Special Guests!

Today, we hosted a demo of our composting process.  Thank you so much to Maggie and Kian for all your help and enthusiasm.  Maggie and Kian learned about and helped with every step of our routine.  First they weighed the kitchen scraps we collected (a total of 123.6lbs), then they helped carry it all up the hill to the composting site.  They were very proficient at chopping larger items up with the machete! They added the scraps to the active container and mixed in the browns (shredded newspaper) to keep the nitrogen:carbon ratio optimal for composting.  They used the compost thermometer to see what stage each pile is in the composting process.  First they took the temperature of the ground which was just above 70 degrees, then the active compost which was over 140 degrees, then the curing compost which was 120 degrees then finally the compost that is almost ready which was just above ground temperature.  Together we searched through the piles to see if we could identify any invasive jumping worms, although there were a lot of worms we did not think any of them were jumping worms.  We did find some plastic food labels that obviously don't compost so we removed those.  The most interesting item we found was a spoon!  Somehow or other this got mixed up on the food scraps.  We will keep it safe in case anyone is missing one!  Thank you Maggie and Kian! We hope you found the whole process interesting and you will join us again soon!