One of the 101 goals I have is to make compost. I like feeling like I am taking part in the circle of life when I work to keep my chickens happy and healthy, when I take care of what I eat. (Eggs) So dumping empty egg shells in trash headed for a static landfill is a small scale travesty. The chickens eat lots of bugs and plants from our land, I want to put back into our land.
I have tried to make compost in a black 55 gallon trash can. I did not have success. Maybe it was too dry. I had holes on the top, sides, and bottom for air, drainage, and rain to enter, but it just kind of sat there. Egg shells, grass clippings, coffee grounds, hay. This time around, I’d like to compost on a bigger scale with bulk ingredients. My kitchen scraps (plant based only) and egg shells will be only a small percentage.
For something to compost well, it has to have a combination of dry ingredients (like hay, leaves, and already rotted manure) and hot, or green ingredients (like fresh manure, green grass clippings, and coffee grounds.) (There are books and web sited dedicated to composting!) I’m short on both dry and hot ingredients. How can I get bulk ingredients cheap? I read that hops, leftover from beer making, make good compost. And I remembered a tour we took of Dillworth Coffee, our guide mentioned that they give away the chaff to gardeners to compost, as well as burlap bags. So I emailed our local coffee roasters, Dillworth Coffee and two local breweris: NoDa Brewing and Olde Mecklenburg Brewery. NoDaBrewing.com got back to me right away! They have a program in place to share their used hops/grain. We are emailing back and forth to set something up. They usually share in batches of 5 gallon buckets, and I am wondering if I can get a pick up load full. I don’t really know how much they produce. We’ll see! My neighbor, who raises horses, offered a truck load of manure. (Isn’t that nice of him!) And I am getting a load of wood chips from a tree cutting company. With a mixture of these three things, I think I should end up with compost in 9-12 months. We also have asked our local Starbucks if they share their used grounds. One store bundles it and puts it in a special can with a special compost sticker. Another Starbucks store said to let them know when I wanted some, they would save them for me, and sent me out with a very heavy bag full of what they had on hand! Free is good!
Making the compost bins won’t be very complicated. I have twelve pallets to make three different bins. The plan might be complicated! In the first bin, I will dump kitchen scraps and a shovel full from each pile (wood chips, manure, hops). And continue until the bin is full. This might take a couple of months. When it’s full I’ll transfer the contents to the second bin, thereby aerating and mixing it. Then go back to filling the first bin a shovel full at a time. When the first bin is full again, I’ll empty the contents of the second bin and into the empty third bin. With the second bin now empty I’ll move into it the stuff from the first bin. Once all three bins are full, the third bin, with the oldest stuff in it, should be compost. The compost gets distributed around the garden, the bin swap happens again, and I start filling up that first bin again.