This seemed to me to be the best place to post this. I have an area in the woods where I dump the following:
Grass clippings
mulched leaves
greens / leaves
Used medium
And after a couple years it’s a nice black color with perlite flecks. I thought of adding a little sphagnum peat moss (25%) earthworm castings (25%) and compost from the pile in the woods (50%) and more fresh perlite which I add as I use the medium. Am I asking for pest problems bringing this inside?
Potential for pests is too high for my liking. The compost is probably good stuff, but I would be afraid of bugs.
2nd the potential for bugs. My solution is I use it in a compost tea instead.
yolo if out in nature left on its own to do its thing with minimal inputs mostly sun and rain on the pile it should be very close to neutral 50/50 good bugs to bad ones
I would use it if i pasteurized it in a barrel with a grate compost placed on grate inside just above water in the bottom with a heat source with a lid loosely on heated between 130degrees to 160degrees for about an hour.Uses steam to kill pathogens and mold spores leaves the beneficials alone.Bringing stuff inside untreated is asking for Trouble.
You can find a deciduous forest with older preferably 80-100 years or more…HEALTHY go to the main trunk…remove the leaf litter from the area say like a 5 gallon pail lid size space…go down into the soil there 12 inches at least and take 2-3 shovel fulls of that and innoculate your soils you plant into with it.
I’ve never tried this, but i would. Just cover the compost heap w/black plastic for a month or so in the hot sun. Bug free compost.
Pretty much the same principle my way is just a touch faster
Probably great for an outdoor garden.
Same deal w/the steam heating the bugs, microorganisms, etc. But my way is just a touch easier, no flames, containers or water involved. (Rebuttal not really needed here.) 
So it’s settled, if I use it I will just use it in the outdoor gardens which are shade loving gardens sadly, and I loved the idea from @BackyardBoogie420 to use it to make tea for the plants. Thanks ya’ll for the input.
Now i don’t wanna mess u up here, but if you pasteurize it i really believe it’d work in your tent. Keep an eye on it. But hell, indoor plus organic, ya can’t beat that.
If you pasteurize compost it really defeats the purpose. What makes compost so beneficial is the microbial life it contains.
it boils down to a cost/benefit analysis, because tho some microbes are sterilized off, the nute bennies are still there. and i am not sure what microbes you can add in to a DWC or a hydro grow, or even an indoor grow in organic soil, and i think that is what we’re trying to accomplish here.
Well yeah hydro you wouldn’t add compost at all. If you’re using liquid fertilizers there’s no real reason to use compost. If you are using slow release, natural inputs like bone meal, blood meal, alfalfa meal, etc then you want microbes to help make those things plant available. When growing organically, the idea is to feed the microbes that then feed your plant. Compost itself is generally relatively low in nutrients. It’s benefit would be in soil structure and addition of microbes. The addition of nutrients from compost is minimal and for structure thats not a big thing if using peatmoss and earthworm castings, so if there is no microbial benefit it is probably not worth adding. The earthworm castings would add microbes however so if it were me I’d stick to peat moss, castings, and then perlite or pumice for drainage.
i meant add beneficial microorganisms, not compost to a hydro, i know better than that, then your hydro’d turn into a muddy mess, LOL. is there such a thing as adding microbes to a hydro or other type DWC grow? There’s a lot of debate about whether outdoors or indoors yields higher quality. I didn’t realize there isn’t a lot of nutrient in compost. Hey that’s why you’re growers and i’m just a smoker.
I stand corrected tho. I looked up a comparison of compost to fert and it compares something like 7 times weaker than a 10-10-10 fert. Thank you for correcting me after all these years of thinking wrong. I pretty much thot compost was comparable to fert!
Yeah A traditional compost is a pasteurization process and there are plenty of microbes left.if the pile does t get over 160 degrees there is plenty of life in it and pathogens are killed.Its recommended to keep it 130 anything past 160 is sterilizing
We have the ability to innoculate again, post-pasteurization
Oven technique for sterilized soil is a tried and proven way
However? It stinks to high-heaven
I frequently source forest litter and topsoil because it’s right outside. I do bring in fungus gnats and occasional other pests. I also presumably bring in beneficial fungus that other people pay for, and loads of soil mites. Overall though, I rarely have problems with pests. When I do, beneficial nematodes take care of them.
