[compost_tea] Re: Re: smell while brewing

From: Kirk Leonard <kirkleon_at_open.org>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 08:57:27 -0800
I've done a lot with worms and manure and have never smelled a manure smell
in finished vermicompost, or in tea. Might the vermi not be finished - what
is the bed residence time?  In my experience it should be at least 6 months
and I think a year is better for a high-manure content vermi.  And what is
the worm density in the bed?  At a peak, you should have at least a thousand
worms per square foot, digging down 6-9 inches or so.

Also, if the manure vermi feed is not bulked some - the bedding often does
the job - you can easily get anaerobic conditions, as Doc E suggests. How to
tell?  If you dig in and get a stink, that's probably what's happening.
Healthy worm beds don't stink. (In Asia, they are sometimes used as
biofilters for composting operations, even.) You can bulk pure manure with
shredded straw or cardboard (or both), too, and the cardboard should help
boost fungal content, as well.

It's also a good idea to pre-compost manures fed to worms - get it through
the thermal phase, then feed it to the worms. In fact, that's the only way
it can be done under USNOP (officially), since vermicompost doesn't
officially exist yet...

> Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 05:36:01 -0000
> From: "pierre charles crozat" <pccrozat_at_fastmail.fm>
> Subject: Re: smell while brewing

> we analysed the smell in our last batch for which the compost used
> was a vermicompost made from 100% horse manure. The smell that we
> had was a kind of a smell of raw horse manure, but not as pleasant
> as the actual smell of raw horse manure (for those of us who
> actually like the smell of raw horse manure), there was a bit of a
> foetid undertone. We try to be very clean and we don t see any bio
> film in the machine but we only clean (thoroughly) with water
> between batches.




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Received on Fri Mar 11 2005 - 00:30:23 EST

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