Enthusiastic About Compost

Finally, I’ve become that guy…the one who always wants to enthuse about compost :grin:

I’m lucky to live in a place that is semi-rural i.e. the city is 15 mins that way, but my neighbours keep horses, camels, ponies, goats and other animals. It’s not rural, there’s no real farming here, just some home gardening and a few hydroponic operations.

The benefit to this is that horses are dirty bastards, constantly pissing and shitting in their stables, and some people rake out the stables and bag the shit and sell it at their front gate for a couple of bucks. I get 15-20kg (roughly) bags of horse manure and sawdust from a nearby horse lover.

I picked up 18 bags of it today, a compromise between the 24 they had put out, and the amount I could actually squeeze into the back of a Mazda 3 Hatchback. They only want $2 a bag, so that’s $36 for what I guess is about 300kg of poop. By comparison, the local hardware / garden place wants AUD $6 for a bag of “potting mix” which is basically just sticks that have been mulched, and lacks any decent nutrient profile. You have to add a bunch of other amendments to it to get anything to really grow in it.

I’ll be mixing it with twigs, leaves, garbage, and sawdust in order to make a quality soil I can use for my gardens. Our soil here is basically solid rock, so the game plan is to dig down a foot or so, make a hugel mound and then top it off with finished compost.

It’s a pretty big step up from where I started, with a small counter top bin for dinner scraps; moving to a 200 litre drum outside for same + leaves and grass clippings. I’ve added a worm composting system now, and finally two 1m x 2m (roughly 1 cubic metre each) garden beds filled with materials.

I’d post some pictures, but do any of you really want to see a picture of horse poop?

Discover more posts like this:

Compost