Spreading the compost love

The current compost bays at HCC headquarters are pretty much at capacity. I’m always tempted to try and squeeze more and more feedstock in because, after all, any material that ends up getting composted instead of going to landfill is a win for our environment. And it’s hard to say exactly when capacity is reached because the whole thing is a moving feast. Suffice to say, Bay 1 is full at least 6 days out of seven at the moment even though I’m working hard to shift materials around every day to keep accommodating more. Oh and in case anyone is worried, yes, we will be constructing more compost bays soon! (more about that in another post though). In the meantime the solution to have room for continual composting is to move some of the ‘semi-compost’ out.

So today we shifted the whole pile from bay no. 5 over to the community garden in Dickson. It was a really nice team effort. First I borrowed a ute from Michelle, a HCC contributor in Downer. Talk about a sharing economy! and they didn’t even mind that I got it dirty (the tray is now just slightly more fertile than the dirt that was already in it 🙂

Then I convinced hubby Scott to help me load up the ute. With two people loading and tipping out buckets this only took us half an hour.

Then it was just a quick drive over the community garden, where Teresa, the convener of the garden was ready to receive the bounty.

Every good veggie patch benefits greatly from large volumes of compost. Growing veggies is very demanding of the soil, so replenishing that soil with nutrients and organic matter in the form of compost is one of the best things you can do. Community gardens always have beds in different stages of growing and harvest so it’s great that they have some large compost bays up the back so that compost can be available on demand. And HCC is happy to meet that demand with supply!

The Dickson community garden is on my commute to my (paid) job and it’s always nice to have a peek and see what is growing in any given season. Hopefully more and more people can be convinced to recycle the nutrients in their kitchen scraps so that we can all contribute to and see a lot more of these wonderful community activities.

Bay no. 5 may be empty right now but I’ll get shifting again in the morning. The driveway bin set a new record today, filling to the brim twice in the space of a single day. I’ll have another pile ready to shift from bay no. 5 in a couple of weeks at this rate 🙂