Stages of Heating Compost

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Once you have a compost heap going, how do you manage temperature so it breaks down and clears out all pathogens? Connect With Tony O'Neill: Tony O’Neill is the founder of Simplify Gardening, a blog, YouTube channel, and the author of the upcoming book Composting Masterclass: Feed The Soil Not Your Plants. Buy this book on: Amazon UK Bookstore US Bookstore AUS Bookstore Simplify Gardening YouTube Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code EPICPODCAST for 5% off your entire first order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Order signed copies of Kevin’s books, plus more of his favorite titles in our store. More Resources Looking for more information? Follow us: Our Blog YouTube (Including our Epic Homesteading and Jacques in the Garden channels) Instagram (Including Epic Homesteading, Jacques, and Chris) TikTok Facebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We all know that for compost to break down effectively, it does have to increase its own
0:19.6	temperature.
0:20.6	The temperature of the pile must increase, and there are stages to this that you need
0:26.1	to be mindful of.
0:27.1	So, Tony O'Neill is back in the show, Founder of Simplify Gardening.
0:30.2	Tony, we've talked a lot about the management and prevention of problems in a pile.
0:34.3	We actually haven't talked much about that process itself and what you need to monitor
0:39.6	as it's happening.
0:41.6	Yeah, so a compost pile will tell you a lot about the stage that the compost is at, and
0:52.0	whether it's actually working or not.
0:54.2	And you do that by the heat of a pile.
0:57.1	Now, this is a little bit different if you're doing a cold compost, but most people are
1:01.8	doing aerobic composting, which is a hot composting method, okay?
1:06.6	So within, when you're making aerobic compost, there's three stages of heat, and the first
1:14.5	stage is psychrophilic, and this is for compost that with a temperature under 50 degrees
1:21.0	Fahrenheit or 10 degrees Celsius, okay?
1:23.3	So that's when you've pretty much just either, I'll talk about something else a little
1:30.6	bit later on, but either you've just started the pile, or the pile is more or less finished,
1:36.2	okay?
1:38.2	Then stage two is the mesophilic, and this is a temperature range of between 50 degrees
1:43.7	and 105 degree Fahrenheit, or 10 to 40.5 degrees Celsius, okay?
1:50.2	And now in the mesophilic, this tends to be where things are just sort of maturing
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Epic Gardening, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Epic Gardening and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.