Is my compost ready....?

[pakaba]

Hi

...It is dark in colour and fairly crumbly but still a little wet and there are still plenty of worms in it.  apart from egg shell, and the odd patch of grass clippingings i can't see any half rotted waste.  It's the worms that confuse me as i thought if it was ready the worms would have left it.  I have tried to use a worm composter and am wondering if i am getting confused with that.

TIA
Paula

[pakaba]

[supersprout]

I'd be happy with crumbly moist wormy compost pakaba! Does it smell earthy and nice? There are usually worms in the compost at some stage in mine. One of the old boys on the plot tsks and says to me I should get more compost out on the beds and not in the bins - he's right, I probably delay too long.

[pakaba]

I don't know what the compost smells like but I smell like rotting veg  from all the yucky stuff on top >:(


Cheers for the advice i will go stick my nose into it now :)

Paula

[supersprout]

My chums in the country had a temporary compost heap from the two years they've had the house. They have now built new permanent ones, and I helped investigate the old unstructured heap by hand. After a layer of 6" to 1 ft of half-composted squelch (whew :-[) there was about 60 cubic foot, from there down, of beautifully rotted compost. You could tell the difference in the layers straight away. So I spent a happy day scraping off and bagging that top squelch layer to start the new compost piles, and my chums have besprinkled their veggies with their 'discovered' compost.

Note, that was my idea of a fun day out :-X ;) ;D
My fee was two or three bags of squelch for the squash 8)

[pakaba]

Cheers Supersprout!
;D ;D ;D
The bottom of the compost heap smelt of nothing, :) i forgot about the nose test to see if it was ready :P  After a day digging up the compost I wish i could say the same about me :o

I have now mixed it with some coir (huge block came with my wiggley wigglers surprise package) and multi purpose and planted some   lettuce, radish spinach, spring onion in the green house for, hopefully, and earlier crop.

Paula

[Robert_Brenchley]

Squelch is wonderful stuff in the right place, but if you put it in the wrong place it can start your plants rotting.

[supersprout]

Yay pakaba, happy sprinkling!

I am going to put the squelch under my squash robert, and plant them on little hills of compost on top of it so their roots will dive into it to feed. Does this sound right? Should hate my prize pumpkin to expiiiire, any tips welcome as always.

[Robert_Brenchley]

As long as there's a few inches of soil over the squelch, you should be OK. I put it on the rhubarb, round the fruit, or on ground that isn't going to have anything growing in it for a bit. I find a layer of it kills most weeds apart from the really nasty ones. If it goes on in the autumn when plants dies back, it's usually sufficiently rotted for them to grow through by the following spring. But I never put it in contact with green stems.

[supersprout]

Thank you for tips, timing and trouble shooting as always robert :D Forewarned!

[Robert_Brenchley]

Here's my rhubarb happily growing through barrowloads of squelch I put on in November.

[supersprout]

Boy is that ever SQUELCH :o! And what luxuriant rubub, looks like it's gobbling it up. I can't imagine how you managed to generate industrial quantities like that robert, am encouraged to be more lavish in my plans now! Great photograph, what a lovely open site and what gorgeous rubub.

[Robert_Brenchley]

I don't produce it myself; we have grass cuttings delivered to the site by the ton, and that's what the interior of the mountain ends up like. It needs using with care, but in the right place it works wonders.

[Common_Clay]

Wow, that's a great pic, how many rhubarb do you have?

I have two so far...  :-[

:-\ :)

[Robert_Brenchley]

Nine or ten big clumps. It's only a few yards from the stream and the roots go down where it never dries out, so it does really well. We eat massive quantities of crumble every year.