Lucy Young for The Hub Foundation
This month YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) hosted an enthusiastic group of composters at an advanced composting workshop.
We got down and dirty, hands in buckets of ‘ingredients’ for a balanced compost, and our noses being used as finely balanced instruments to analyse the quality of finished compost.
As someone who had provided a sample of my finished compost, my heart pounded as I awaited the verdict on my bucket of my sifted, deep coloured, spongy, friable mix.
“A small amount of recalcitrant carbon, and a little dry,” was the result, “but otherwise lovely”.
I felt a swelling of pride, relief and curiosity, eager to improve my next batch. Other composters keenly awaited analysis of their own samples, as we hypothesised on the reasons for variations.
Over the years, many have hosted basic composting workshop to learn that with a little bit of knowledge, ‘organic’ matter will break down into something useable within the garden.
This workshop took our understanding to the next level and taught us that with the right ingredients we can supercharge our compost, and process organic ‘waste’; quickly!
One of our composters, Mikaela, is studying with the Soil Food Web Institute and literally brought compost to life for us.
We heard vivid descriptions of what she sees under the microscope in a healthy compost and I had the realisation that I now have millions of pets to care for: cyanobacteria, protozoa, fungi, nematodes, microarthropods and this is even before the earthworms get a look in!
The feeling of responsibility to the soil food web that supports all other life to thrive was palpable.
There are many reasons to compost, YIMBY is primarily concerned with removing (so-called) ‘waste’ from landfill and producing high-quality compost to repair our soils, suffering from decades of destruction and neglect.
Learning how to process large quantities of ‘organics’ at a backyard scale involves knowing what is needed to create a thriving compost heap, or in other words, a comfortable and safe place for our compost pets to breed in!
What we don’t want to breed is rodents! Compost and rats often live in the same sentence, this is another reason YIMBY uses ‘hot’ composting, (reaching consistent temperatures of 55 degrees plus) rats cannot live in these conditions. We also pay attention to compost bay design. Stay tuned for more information on this.
YIMBY is a project of The Hub Foundation and is supported by the Recycling Victoria Communities Fund, delivered by Sustainability Victoria on behalf of the Victorian Government.
