Re: home made fertilizer

[Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>]

Toby could you send me your email address so I can pick your brain off
line?
I am looking for a good simple book on CEC in soil.

Scott

At 10:00 AM 3/20/01 -0800, you wrote:
> on 3/19/01 10:51 PM, Evan Davies at
> evangardener@hotmail.com wrote:
>
> > The reason there is no smell using the sawdust method to store
> urine, is
> > that sawdust, or wood shavings(sawdust will absorb the liquid a
> lot
> > quicker)is a large proportion carbon
>
> For those who are interested, that's one of several reasons. BTW, I
> prefer
> using fine shavings unless I can get coarse sawdust, because the
> sawdust
> from all but the big mill saws is too fine, and often packs down into
> a
> gooey, anaerobic lump that gets really foul in the center and is hard
> to
> spread out evenly in a compost pile. Which leads me to additional reason
> 1:
> Using shavings or sawdust, which have lots of  air between the
> particles,
> results in aerobic fermentation of the urine, while a bucket of liquid
> will
> quickly become anaerobic. Anaerobic processes are far more stinky
> than
> aerobic ones. Aerobic fermentation will yield more nitrate (NO3), not a
> gas,
> while anaerobes, lacking those oxygen molecules, are forced to make
> gaseous
> ammonia, NH3. Bye-bye nitrogen.
>
>  Also, shavings and sawdust have lots of surface area, allowing
> quick
> colonization by huge numbers of microbes, which will metabolize the
> ammonia
> and other volatiles in decomposing urine before much of it can outgas.
> Any
> gases from the puddle in the bottom of the bucket must rise up through
> this
> fluffy bacterial filter before they can escape, and get absorbed. And
> third,
> wood has an extremely high C/N ratio, 400-800 to 1, so any nitrogen in
> the
> urine will be quickly gobbled up by microbes to be bonded to the
> overwhelming amount of carbon they get from the sawdust. The bugs
> are
> building molecules of roughly 12:1 C/N, so they'll lock up nitrogen
> quickly
> to do that (which is the opposite situation we hope to have when
> we're
> fertilizing, where we want to release nitrogen--slowly--rather than tie
> it
> up).
>
> I like to build my compost piles on the woody side, more like 40:1
> C/N.
> Nitrogen is lost rapidly even in compost piles that are built to the
> ideal
> 25:1 ratio. In a fast, hot pile of 25:1, the rapid metabolisms of
> the
> microbes often lurch into anaerobic processes and give off a lot of
> ammonia.
> You can catch that ammonia by adding gypsum to the pile (the CaSO4 of
> gypsum
> reacts with ammonia to give non-volatile ammonium sulfate) or, if
> there
> aren't lots of seeds to sterilize in the pile, I just make a woodier
> 40:1
> pile and let it moulder more slowly. This cooler pile seems to leave
> more
> nitrogen in the compost. At least the resulting soil tests higher
> for
> nitrogen, so I assume that's what's happening.
>
> Hope this isn't too tedious. Thanks, Evan, for giving me an excuse
> to
> blather about soil chemistry, one of my pet subjects.
>
> Toby     
>
>
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