Tag: winter composting

 

This is a quick followup to post #1921, where I dumped some winter pond maintenance bacteria into one side of my tumbling composter, to see what would happen.  The question was whether or not that would keep my composter working in the cold of winter.

Now, one month later, the short answer is, not.  There is no detectable difference in the level of (un-decomposed) compost, between the treated and un-treated sides.

The upshot is that the only way I’m going to be able to keep that composter working throughout the winter is to heat it.  A little passive-solar-heated shed didn’t do the trick.  These cold-loving bacteria didn’t do the trick.  And having an electrically-heated outdoor composter is a total non-starter, for me.

At this point, I give up.  I just won’t compost kitchen scraps over the winter.

 

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.