That's cool. Do you have opaque plastic sheeting (read: black garbage bags) over the whole enchilada to get the temperature even higher (helps get rid of some plant pathogens - ie., some bacterial/fungal spores, &c)?

Used to take me weeks and expensive bacterial additives to get the compost hot.

i, uh... never mind.

As someone who longs for a proper yard so I can start a compost heap, let me just say, yay for chickenshit!

Yay! I loves compost. Garbage in, soil out. But I run the oak leaves threw the mower and use them for mulch because they last so long.

isn't it really stinky?

Porp -- don't need the plastic. This is good old fashion "hot" composting, and the pile gets hot enough on its own to kill the bad bugs (and dandelion seeds, the fuckers).

LeeJay, get a worm bin!

Arse, the leaf vacuum I have chops the leaves up. I'd never use the oak leaves otherwise. It's a cork oak, and the leaves are pretty much like live oak leaves (i.e., they'd survive for millenia if left to break down on their own). If you can get them to break down, though, they make great compost. They're more acidic than other leaves, and that makes my clay soil happy.

Amberglow, it smells great -- like the forest floor. Compost only smells bad if you don't get the proportions right. Too much green stuff makes it smell like ammonia. And the chicken shit is last year's crop, so the smell's all gone from it.

Thank you all for indulging me.

Next month: A primer on compost tea.

um....yay for you?

it's hard to get really happy over hot shit, but for you!

I know what this means! That's awesome!

You know what else really makes the compost go nuts? Beer-making leftovers. Barley and hopps breeds the fattest, happiest earthworms I've ever seen.

The lees of the wine is great too pieisexactlythree.

Mmm, beer leftovers.

I have the starts of an enormous compost pile. It needs green stuff and some other goodies though, right now it is mostly dead junk, including quite a bit of bark from where I had firewood stacked for years.

weretable, give me your address and i'll send you chicken shit.

Yay for compost. At George's farm, the compost heap was started by his grandfather about 70 years ago and is still going strong.

weretable, give me your address and i'll send you chicken shit.

How can you turn down an offer like that?