Today I made considerable progress in composting. I made my second day in collecting food waste at SLC for the summer months. Today Chris, the manager of Avi Fresh at Sarah Lawrence College forgot to get my food waste and seeing I would be gone for a week, I had to take matters into my own hands. I got the food waste. I ate icecream with some chemistry interns- that is liquid nitrogen ice cream!! Really cool!
Anyway, I decided to move more of the day-to day composting work to Warren Green house. I'm doing this for a few reasons. First, they have a rainwater collection system to clean out my buckets when I am done collecting food waste and for me to soak my paper to make it easier to shred. Secondly, when I form my composting club, I want to recruit volunteers to help compost food waste, and actually, to make this a business, I would like to figure out a means of paying people to take the time to compost. For now though it will suffice to just get people interested in the idea of composting all of the college's food waste, and there is no better way than to just bring all the fun over to Warren Green. Third, Bates Dining Hall is close to Warren Green. Finally, it will be easy for me to pick up the bucket and just take it to the Board of Trustee's house. Actually I can also arrange compost tours and visits for anyone interested. I will have regular tours for anyone interested in learning more about the composting facility. It will be a weekly tour.
I next found my food pulverizing tool. I learned about this from Compost for Brooklyn and their small-scale composting facility in Brooklyn. It's a really cool place!! I definitely recommend paying a visit to this small, homey place. This tool basically allows me to cut up my food waste to a fine pulp, which then can be mixed with shreds of paper to allow food waste to break down faster. Tearing paper still takes forever. This is sad. I really wish there would be a way to get the wood shop in the theatre department to stop using wood with lots of harmful chemicals. This would make their waste sawdust usable with my food waste. For now, I'll just have to make do with paper waste and taking the extra time to shred that up. I am looking into the purchase of an easy-to use paper shredder. It would make shredding paper much easier, make the paper smaller, and therefore, allow more composting to occur faster. I just want to be able to dump bag loads of paper into the shredder and have shreds of paper come out the other end in a matter of seconds. We may be looking at a couple thousand dollar investment, however, we would be reducing waste, and we would be making a high-quality worm compost that could sell for a lot of money. Once I know the machine I want, I will put all my will into finding the money to get the machine and to put it to maximum use.
I'm testing my plants with compost tea and without compost tea to see which ones grow faster. For now, seeing the water coming out is not smelly, I'm not going to pump any air into it. See the link here for a definition of Compost Tea.
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