Composting Visit

Today I visited Added Value Community Farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York. There was really smart, informative guy there named David. Definitely volunteer and ask to visit if you'd like to learn more about composting.

     Located on an abandoned sea of pavement, I dismounted my bike onto a cool patch of shade to be greeted by two wonderful managers who then put me to work and told me David might come in today. Upon David's arrival, a small series of plastic composting bins, and rotating drums first caught my eye. Mainly for people in surrounding areas interested in bringing their food scraps to be composted, David kept a long range of neatly printed signs informing these amateur composters to add the equivalent amount of leaves to the equivalent amount of food waste they bring to be composted. Sitting directly left of these bins lied a series of three large 1/2 inch hardware cloth covered wooden frames filled with composting food waste easily soaring above 100 degrees fahrenheit-that is without having been turned in at least a week. A wall of these bins gets taken off, and, to turn it, an individual just simply shovels the composting material into the next neighboring twin frame. Taking a total of 3 weeks to decompose, this stuff makes perfect compost for worms who live in a home very familiar to us, the OSCR worm composting bin.
     When asked, David remarked that these composting bins were "a little fussy." That is to say, for some reason they worms tolerated a lot less turning than worms eating food waste in much smaller bins. My experience upholds his findings. He continues to remark that the OSCR bins rely on a very stratified set-up for worms to survive. Turning or digging in any way immediately kills the worms we so rely on for the composting process. In addition, the compost in the bins tended to heat up even after having been precomposted. In precomposting, lets say you have an apple, well, a normal edible apple would be ready to eat. In a precomposted apple, you can still recognize the apple; however, upon the slightest touch the apple crumbles into a gooey mass, signifying the significant progress bacteria have made in the composting process. Worms love this kind of compost, and make the richest, highest-quality compost available. Upon his lifting of the compost bin lid and seeing a bustling city of worms crawling on top of all the composting matter, I knew these worms were some very happy guys. From the bottom came finished highly prized worm castings. While leachate is a common occurrence in any composting process, David takes special care to minimize the amount of leachate from the composting process. "Unhealthy compost makes a lot of leachate, and compost leachate is toxic and needs to be treated. See those bales of hay under those rotating drums? Any small amount compost leachate made quickly gets absorbed and further composted."
     Those are revolutionary ideas for me. Perhaps now I might decide, why bother making a compost leachate tea at all? It may just be more work than it's worth, and it's better just to take compost leachate, soak it up with fiber, and compost it, and then make tea from FINISHED compost. It is a much higher-quality product anyway.
     David's long windrows are what allows composting to happen even in the dead of winter. Here, David mainly handles weeds. By making a much hotter composting process, weed seeds get killed, and, therefore render the compost much more useful for plant application. His sifters were an idea I never considered- just construct the tables large enough to fit a wheelbarrow or two or three under them, and then finished compost without any large pieces falls into wheelbarrows for ready plant use. Since hot compost (Compost that gets hotter than 130 degrees fahrenheit) needs a fresh supply of brown materials in order to get hot and to avoid smell problems, it is then easy to understand why he keeps three large circles of fence brimming with leaves in various stages of crumbling. David likes to let his leaves crumble because smaller leaves means easier composting.
    I then learned of several other interesting composting people to connect with and now... time to learn more about who they are.