharacter
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296941

Postby ReformedCharacter » April 2nd, 2020, 11:56 am

Breelander wrote: Have you ever been near a silage pit on a farm?


I've worked on farms that made silage, worked on a silage clamp and fed large amounts of it to dairy cattle. Good silage, properly made, shouldn't smell bad, although one person's idea of bad may differ with another's. Of course other animal products nearby may well smell bad. Poorly made silage may smell bad.

Silage that ferments normally may smell slightly sweet, but typically has very little odor since the most prevalent volatile fatty acid is lactate, which is nearly odorless. A mild vinegar odor is another possibility for normal silage, because acetic acid is the second most common fermentation end-product, and it is quite volatile.


A modest but inoffensive smell of vinegar is my memory. Deep litter poultry houses OTOH can smell really bad.

https://hoards.com/article-26409-odor-a ... ilage.html

RC

bungeejumper
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Re: Starting a compost area

#296970

Postby bungeejumper » April 2nd, 2020, 12:54 pm

ReformedCharacter wrote:I've worked on farms that made silage, worked on a silage clamp and fed large amounts of it to dairy cattle. Good silage, properly made, shouldn't smell bad, although one person's idea of bad may differ with another's. Of course other animal products nearby may well smell bad. Poorly made silage may smell bad.

We live two hundred yards from an organic dairy farm, and the difference between silage and cow effluent has never been in question. Silage ought to smell sweet; cow effluent, also faintly sweet but with other "overtones" (mainly sour) that ought to be obvious to the nose.

But our house visitors, most of whom are city dwellers. seem genuinely unable to tell the difference between the two smells. If the farmer opens up the silage clamp covers it's "Aw, couldn't you have held that till you got to the toilet?" :| There's no point in arguing with them - it's just they they don't have any familiarity with the way the countryside works. (As, indeed, I don't have much familiarity with the modern nuances of city life.) Town mouse, country mouse. It's a good thing that we're all different. ;)

BJ

Nimrod103
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Re: Starting a compost area

#297624

Postby Nimrod103 » April 4th, 2020, 10:30 am

I have half a dozen of the black or green plastic Dalek like composters. They are neet and don't look unattractive, and I find they are very effective and do not smell. But as I mentioned before, solid masses of grass cutting do make a rather slimy mass, which excludes aerobic decomposition, and that is when the problems start.
I seem to recall reading that worms don't like onions, and too many will hinder their activity. Not sure if it is true or an old wives tale.

One thing that always puzzles me, is that most of these plastic composters have a flap at the bottom to open and dig out the finished compost as if it is some production line process. Advertisements show nice black crumbly earth type compost emerging from this access point. But when I open mine, all I see is a thick sticky gloop. It is still good compost, but I find the plastic bin needs to be lifted off, and the gloop shovelled out from the exposed heap. The drawback with these flaps is that they provide ingress for badgers in search of worms, which was a problem last year as they strew some of the contents around.

Mike4
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Re: Starting a compost area

#302334

Postby Mike4 » April 21st, 2020, 8:48 pm

Interesting thread, thank you everyone.

As someone who takes a cursory stab at gardening every 20 years or so, all I have learned so far is I'm not very good at it. The 20 year cycle is however just beginning again having recently acquired myself a house with a supposedly 'low maintenance' garden and a lot of spare time due to this rook flu' problem we have at the moment.

Anyway to the point. My garden contains a lot of ivy climbing all over stuff so I've been pulling large volumes of it down (surprisingly satisfying and therapeutic) now I don't really know what to do with it all. I have a wheely bin rammed tight full of it plus two dustbins and I've run out of things to put it in, and my local council don't collect it for the foreseeable. Fortunately someone told me NOT to heap it up on the pile of leaves in the ex-chicken run I call a compost heap, but what should I do with it? There is loads more of it still to come down/off/up. Just stuff it into bin liners is all I can think of. Any better suggestions much appreciated...

JohnB
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Re: Starting a compost area

#302344

Postby JohnB » April 21st, 2020, 9:56 pm

Ivy will compost in a big heap that gets hot enough, but you need to mix in green stuff if its mainly brown stems. You will need to add water in weather like this. Put it on bare soil so the microbes can move in.

kempiejon
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Re: Starting a compost area

#302346

Postby kempiejon » April 21st, 2020, 10:15 pm

I have a shredder, it's invaluable in turning large piles of stems and branches and assorted garden detritus into a manageable couple of sacks of mulch to dress my beds. It'll take anything from twigs up to about 1.5" and spits out little chips. A particular boom as the dump is closed round here and I would have had several car loads to deal with

Nimrod103
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Re: Starting a compost area

#302349

Postby Nimrod103 » April 21st, 2020, 10:54 pm

Burn it if you are allowed to. It will take a long time to rot down, and I suspect chopping it up is a bit like cutting the head off the Hydra, you will just get a lot of little plants in place of one.

Ivy really is the devil, because you may have removed it from walls etc, but the plants will just start creeping up again. You have to clear the soil at the base of the wall or tree as well.

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Ivy

#302385

Postby bungeejumper » April 22nd, 2020, 9:01 am

I might get flamed for this, but I'll chance it. :| If the ivy's coming from just a few big roots, cut them back to a three inch stump and then apply a stump killer like SBK - drilling deep holes in the stump to get it right down into the fibres, and mixing it fifty-fifty with paraffin for even deeper penetration. Works on our dry stone walls, which have been growing big deep-rooted ivy for the last 150 years. :)

Glyphosate (Roundup, boo hiss) also works well on normal ivy growth, but these days a lot of people are calling for the evil stuff to be banned, and TBH you don't need gly anyway if you've already ripped out all the top growth.

You have been well advised not to let ivy get near your compost heap! Bag it, bin it, or if possible, burn it. It'll be OK in your green bins because your local authority will (hopefully!) be using a high temperature anaerobic composting system, which you won't have.

BJ

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Re: Starting a compost area

#302452

Postby Nimrod103 » April 22nd, 2020, 11:38 am

Although ivy is difficult to control, if you have an old fence or something where the ivy can grow up without causing damage, it will flower, and these flowers provide valuable insect nectar late in the Autumn when there is not much else around. It also provides good nesting sites for small birds.

But it is very invasive and destructive

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Re: Starting a compost area

#302483

Postby ReformedCharacter » April 22nd, 2020, 1:05 pm

Nimrod103 wrote:Although ivy is difficult to control, if you have an old fence or something where the ivy can grow up without causing damage, it will flower, and these flowers provide valuable insect nectar late in the Autumn when there is not much else around. It also provides good nesting sites for small birds.

But it is very invasive and destructive

Quite true, although I wage a constant war against the stuff invading my garden it provides the honeybee with a very useful source of nectar and pollen at a time when there is little else available. My garden is also assailed by brambles but they're good for bees too and make good honey.

RC


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