Basic Compost Workshop

Sorry I haven't posted anything in such a long time, but I have been very busy preparing the house and garden for the upcoming Bay-Friendly Garden Tour and for my Basic Compost Workshop that I conducted at the house on Saturday, April 12th.

All Master Composters are required to do some kind of outreach project to teach at least 10 people how to compost. I decided to do a workshop on Basic Composting (as opposed to Worm Composting), and I invited friends and family.

I present the workshop. (If you look closely, you can see that my eyes are closed. I was like that the whole way through.)

It was s lot more work getting this workshop ready than I would have expected. I wanted to do a hands-on workshop in which we actually build a pile, so I needed to empty my own full-to-the-top compost bin. In preparation, I sifted the whole cubic yard of compost twice, so that I could show the participants finished compost (material that passes through the 1/4-inch screen), unfinished compost that could be used for mulch (material that passes through the 1/2-inch screen but gets caught in the 1/4-inch screen), and bulky unfinished compost that needs to go back into the pile (material that gets caught in the 1/2-inch screen). That's a lot of sifting.

I point out some of the sifted material.

I also wanted to have enough ingredients ready so that the participants could build a whole cubic yard pile. So, for "browns," I gathered about 20 gallons of leaves and dry brown material from around the yard. And for "greens," I ran about another 20 gallons of moist green material from the yard through my shredder. I already had the 15 gallons of bulky unfinished compost I had sifted out that needed to go back into the new pile, and about 15 gallons of the finer mulch-like material that I could put back in. I also wanted some more exotic materials to show, so I gathered some straw from a feed store, got about 10 pounds of Starbucks coffee grounds, arranged for a gallon of rabbit poop, bought a bag of chicken poop, and saved up about 2-3 gallons of kitchen vegetable scraps. That's a lot of materials.

I prepared samples of amended and unamended soil from the yard, samples of compost from my system and from different commercial sources, and samples of my own mulch and commercial mulch. That's a lot of samples.

Some of us smell the various soil samples while family members appear to mock us for sticking our noses in the compost. It actually smells really good!

The presentation itself took a long time to prepare. I think I actually covered a lot more than what is required for the Master Composter outreach project, but I've seen a few of the really good workshops that the paid employees of the Stopwaste.org organization present to the public, and I wanted to do one that was at least as thorough as those are. I adapted one of their outlines, and I made my own visual aids. It took a few days to put the whole talk together and it runs about 2 hours long. That's a lot of talking.

I think it worked out pretty well. With questions and delays, the presentation went a bit longer than I expected, but people seemed to enjoy most of it, especially the hands-on parts. They all asked a lot of good questions, and I think they all learned something. I had a lot of fun with it. Because it was all friends and family, and we were having it here at the house, we had a barbeque afterwards, which is always a good time.

I demostrate construction of the Biostack composter.

One of the participants adds material to the pile while I appear to kick him in the behind.

One of the participants adds water to the pile.

I add a load of rabbit poop to the pile.

The compost pile we built is doing well. It has heated up nicely and is really starting to cook. I'm sending out e-mail notices to the participants so they can see how their excellent pile is doing. And I will now be welcoming a guest author to this blog --- the pile will be posting periodic diary entries.