This month I had a leak in my bathroom that soaked through my floor board into the basement and rehydrated a pile of coconut coir. When coconut coir is exposed to water it expands from small compact bricks into a loose "soil". In other words, I went from a nice, neat stack of bricks to an 100 square foot garden bed. Thankfully, I have extra 5 gallon buckets on hand (perks of owning a compost business?) and was able to shovel it and carry it outside, where I'll make a temporary outdoor garden bed. Ayaya!
I met a really cool worm farmer at the Farmers Market from California. He runs a larger operation than mine.. I was surprised to hear he had excess worm castings! I have the opposite issue. Currently, I'm only producing a few gallons a week and I seem to sell out within a couple hours of the market each week. To be fair though, it sounds like he has a much larger operation. I hope I can scale to his size one day. He hot composts his inputs first before feeding it to his worms. This has a multitude of advantages. It kills weed seeds, fly larvae eggs, and can break down other chemical additives. If your hot compost pile gets hot enough, you can even compost meat, dairy, and bioplastics. However, I would need to be a bigger space in order to do this. He also showed me his hat with the logo he designed to represent compost. "Blue" for water, "brown" for carbonaceous materials, and "green" for nitrogen rich materials, the three essential elements to composting. He said Kanye West on a visit to his worm farm gave his approval. In the month of July, we composted 1,438 lbs. A huge jump--nearly double of what we composted last month! Plus, we broke the 1,000+ lbs. in a single month barrier. I now have enough food waste to be dangerous. Look out world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2024
Categories |