You might reasonably think that a post featuring my rotting kitchen scraps is a new low for this blog …
… though I’d bet there are some in the Town of Vienna who might disagree. But that’s water over the dam.
In any case, you’d be wrong, because today I treated half that pile of rotting kitchen scraps with cold-water pond … eh … stuff. That converts this pile of rotting (or, more precisely, non-rotting) garbage from a mere oddball gardening obsession into an exciting citizen-scientist experiment.
Anyway, as promised in Post #1917, I leveled up the two compartments in my tumbling composter and added cold-water pond treatment to one side. This stuff:
The idea being that a big dose of psychrophilic (cold-loving) bacteria might jump-start my kitchen-scrap composting.
Composting activity has pretty much ground to a halt, due to the cold outdoor temperatures, despite my having built a little insulated solar shed for the tumbling composter.
Methods: After leveling up the two sides of the composter, I added about a third of the bottle to one side of the composter, in several small doses, tumbling the compost vigorously with each dose. And added a packet of something advertised as enzymes to break down cellulose (though that seems more than a bit far-fetched to me, for reasons I won’t go into). I’ll tumble it daily, maybe add another treatment in two weeks or so.
In a month, I’ll check to see whether or not the level of compost in the left (treatment) side has dropped materially below the level in the right (control) side.
This is my last-ditch effort to get my tumbling composter to continue working through the winter. This pond treatment cost $30, so I figure I ought to try to get my money’s worth. If the stuff doesn’t work for this use, at least I can affirmatively document that it doesn’t. Hence running this as a controlled experiment, instead of just dousing the whole batch of compost at once.
I’ll be surprised if it works. But that’s what experiments are for.
Results in a month.
