What a gift this pile is! I am so thankful to our friends that gifted these piles to us for the park garden. This is a mix of wood based bedding in a free stalled cow dairy by a friend who also raises most of the crops that are being used.

This is the third time i have had a delivery from them over the past five years, the first pile was 5 tons and it was delightful and dropped closer to the gate you can see the areas in the park garden that it was used in because you can tell the color of the grass where it sat even though most of it was used in creating beds, that’s how much the land wanted and is using what this provides.

The second deliver was much closer to the front of the park gardens and in truth we still have around a ton or ton and half to use up. They closed and sold their cattle, keeping only back a small amount of meat type to raise up, so I knew that access to this resource was limited, I asked if could get one more big load and was very happy when told yes.

What you ask is the difference between this compost and what i can produce on my own farm? The answer is turning, they have bedding fluffer that means that the wood based bedding, the urine and the poo are turned, spread and mixed to create a living always decomposing deep pack for the comport of their animals.

I have old aged sheep in aged hay/straw bedding, I have hot fowl in wood chip/hay blend and i have lots and lots of picked horse piles. What i don’t have is the ability to blend my horse piles with wood chip bedding and turn it over and over and over again in a living active way.

This pile will have some very small clods in it but overall its going to be loose and friable aged compost, its already a year plus in age as we had to wait for the winter freeze to end, the spring to wet, the spring/summer/fall crops season to be done to find just the right day to deliver, when crops were off, the ground was dry enough for them to drive in on the ground and so on

If you are looking for manure tea for use, then you want to make with much more fresh then this and i have to be very careful where its used this year, i can make new beds with it, i can add it to the garden to rot in over the winter etc, but i can’t put it on any overwinter plants or canes, or fruit trees etc.. it is totally the wrong season to be adding in extras to encourage growth. I want everything to shut down right now..

Once everything is fully died back, I will do some early winter spreading, a great example of that would be on the rhubarbs, they will all get a good solid inch of compost over the whole area to feed the plant for next spring.

As we have this pile now to work with, the plan for the remaining pile by the front of the park garden which is across from the main garden is to clean it up/edge it out and flatten it into new garden itself, take advantage of the fact that it has smothered everything under it, that at its age, anything will grow in it, i am going to plant it out into started plants for the next few years.

What type of compost are you working with in your gardens/food forests/or raised beds? Are you able to access locally produced extras be that sawdust, or switch grass/straw or wood chips or ? Different areas and different small farms/homesteads produce different types of compost, in 2024, we will wood ash, fowl compost, horse, plant based (nettle/comfrey and so on)

This pile should if used carefully allow us to amend and increase our production in the park garden as we continue to expand it.

Day 4 of my personal 30 day mini challenge to back into writing daily for the blog! Trying to get back into the habit of writing often.