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Ok, Just a quick update today as I have some pineapples to get planted this morning. Both piles were cooking away nicely at 160 degrees when I checked on them yesterday . . . It will be interesting to see how Pile #2 with only the sawdust as the brown carbon component progresses but so far everything looks good. The main pile is darkening up now. It was a little delayed in showing outward signs of decomposition, maybe due to the fact that the pile kept running so hot with its

I have been having a very hard time in controlling the temperature of my Hungry Bin worm bin in the Hawaii afternoon heat. The location where I have the worm bin stays in the shade until the later afternoon as the sun starts to dip down in the west, then it is in direct sunlight unfortunately at the hottest part of the day. It has been in the low to mid 90s outdoors lately and inside the bin it has gotten as high as 97 degrees. Luckily the worms are able to go deeper in the H

Welcome to Day 21 of our Active Compost Series. The pile was running at 168 degrees yesterday when I checked on it, so it is still chugging along at an elevated temperature. It seems no matter what I do to this pile it always wants to run extremely hot. This morning it finally came down to an acceptable temperature of 160 degrees so since the temperature dropped, that signals that it is time to turn the pile to get more oxygen back inside it. Normally, the pile would be compl

We are going to take a look at another newer form of composting systems available on the market which is Bokashi Composting. I will be using the Bokashi stem as part of my overall composting system here for my garden, however I want to go over a few things to help people understand Bokashi better, and understand how it works, what it actually does, and most importantly what it does not do. First off, Bokashi is a Japanese term which means to ferment. Bokashi is NOT compost. T

After the herbicide setback with the garden on Tuesday, to salvage the compost that was almost finished I needed to raise the heat back up on it again to try to cook off the chemicals that over-sprayed onto it so I combined it with the second pile that was still in the "hot phase" of its decomposition. The pile was holding 168 degrees on Thursday so I decided to just let it continue to cook some more and not turn the pile over until the temperature started to drop, signaling

Ok, after letting the Hungry Bin sit overnight to settle in (which is not required per the instructions but I am erring on the side of caution) I retested the pH level and moisture level. Using a moisture meter is basically useless as it will only show that the compost is "WET" but that doesn't really give us any information. For instance is it just right or is it too wet. According to the meter it is pegged all the way to the wet side of the indicator, but by performing a ma

Along with the hot composting piles that I am doing for the garden I will also be adding on Vermicomposting, or "Worm Composting" which uses specific species of worms which are Eisenia fetida, commonly referred to as "red worms", or "Red Wigglers" to compost food scraps and other organic materials. One of the end results of the vermicompost system are worm castings which is just a politically correct way of saying worm poop. Worm castings are one of the best fertilizers that