composting

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by tcd, Jan 30, 2009.

  1. tcd

    tcd Junior Member

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    Does anyone know if there is some type of hand crank compost grinder. It seems like if you took regular kitchen compost and ground it up into small pieces almost as small as coffee grounds it could decompose much faster, especially if you kept turning the compost. Any thoughts?
     
  2. gardenlen

    gardenlen Group for banned users

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    Re: composting

    the only thought i can add 'tcd',

    is we do all our composting that includes vermi-comosting right in the garden where the benefts are needed. all rottable kitchen scraps go that way on an almost daily regime, and they rot away within about a 2 week period, with the help of a very large worm population. the same happens with the spent vegetable plants composted under the hay right where they once grew, too easy hey?

    len
     
  3. Hamishmac

    Hamishmac Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    tcd,

    I suppose the answer to whether it is worthwhile or not is, "Well, it depends". It depends on the amount of outputs you have, the way you are converting them (worms/ ad hoc under mulch composting/ dedicated compost heap from saved scraps), how fast you need the output, and how much you can be bothered.

    In general, the smaller the size of each of the pieces, the greater total surface area on which your bacteria, worms or maggots can work, and the faster the conversion process.

    A few years back, my kitchen outputs were too great for my then small worm farm to handle. Unconverted food scraps would build up & get a bit stinky. I used to pile all the scraps in an electric blender with a bit of water and make a nice goo for the wormery. They could handle it better, but problem was that I had to use extra effort, electricity, water to wash out blender daily, and eventually the wormery got too wet & soggy & stinky again, so I was spending extra time shredding paper to soak up excess moisture.

    Solution was to get a bigger wormery (a bathtub), only give them what they could handle, only use what effort I was prepared to put in (chop roughly with a kitchen knife), and chuck the rest of the scraps elsewhere. Oh yeah, and stop force feeding them pineapple, onion, garlic and chilli scraps every day. Haven't looked back since.

    The principles would be the same for composting. Is your need to produce large amounts of compost quickly? Or just to have the garden absorb as much food waste as you produce daily, with the minimum of effort required. If the second, then gardenlen's method is the way to go.

    Even when chopping up stuff to make a proper compost heap, I don't tend to cut much smaller than 3-4cm.

    Hamish
     
  4. paradisi

    paradisi Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    you could add a tin shute to a regular gaden mulcher

    i have seen something similar on a victa with a hole cut in the cover plate - though that would be at best called very dangerous
     
  5. tcd

    tcd Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    Thanks for all the replies. They were very helpful. I guess I was thinking of ways of making surplus compost soil. I heard about some people in India who were turning compost into soil in about three weeks as way of producing extra income. They would constantly turn the compost and could make it usable soil in about three weeks. There seems to be a lot of compostable material that goes to waste in landfills simply because people don't have the means, time, or space to do the composting themselves so they just throw it away. A university team excavated a landfill and found petrified banana peels-even decomposable material doesn't decompose in a landfill. Obviously the easiest thing to do with a food scraps is feed it to your garden. For myself thats what I do. But how can businesses, restaurants, or people who live in apartments or places with little or no space deal with their kitchen scraps? If it could be somehow collected and quickly turned into comost it could greatly reduce the amount of landfill. A chipper/shredder uses gasoline, but something with a hand crank would only use human power. Just thoughts, I appreciate everybody's input,

    Thanks again
    Tom
     
  6. permasculptor

    permasculptor Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    bokashi bucket comes to mind- https://www.bokashi.com.au/
     
  7. Hamishmac

    Hamishmac Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    I saw a video on youtube on making papercrete. To blend the paper/water/cement mix the guys had mounted the bucket of a broken concrete mixer onto a trailer, and connected the drive shaft of the mixer to the axle of the trailer. That way, when they drove round collecting paper or picking up stuff, there was blending action going on in the trailer.

    Fancy driving round the city with a modified twin tub in the trailer?

    Still need fuel for the car, though putting it to several uses at the same time.

    Bike power?

    Hamish
     
  8. Phil Hansen

    Phil Hansen Junior Member

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    Re: composting

    Somehow I don't think a Bukashi bucket quite works on the scale required for restaurants who might produce between 1 - 2 cubic meters per week! Most landfills compost their green waste anyway and use the products on public gardens. Centralised, organised and useful.
    Phil
     

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