Pick up - 11/29

Thank you once again to all our participating households.  Today we collected 87.80lbs of kitchen scraps which, when added to the pumpkins rescued from landfill by Shirin Madden, gave us a total weight of 192.21lbs of compostable material saved from landfill! Our best week so far.  As you can see from the photo, we chopped the pumpkins up to much smaller pieces to speed up the composting progress.  Last week we re-built our compost pile entirely hoping that through thorough aeration the temperature would rise more rapidly.  Unfortunately it did not rise above 110 degrees.  While 110 degrees is a good temperature for hot composting the pile was beginning to loose heat as the week went on.  In order to wake the microbes we used on old piece of rebar to make big holes in the pile to aerate it.  We also added more kitchen scraps to this pile in the hope that the increase of nitrogen and air will help heat the pile - we will take the temperature each day and keep you posted.  Also today we started a second compost pile.  This is still trial and error but we think the original pile is large enough and we will just add small amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and air to this each week monitoring the temperature.  The majority of the next few weeks pick up will go on our new pile.  Check you the slide show for photographic updates and watch this space for more updates on our progress and the temperature of the compost piles!