Pre-soaking for happy summer compost
Now that the weather is getting warmer, our compost piles can start to suffer from drying out too much.
Letting our compost piles dry out will force our compost microbes to go into a dormant mode, protecting themselves from the dry with an impervious layer and taking a break from their composting work. We don’t want this to happen.
Drying out is particularly a problem for open compost piles, or ones where the bay sides are very porous, but can afflict closed, Geddie-style plastic bins too.
The answer would seem to be simple, if our compost has dried out, ’just add water’, but if you’ve ever had a problem with dry compost, you’ll know this does not always work as a quick-fix remedy.
I’m sure you know the experience of standing with a hose and watering a dried-out garden bed or pot-plant and watching the water just shed off or through the soil. This is a sign our soil has gone ‘hydrophobic’ (literally scared of water) and the same thing can happen to our compost piles – it is a function of our soil or compost microbes going into their protective mode and forming water-shedding waxy coatings.
If your pile has dried out too much, don’t stand there for hours with the hose running, this will just wash nutrients away from the pile and waste water. The best way to rectify a dry pile is to pre-soak some carbon-rich ingredients like straw, leaves or old rotted wood-chips in a tub or bucket of water for a day or two before adding them to the compost pile.
This pre-soaking gets the fibres of the carbon-rich materials fully charged with water and is an effective way to introduce lots of extra moisture to the pile in a way that the water won’t just drain away. These water-charged carbon-rich materials will then slowly soak their excess moisture into the compost pile, gradually wetting and re-activating the dormant microbes.
I use an old 200-litre plastic drum cut in half to pre-soak my carbon ingredients in the dry weather, but a 20-litre bucket works well too, though you might need a few on the go.
Preventing your pile from drying out in the first place is always the better option, and pre-soaking your carbon-rich ingredients over the warmer months is a good practice to help keep the moisture content of the pile just right.
Next week we’ll have a look at how to test for the ideal moisture content in your compost pile.
– Joel Meadows works with Yes In My Back Yard, (YIMBY), a community-scale composting initiative in Castlemaine and surrounds. Send questions or comments to hello@yimbycompost.com
