Composting Hendrix..

 

When I last left off talking about the Resurrection Garden I'd been sharing about the terribly poor soil condition and all the hard work that went into clearing it of rubbish and non-organic debris. That same day after paying my day labours I stood in amongst the (kinda) freshly tilled soil and there was one thing was glaringly obvious; if I wanted this garden to become a thriving slice of paradise then it was going to need an influx of organic matter, and plenty of it!

At the time, we had 2 large compost bins on our community that were each built out of beautiful stone slabs that all up were about 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5m in size and were pretty much full of good composting materials. We have a couple of very large trees on the property that give off a never ending supply of dried brown leaves, also plenty of grass clippings, kitchen scraps, garden refuse, coffee grinds, eggshells, cardboard and the list goes on. It was monsoon and so the piles were getting a decent soak from time to time and to my mind they should have been plowing along nicely, turning all those rich nitrogen and carbon based goodies into a sweet smelling, rich black soil which would be 'so good you could eat it' (ala Peter Cundall). 

However it was not to be. They were Cold Compost piles and none of us on the community had the time to turn the piles to aerate them with any sort of regularity, and so they were progressively becoming more and more compacted and thus anaerobic; completely shutting down the decomposition process. Shoonkdedy bloom is my gardening buddy and it was to both our surprise that even though the compost bays had been filled for between 6-8 months, the deeper we dug down into those compost bays the less and less things had decomposed. This was a rather deflating discovery to make.

Knowing that it wouldn't be long till monsoon ended and that it would soon be the perfect time to plant all my crops, I wanted compost, lots of it, and I wanted it now! I began devouring any articles on speeding up the composting process that I could get my hands on (and during this time I began to realise that the Gardening Australia website/TV program essentially do the exact same story on compost every other month, just with a different host. I guess there really is only so much you can say about throwing kitchen scraps into a pile hey!). But in all my scouring of the web I did come across one very interesting article that was set to change everything, it was called 'Hot Compost; The Berkley Method.'

Little Feather helping Papa Bear gather leaves for the Berkley Pile

This article outlined the method of Hot Composting developed by the University of California, Berkley, which promised to naturally turn 1.5m³ of raw materials into a rich, highly fine, pathogen free compost in just 18 days. That's right, 18 days. Initially I was super skeptical to say the least, but as I read over the process a number of times it seemed to make a good deal of sense, so I figured why not invest some hope into it and give it a try.

I won't bore you with every step of the process in full detail (that can be done here), but the basic premise is that by getting the right sized pile, stacked in a specific way, comprised of a specific balance of high Carbon materials and high Nitrogen items, getting the right amount of moisture, then exchanging the outside of the pile for the inside (and vise versa) every 2nd day, you'll have created the perfect environment for the bacteria who are responsible for the composting process to pretty much go nuts, and 18 days later you'll be in compost heaven.

Day 1 (Still with about a foot or two of raw materials to be added)

I had desired to be really specific with the whole process and really test the '18 day' claim, but being married with a 2 year old, adapting to a new culture, learning a new language, having only a small window of opportunity to work in the afternoons when the heat isn't too intense... well, I'm guessing you get the point.

Day 4 (Fairly noticeable change already occuring)

Building the pile took around 4 hours (hauling everything around in 8L water buckets as we didn't have a wheelbarrow) and I was quite specific in following the details. Turning the pile turned out to be a much bigger task than first anticipated and all up would take roughly an hour and a quarter each time. In the first week I did great, turning the pile exactly as instructed, but in the subsequent weeks I could only managed to find time to turn the pile at least once every 4-5days and it didn't take long before I could no longer be bothered turning it the time consuming way by exchanging the inside for the out (and vise versa), and so the process was definitely thrown of track and clearly effected the outcome.

The process itself is quite remarkable though. The pile heats up so much that you are able to put pretty much anything in there and it will break down (including weeds with seeds, pathogens/diseased plants, roadkill, etc.) and I discovered on around day 8 that when a section of it falls on our foot you actually get burnt! I've since read all sorts of things that people do to utilize this naturally generated heat - my favourite being building your pile around a coiled pipe that is connected to your water system that you can feed water through in order to take a naturally heated hot water shower. I love this kinda stuff!

Week 4.5 (The final product)

When it reached the 18 day period it was clear that my Berkley pile was not the glorious mountain of humus I'd dreamed of, but there was no denying that those lil bacteria had found a great place to be getting it on as a tremendous amount of decomposition had taken place. I kept the pile going, turning it as often as I could and somewhere around the 4.5 week mark monsoon ended and it was time to put some seeds in the earth and so I began shoveling out the compost. As you can see in the above image, there's still a little ways to go before it would have been completely done, but to make this quality of compost in just 1 month.. Shabaaash! ("excellent" in Hindi)

So if you have the garden, the time and most importantly the desire, I would most definitely encourage you to give the Berkley Method a crack. It was a lot of hard work, but the benefits of this style of Hot composting Vs. Cold composting are obvious and numerous (apparently you can even Hot Compost your old cat!). And the change that adding this much organic matter to the soil made was instantly noticeable (you can see the difference in soil quality in the above image between whats on the shovel and whats beneath it!) and led to a far superior growing season. But I'll be saving more about that for next time!

* The title of this post 'Composting Hendrix' kinda gives away a bit how my brain works..
To this day I can't hear the word 'Berkley' without immediately associating it with this moment and this guy!