How to do better then ancient forest by general hydroponics

I always thought piles were easier and cheaperXD

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Well they might be yes, but i like cool gadgets and i gotta have my toys! LOL

This is the only hobby i got right now, i have to re-new my diving license to be able to dive again, and with jiu jitsu i got into an injury in my lower abdomen, so i gotta take it easy nowā€¦ YouĀ“ll see when your my age brotherā€¦

What usually takes my team mates to recover from in 15 minutes takes me 15 daysā€¦ LOL

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Whaaat no way bro. I do yoga and exercise everyday. Im sure youre not 80 are you? Im actualy not surešŸ˜‚ hahahahaā¤

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My problem was that i did a lot of drugs and stupid things when i was your age, i didnĀ“t start training till a few years ago and it is a lot harderā€¦ I should have started b4ā€¦

I was training really hard with this one guy and i got my abs ripped in half, with his knee on top of me, and wellā€¦ I gotta recover manā€¦ itĀ“s an abdominal separation of the muscle tissue and hurts a lotā€¦

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I just a little concern about the volume @MadScientist if your going to do hot composting itā€™s going to need to heat up to about 150 degrees anything smaller than a cubic yard just isnā€™t going to do the trick!

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Iā€™ve got a strikingly similar tumblerā€¦ itā€™s okay. If youā€™ve got a nice, sunny place to put that, you should be able to cook up some compost in 6 months or so.

I donā€™t have a nice sunny spot, maybe thatā€™s why Iā€™m not a huge fan :grin: I mostly use it to make leaf mold at this point. Worm bin all the way for my babies, theyā€™re industrious little nightmare monsters.

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i would like one just for mixing my soils up !

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I thought about that too, now since it seems i will be doing soil for a few runsā€¦ I wanna do DWC too eventually!

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Excellent idea. The soil I have cooking is in a big olā€™ trashcan, and mixing it is not my favorite chore.

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I will use one compartment to mix soil and the other one to cook compost!

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Is one side big enough? Like someone said compost needs to be atleast 3x3ft so it heats up properly and stays heated up for a while to kill pathogens and unwanted seeds.

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interesting dialogue! You have to keep an open mind on these mega-corporations. I like to diss Home Depot all the time, for wiping out Americaā€™s family-owned local hardware stores.

Yet when Iā€™m forced to visit Home Depot I realize a lot of the employees are really good people, desperate for a job. They canā€™t help it that Home Depot are elitist assholes that fire paraplegic employees for using medical cannabis.

I go back to my comment about carbon footprint. Donā€™t buy a heavy bag of compost thatā€™s been shipped thousands of miles! Makes no sense. Gardening is a HUGE hobby around the world, just do some networking. I went to a local garden club plant sale this spring, someone told me that the next town over is giving away free compost because they have too much. You pull your vehicle in and they fill up as many bins and containers that you have for FREE.

This is compost from yard waste and clippings thatā€™s been sitting there in massive piles for years, being turned with bulldozers, outstanding quality! Now how much sense does it make to pay $30 for someone to truck in 1.5 cf of compost from across the continent?

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My thoughts exactly but be cautious about composting sites that do there own mixing , moisture, heat, aeration all all important when it comes to great compost .If there stuff goes anerobic you just as well leave it there! There could be bad stuff that finds its way back into the compost Itā€™s best to do it your self!

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now that I think about it, you might be getting some pesticides in the municipal compost from people using it on their lawns. But I think itā€™s mostly leaf waste and cleared bushes & weeds, trees, etc. Grass clippings are smaller in volume.

Around here, we get free leaf litter every October. All you have to do is rake the leaves into a pile and nature will do the rest.

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Every fall i post online ā€œlooking for bags of leavesā€ ill get sooooo many phone calls for atleast a month.

Community compost isnt usualy taken care if and will cause more problems then good. A better idea is to collect leafmold from forest floors.

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Not to mention possible herbicide! Which would do a whole lot of damage also!

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and fungicides. my soil would not like that at all!!

I have a tumbler similar to this. IMO it doesnā€™t have enough airflow to compost properly with it either turning anaerobic or becoming water logged.
I do however use it with great success for cooking my peat based soil mixes.

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My leaf mold pile consists on a 2:1 shredded leafs/grass clippings. My grass clippings are basically praire grass refuse. Itā€™s been baking in a 150gallon fabric pot for three months so far. Iā€™ll have to post a pic later the ones on my phone need to be resized I guess.

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Hereā€™s my leaf mold pile. Itā€™s still really nice outside so itā€™s uncovered. I will be covering it in landscape fabric before it frosts.

As you dig down slightly you can see how it has a nice milk chocolate bar brown look. The whiteness is massive fungal growth breaking down the high lignum material. It was boosted about two weeks ago with a container of oat meal and some corn starch that went bad. Itā€™s smells amazing, like spring turkey season lol.


Hereā€™s my tumbler composter and itā€™s current contents. The mix in there is pro-mix (8x1cuft bags) mixed to close to 35% crushed oyster shells/pelletized gypsum as aeration. I also tossed in some alfalfa meal and kelp meal with about a gallon of leaf compost from the above pile. This mix is a light nutrient soil for seedlings and clones.


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