any composting guru's here?

[kossetx]

I'm new to composting and having trouble figuring out what is right and wrong for making compost.

I have a ranch with not the best soil. It was an old cotton farm and that may have depleated the soil. In reclaiming the pasture I cut out tens of thousands of mesquite and cedar trees. After burning most of them, I finally bought a 6" chipper for my tractor. It makes fabulous mounds of fairly small chips which I hope will make some good compost someday to apply to my soil.

The question is, when I chip lots of freshly cut down cedar, youpon, mesquite, elm, oak, etc., can a portion of that be considered "greens"? I'm having trouble getting enough cow manure to add to the piles and other greens are in short supply in the winter. When the summer comes, manure is in short supply because the dung beetles cart it off so fast. I added 2 yards of cow manure to 5 yards of green chips. Is that enough to make good compost? For a month, the chips by themselves didn't heat up much, so they aren't really greens, I'm guessing. They did start to turn a nice brown color.

Does anyone have experience mulching fresh wood?

TIA, MP

 

[John D]

Mark. I started a thread up in lawn & garden about horse sh##. I dont think I have enough for what you need but if you want it come and get it. Bamboo flyrods?? jb

 

[guyrj33]

Wood composts slowly.
You need to have enough moisture also.
Cedar is naturally resistant to rot, it may take a long time to compost.

 

[WayneB]

Wood composts slowly.
You need to have enough moisture also.
Cedar is naturally resistant to rot, it may take a long time to compost.

you are right about cedar, they are still hauling logs out of bogs that are over 100 years old and sawing them up.

 

[MossRoad]

I'd be leary of using wood chips from species that don't rot easily, like cedar. It will take a long time and lots of nutrients from the green material will be leached out by the time that cedar rots.

 

[randy41]

wood chips can make for good mulch but not for good compost

 

[txdon]

kossetx, I have mulched fresh cedar with brown leaves and cow manure in the winter. The cedar will produce some heat but to finish the composting process I found I had to mix in a #50 pound bag of cotton seed meal. It has the nitrogen needed to slowly decompose the wood and the pile starts to heat again.

Volume wise it is about 20 parts compost to one part cotton seed meal.

 

[jeffinsgf]

Mesquite is almost as slow to decay as cedar. The others can go pretty fast, but I chip my cedar into a separate pile and use it strictly for mulch. The oak, hickory, elm and persimmon go into the compost heap.

 

[kossetx]

In my opinion, mesquite is more rot reststant than cedar. Folks around here won't touch ceder for fence post. I did and 10 years later I need to replace fence. Juniper is for fence posts. They redid Old Fort Parker, here in TX, in cedar logs and had to redo it 20 years later because of rot. They treated the cedar the next time.

The chips the jimna makes are for the most part very small. They should rot well.

Randy, Malcom Beck out of SA, TX makes his living, a good one I might add, out of wood chips for compost. Garden-ville has mountains of ground pallets.

Don, Thanks for the advice anout CSM. It is cheap and I'll put some in. Do you think the cedar rots in reasonable time?

Jeff, I also make strictly cedar piles for mulch. But I have so much I mix some in with my compost piles because it chips fairly fine. Only time will tell how good it will come out. Do you have mesquite in MO? That hickory needs to be sold to a store in bags for BBQ.

When I said I was new to composting I should have said I was new to wood composting. I've been composting everything else for years. I got tired of burning all that wood and getting nothing out of it. Even if it takes years to compost it, I'll have some for the rest of my life, I just won't have it for a few years.

It sure is nice now to have a fel to turn those piles.

Thanks, MP

 

[jeffinsgf]

No mesquite, and our cedar is really juniper.

There's not much hickory that goes through the chipper. I burn everything down to 1 inch in my smoker. I will admit to using quite a bit in the Buck stove, which seems a shame, until you see how long it lasts and how clean it burns.

Funny part is, we pay top dollar for mesquite chunks to smoke with -- maybe we should work out a trade on a box full of hickory for one of mesquite.

When it thaws out a bit, I need to do some pile shuffling on my compost and mulch. I have a pile of old grass clippings that started out cooking pretty good, but stalled because I didn't have any dry stuff to mix with it. I have some mixed juniper and hardwood lathe shavings, and some almost 2 year old hardwood chipper chips. The kitchen scraps have been collecting and cooking in a Mantis tumbler for the last year, and they're keeping temps up, even in the cold. I think I'll mix all the piles together and throw in a healthy dose of kitchen stuff out of the tumbler to get it all fired up.

I have been going through this for a couple of years, and it is fun, but when it is really time to use some compost, I don't even have close to enough. Luckily, Springfield, MO is a rather progressive city. I can get "Zoo Doo" which is composted droppings from the zoo, about twice a year, and in the Spring, they have MOJava, which is a blend of composted yard waste and coffee grounds from a local coffee processing place. A quarter inch of that on the yard is better than any chemical "turfbuilder" I have ever seen. It is also a heck of a lot less expensive, builds the soil, instead of just feeding the plants, and feels good "politically".

My juniper mulch holds out, though. I haven't even come close to buying a mulch product in the two years we've been on our place, and I have every bed and tree mulched deep.