Re: My hay seems a little too warm

Posted by T_Bone on June 19, 2003 at 00:16:37 from (171.75.7.34):

In Reply to: My hay seems a little too warm posted by ole on June 18, 2003 at 06:52:57:

Hi ole,

I can't tell you much about hay as I've forgotten most that I learned about hay as a kid but I can tell you about composting.

To compost you need;
Oxygen
Water
Nitrogen (greens)
Carbon (browns)

You have three out of the four ingredients and only lacking the browns, straw, wood chips, dry leafs, etc. I thought this part would be of interest to you.

A Compost pile will get about 160*f or so for hot composting and about 130*f and under for cold composting in the center of the pile.

On hot composting I can turn out a yard size pile every 30days into excellant compost. Cold composting takes about 6mths to finish product.

When a pile gets to stinking and very hot, 180*f plus, it's because it has too much moister and not enough browns. This pile will rott and is the odor that you smell as working compost smells like fresh earth. Ever smelled a pile of wet grass clippings? Same thing it's rotting not composting!

The other thing that happens with rotting vegetation is that it can make methane gas under the correct conditions just like your septic tank does. Thats when it becomes a fire hazzard.

This rotting will not turn into compost without adding browns and will go to a black sludge type of bacteria and when it drys out will be dry mold with alot of unhealthy bacteria. This pile would have to be used as a filler on a new pile.

Hope that info helped you in some way.

T_Bone

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