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Successful Manure & Waste Management
Lumpy and Bumpy
September 25th, 2008 by peter
A recent comment from one of our Micro-Bin Composters: “After 30 days, my compost is still ‘Lumpy and Bumpy’. I guess that I was expecting it to look more like a bagged potting soil mix. Am I doing something wrong?”
My Response:
As I understand it from several of our veterinarian clients, a horse’s digestive system is only 17% to 20% efficient. Consequently, much of the hay passes through the gut and the manure has a very high cellulose content. Cellulose is resilient to biologic decomposition and therefore, even after composting, the manure balls will retain some of their structure resulting in a lumpy and bumpy compost. If you break into one of these lumps, you will see that it is dark throughout and is no longer manure. Often, it also has white specks throughout – these are Actinomycetes, a type of fungi that is working to break down the residual cellulose. This is also true of loose hay as well as straw used for bedding.
Bagged potting mix of every variety has been screened (and typically blended with other products), resulting in a uniform texture. This look and texture can be accomplished with your compost in one of four ways:
- If you use a pasture vacuum, the manure balls will be macerated as they are drawn past the impeller, thus resulting in a uniform texture going into the compost system. By providing a fine texture material at this point, your composting time will also decrease significantly. We are in conversation with Greystone Pasture Vacs adn considering a working relationship to offer discounts when both a Greystone Pasture Vac and an O2Compost Training Program are purchased.
- Following composting, you can screen the mix. I have built a 3-foot by 8-foot screen using 2″ x 4″s and hardware mesh, and it works quite well. Putting the screen on a ~30 degree slope, I toss some compost at the top end and then separate the fine material (”fines”) from the coarse material (”overs”) using a wide push broom. The broom is gentle on the hardware mesh and keeps the screen openings free of compost build-up. Note that drier compost is easier to screen.I place the screen overs (i.e., the lumps and bumps) around my landscaping plants (rhodendrons, azaleas and evergreens) - this is where the majority of the nutrients reside. I then use the fines as mulch layer between the plants as a weed barrier. This is somewhat labor intensive but it makes a great job for youngsters who want to make a few dollars. In fact, selling the screened compost (both fines and overs) in bags can yield a very nice income stream for teenagers. If this is of interest to you, please listen to the audio testimonial by Robert Garofalo.
- Some of our clients take their finished compost and run it through a garden-sized limb shredder. This, no doubt, is also somewhat labor intensive but it reduces all of the lumps and bumps into a uniform fine texture. Many of these clients are using the shredded compost back in the stall as bedding. You can also combine screening with shredding of the coarse materials to oprovie a superior potting media.
- The last way to reduce the lumps and bumps is the easiest, but it also takes the longest. Placing the finished compost in a holding pile on soil will encourage earthworms to find it and do the hard work for you. It helps to tarp the pile and it is important to keep the pile very wet, almost saturated. This process usually takes 6 to 12 months but, if you are not in a hurry, it will not only reduce the lumps and bumps to a minimum, it will also produce a batch of worm castings that have magical properties. Ohio State University has done a considerable amount of research on the benefits of using work castings in greenhouse applications - add 10% to any bagged product to provide optimum growing conditions. Castings can also be sold in small buckets and bags for top dollar.
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