Hi All, Let me start with a confession. I am mad about Compost. I love the stuff. Now let me introduce my favorite tool of De-composition: View attachment 1509 I got this baby from the store beside the Mt Tambourine community garden. If your ever up that way, i recommend dropping in. It's across the road and up a little bit from the beer/cheese place at the end of the main street (convenient!) It works great and was cheap as! Either $100 or $150. But my question is, what organic sustainable product can i use to stop or slow down the rust. A spray can of fish oil i was thinking? Thanks Brad
For what it's worth, I live at the coast and everything rusts. wouldn't surprise me if the vinyl and plastic start in any day now!! But it takes a really long time for rather thick surfaces to dissolve, so maybe just let it go. The inside is so full of bacteria there wouldn't be a way to protect it, I don't think. I have a cast iron wood stove that I use vegetable oil on, that's about as cheap as it gets.
I would be very dubious about where fish oil comes from. Molasses is a good rust converter and its not bad for your garden microbiology either
Better still - learn to make free form piles. Nothing rusts, you can put them wherever you want and make them an size or shape that you want.
You could convert to the purple pear prototype https://forums.permaculturenews.org/group.php?discussionid=113&do=discuss
Thanks for the replies. I might give the molasses a go or vegetable oil. Anyone used anything else or have any other advice?
I actually like the rust in my compost. I on occasion add rusty nails or wire I find for the simple addition of micro nutrients to the compost.
If you use an organic sustainable product, it will be quickly absorbed by the microbes in the compost, which will be great for the compost, but it will not be very effective at stopping the corrosion. The only way to actually stop the corrosion is to empty the drum, clean and dry it thoroughly, remove the red iron oxide (hematite) using acid with a passivating compound, paint it with primer, and paint it with an industrial strength coating designed to hold up well under the extremely corrosive conditions of a wet compost pile. Personally, I wouldn't worry about the rust. It will take quite a long time for it to render the apparatus unusable. I prefer to make much bigger piles containing them in chicken wire or pallets, which allows better air flow into the pile. The larger size piles also are necessary for making hot compost, although cold compost is great stuff, too. It depends on how much compost you need. We need a lot now, and hopefully less later. But for now, we need to make hot compost because we can produce a lot more in a shorter period of time. It's important to place the larger, open piles in shady areas, so they don't dry out too fast.