It's go time! I am finally getting to composting. Under the guidance of the Soil Food Web mentor, I gathered all necessary materials. I used a 40 - 5 gallon bucket method to ensure I had proper ratios of each material needed.
I need approximately 60% carbon material, 30% green material (Nitrogen) and 10% High Nitrogen Material.
Easy enough right? Not if you do not have a truck but maybe if you live in a neighborhood full of the needed materials!
The 60% carbon material I used was wood chips, which I took care of gathering a couple of weeks ago! However diversity is key and that I lack in my materials. Each material was essential from a single source.
I was stressing about the green materials. I needed approximately 14 - Five gallon buckets filled and packed tight. Well, like some sort of miracle or answered prayer the city of Eugene came and cut ample amounts of grass in the city easements in which I was granted permission to gather the clippings from!
Before I gathered my High Nitrogen Material I needed to soak my materials over night in Five Gallon buckets to ensure the woodchips and grass had enough moisture for the Thermophilic compost pile I was making the next day. Yes, draining the excess water in the morning.
Did I mention my High Nitrogen source was going to be fresh horse manure? Well yeah it is. Luckily, I found a local horse manure source where the horses were not treated with deworming medications as that will impede microbial growth. My mentor told me to go a little heavy on the High Nitrogen materials so that meant I needed 7 gallons of manure....š Naturally, I wanted to wait till the last possible second to get this horse manure in the morning!
The horse manure made making this pile not as fun. The clumps of horse manure was extremally fibrous as these horse were grazers strictly from what I remember. Dried chicken manure might had been more Ideal but so for the Compost pile is looking really good as far as temperatures go. At 24 hours it is at 118 degrees F.
Making the pile took me 4 hours and just as much time to clean the white 5 gallon buckets! The pile stands at 4.5 feet tall thus far.
This was so exhausting. I even had to start cleaning buckets early this morning before the soils arrived... Yup fun times work, work work!
My buddy had his soils delivered directly to where we need the soils. So no wheel borrowing! He added 40 tons of loam soil and top dressed with 3 Cubic Yards of organic material that was amended from Lane Forest Products. We then added some clover seed and organic barley straw on top of the seed after watering them in.
This is a pretty interesting project from 
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