John Horsfield (our resident expert), Trish and I held a Composting Moot by the village pump this morning. There was only one item on the agenda:
What to do about rainwater getting into our compost?
John has a different perspective on composting: he (and many others around here, including the Cornerstone), run open boxes and don’t care how much water gets in, it just filters down and out through holes in the boxes (OK, so there is a bit of nutrient loss, but it can be recovered in various ways).
John also reported that bins at St Peter’s Church, which are similar to ours and are exposed to the same weather, are composting well and do not appear to be water logged like ours. This is worth knowing, though we do not know the explanation – John thinks perhaps the feed composition is different.
Our problem is that we need to produce dry, fragrant compost that can be bagged and delivered – alas by car – to users, without dragging any mud and bad smells around with it…..and unfortunately we do not produce dry compost.
We thought of shutting up and stopping collection over the winter but in the end decided on a different course of action:
At the moment box 1 is almost full, boxes 2 and 3 are about 1/3rd full of wet compost and box 4 is about 1/3rd full of relatively dry (almost baggable) compost.
We are going to ‘turn’ box 3, then transfer the contents of 2 to 3 and bag the contents of 4 – that will give us two empty boxes that should see us through to the end of the year.
After that, we’ll have to think again
… and Merry Christmas.
Till then, thank you all for all the good work,
from all of us.