Build Great Soil: Overview of My Composting Setup

Hi, Laith from Wineberry Hill. I've come to the conclusion that the single most important thing that a successful gardener can have is high quality soil. In addition to that, it's my belief that based on the world events and the way things are going, that if you're a property owner it might possibly be the single most important physical thing that you can have as well. Now, an important relationship to having a high quality soil on your property is the process of composting. Composting improves soil structure, moisture retention, and the overall nutritional density of your soil. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate the main ways that I employ composting on my property. And I do it by two general methods. One is, they're both aerobic composting. One is actively managed and one is passively managed. And right now, I'm standing on the passively managed compost area. Now, for me, passively composting means I have a big site on my property where I just dump the kind of slow decomposing materials. Things like tree stumps, old rotten tree trunks, wood chips, and then a larger volume of yard waste like leaves from my town, from my neighbors that bag up their their yard waste. And I'll go drive around, I'll pick it up, I'll collect it, and then I'll throw it down into this pit. That's the basic idea for the passive aspect of my composting. Let's take a look at how I actively compost. This is where things happen a little faster. You know, passive composting might take many, many years, maybe decades, whereas active composting happens on a much shorter scale. And that's because I'm actively turning it, moving it from the geo bins into the three bin system. Now, I use things like rabbit manure, chicken bedding, chicken manure, kitchen scraps and kitchen waste, yard cleanup waste, as well as a lot of restaurants and markets in the area that I live will give me a text and say, hey, we have a bag of scraps for you. And I use those both composting and to feed the animals on my property. During the peak growing season, I go through a lot of biodegradable material. And so to accommodate that, I have three geo bins that I will kind of open up as I need. And I'll cook down as much of the mass quantity of material that's coming onto my property, so that once it's finally to a point where it's kind of cooking down, I'll either combine them, and then I will start them in bin one, like a very typical three bin system. Now, you might notice that my three bin system is made out of concrete, specifically cinder blocks. And this is because I had to keep learning the hard lesson that using wood in a composting setup is eventually going to just have to be replaced. And in my case, it was every year I was replacing my composting bins because they would get so rotten, you know, all this active decomposition taking place. And so once I finally decided, okay, I'm just going to do this once and not fuss with it anymore. I was really happy. I was really happy that I converted it over to a kind of more permanent structure on my property. When I built this setup, I decided that I wanted to include some deluxe features. These include an aeration port and a human liquid nitrogen input port. Yes, for those of you unfamiliar with composting science, liquid nitrogen is super beneficial for your compost. Not only that, it's very hygienic to do this because of the processes involved in composting. Now, here's how this specific setup works. I add liquid nitrogen, it completely bypasses the final bin, a small amount is added to bin two, and the majority goes into the first bin. Another important consideration when composting is trace minerals. Sometimes these can get leached out during the composting process, but they're really important for the overall value of the resulting compost if you want to use it in your garden. So trace minerals can be re-added to your compost by using something like glacial rock dust, rock phosphate, or my personal favorite, azomite. These products help replenish trace micronutrients like calcium, magnesium, and trace elements that might be lacking after the organic matter breaks down. I usually add azomite in layers as I'm filling up the final bin. Some of you might be wondering, how do I keep rats and mice and raccoons out of my compost? And the short answer is, I don't. The main reason is because my compost is pretty far away from my house. And secondly, my compost is quite literally in their house. And so I'm okay with them doing what they do. This is their job. They, you know, scrounge around for resources to eat. And usually by the time it makes it into the bin system, there's nothing really interesting that they want to go after. In fact, I've never had them tear into any of my bins. Now they do dig through the geo bins, but that's fine. Some of you probably noticed that I used to have a rotating, tumbling sifter on top of the middle bin. And it was actually pretty good for what it did, but unfortunately it was a little bit too tedious loading it a few shovelfuls at a time. And so I decided to take it off. And that's an overview of my outside composting systems. But as cold weather comes in, those outside systems eventually come to a crawl, if not a stop. And that's where my indoor composting system comes in. And it all happens here in my kitchen. The Vigo countertop composter. For years, I had been holding off on getting a countertop composter because, well, to me, they were more destructive to the resulting compost than was beneficial. But then Vigo introduced their countertop composter, and finally someone got it right. Now it was possible for me to compost in the winter, when my outside compost pile was basically slowed to a crawl, if not even a stop. It's silent and odor-free, and you can control and monitor it directly from your phone. And it has a bunch of features packed into the various modes. The Vigo mode, which is my favorite mode, is a low-temperature, kind of always-ready-to-receive-new-scraps mode. But it also has a fertilizer mode, a grass mode, and an express mode. It's actually pretty astounding how fast it turns normal kitchen scraps into something that looks very much like compost or even garden soil. I'll leave a link in the description if this is something that you might be interested in checking out. Well, there you have it. An overview of my composting process, both active and passive, and indoor and outdoor. Now, I say it all the time, but your comments and doing all the YouTube stuff make this channel possible. And if you like this video, you might like these. And I need to tame the jungle in the greenhouse. See you around.