Hi, I’m Laurie Murphy, I’m a co-project leader here at the compost workshop center at Fair Oaks Horticulture Center and we finished up our first batch of compost. I’ve got some really nice compost down at the ten bins that we tried. This was the final project and this was not shredded when we started, it was just garden clippings but we do have a lot of the sticks and twigs that didn’t compost fully. So the larger sticks and twigs, we actually added to the pile for our next. This is our, where we were gathering for our second compos batch which was just started. So we fill the nine bins with the shredded material and it should compost quite a bit quicker. So now, we’re about a week into it and we’re starting to take the temperatures, the temperatures rose up to like, hundred and sixty degrees the first couple of days. We’ve actually turned them once. We’ve tumbled the tumblers every time we come out here about every other day, when we take the temperatures. So that’s what we’re going to do today is turn them and take the temperatures.
Hi again, I’m Nikolai Laqualia. I’m a University of California Cooperative Extension Master Gardener in Sacramento County here. We’re back here again at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center at our Compost Research and Workshop area. Laurie Murphy, my co-coordinator here is turning one of the bins. Now you can see the steam coming out of it. Its, its pretty hot in there, we have a , we reached a hundred and sixty four degrees within one day, after filling the bins this time, they’ve already talked about that we’ve shredded the materials this time and the mixture and percentages of green to brown that we’ve used and some of the results we’ve got on our first trial. In the future, what we’re going to be looking at is, how would these work for different types of uses? Let’s say if someone was older or just didn’t have the strength to use one of these larger bins which could hold up to a ton of wet materials when you first fill them and even when you.
Even if you make it easy to turn them by lifting the bin off as we talked about in the last segment and just move the material back in; you’re still having to lift that amount of material. There’s a lot of people, a couple of our people involved here would never be able to do that. So we’re going to be assessing each one of them, using a criteria of, how can, how can this be used by different types of people. Another part of our next set of trials will be including, vermin composting or worm composting. We’re going to take a look at different types of containers for that and where to keep the out here, how often they would need to be filled and the results from that two. Research shows that as compost is to regular soil, as far as adding nutrients and available nutrients to the plants that they can actually take up. Worm compost is to compost the same way.
The materials, the nutrients, the calcium, things like that that are in the worm compost is immediately available to the plants. It’s kind of a myth that the plants take the nutrients from the soil, they really take it from the microbes next to the roots. And those microbes which are in the compost pile, being spread around and one of the things that we’re doing is adding the humus that’s in there and adding the other materials that’s in there as an amendment. But it’s the microorganisms that are doing the real work for us here and that are going to be adding then nutrients to the soil out here in the garden and we’ll take a walk over here in the garden and we’ll show you where some of the places we’ve used them.
This is our vegetable section of the Fir Oaks Horticulture Center. It’s about ten rows, few hundred square feet of vegetables. It’s in Winter Crop and Cover Crop right now. Down here you can take a look. This has got the compost mixed in that we had from our first trial. And you can see how nice the soil is. Little bit of history about the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, when we took possession of this section of the garden, a week before, the parks happened to mead the soil. On top here and they took all the top soil and put it down the hill down there underneath the parking lot and left us with really, just the substrata which was primarily just a hard clay oil that couldn’t even be dug into. And so you can see the richness of this soil that we’ve got up here now and part of that is going to be endue to the compost we add to it. We have some addition although we stored on the side and anybody in the garden that needs it has the, our blessings to come over and take some and just use it wherever they need.
There’s pure compost. You can see there is, it’s a real humus rich, it’s got a mixture of some of the larger, semi decomposed sticks and things in it. We’ve talked about this, it really adds to the soil to use that part of it in the soil as an amendment. It adds spaces for air, for water, the nutrients in the soil as well as in the compost need the same three things we need to live and that’s food, air and water. And so, having these extra pieces in here, most of the time will take the bigger ones out and just put them into mix compost while they’re kind of inoculate. But you can see. It’s just beautiful, beautiful compost, and you can do this too.