The hot compost is a lot of work, but so far, I find it at least interesting. In the meantime, I learned that the white stuff that I thought was fungal mycelia is actually bacterial growths of Actinomycetes. An easy enough mistake, as the name suggests, there are similarities.

My garden needed trimming again, and this time it was too much grass to cut it all in one go. On the first day of work, I got a pile that was roughly the same size as both previous piles combined.

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Again, I did not wait for the grass to dry, and I piled it directly on the heap. The weather was so dry and hot, and it took me so much time, that the layers did wilt and slightly dry anyway. Even though this time it was mostly fresh grass, I added calcium cyanamide to the pile straightaway to see what happens. What happened is that it went all the way to 70° and higher overnight. I had to do other things for a bit, so it took a few days before I managed to mow the rest of the garden and add it to this pile again.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This time the grass did dry up completely, because I had to mow grass around the garden too, and it is less walking to mow it and let it lay until it dries and then collect it with a wheelbarrow than trying to cart it to the pile directly from the lawnmower. So for the second (top) half, I had to water it thoroughly too. It took a bit longer to reach the temperature, a whole day instead of overnight.

Now it is going to sit in this place until it starts to cool off, then I will turn it and fluff it up a bit and leave it be again. Probably until next year – this pile is now on the part of my vegetable bed, where the soil had to be dug out when building my sewage cleaning facility. When filling it back, the workers were not careful enough to put the topsoil back on top properly, and it got mixed up a lot with the infertile clay underneath. It has been lying bare for a few years now, with grass and wildflowers working on the soil to improve it naturally. Now I want the compost to finish that process and expand my usable garden bed to its full former glory.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The second muck heap is cooling off, but it is still higher than the ambient temperature, 30-40 °C. The first heap has been cold for several weeks now, so I decided to put it between the rows of the potato patches. It was five wheelbarrows per patch, and even though it is not completely decomposed and cured yet, it should add the needed shade for the tubers and some nutrients for growth. It will continue to decompose in situ, and potatoes do not mind a lot of organic matter around them – I grew them directly in non-composted grass the last two years after all.