Yesterday I turned the compost for the first time. I left it a bit longer than 4 days because I couldn’t face digging any more!! Most of the middle pile of the three bays was built on the 1st July, and then topped up on the 4th July, so its been sat brewing for about two weeks. The one on the right was built up over the following week. I turned the middle pile to the empty bay on the left, and the right hand pile into the middle bay.
I’ve taken a photo of the middle pile before turning with the door open and you can see the layers roughly. Digging into the first pile there wasn’t a lot of bright green material, most of it has blackened with compost heat or it has been wilted grey brown. Always amazes me as well how citrus still looks almost edible after two weeks cooking in compost…
However this pile contained quite a lot of sawdust which is at the higher end of the carbon content scale, so most of it is still looking brand new. More green nitrogen material or manure needed ideally. I’ll let it carry on though without any interfering so we can see how it turns out.
Hopefully in the video you can see the steam coming out when I lift the fork in the middle of the pile. It was still cooking hot. I didn’t use very much manure in either of these piles, mainly fresh chicken poo, so the smell was bearable. Thankfully, because I had chopped everything up pretty small it was easy digging. I use a garden fork for most of the pile, and then scrape up the dregs with a flat blade shovel.
There is green on top of the left pile in the last photo because I was on autopilot and threw a bucket of mulcher/ shredder product in.
I’ll turn it again toward the end of this week and see how we look then.
