If you find yourself in this situation, pump up your tires with air almost to their maximum rating, which is shown on the sidewalls. Although your car's ideal tire pressure is usually lower and it's shown often in your driver-side door jamb. Anyway, the extra air in the tires really helped to haul that cubic yard.

By the way, anyone know how much a cubic yard of compost weighs?

The cubic yard filled exactly 20 plastic garbage bags, 14 or so went in the trunk. The other 6 in the front passenger area (in the seat and foot well). No way should you fill the garbage bags even close to full, because then they'll be way too hard to lift into your car. My plastic garbage bags were 30 gallons and 55 gallons each. I felt the 55-gallon bags were better to use simply because the plastic fabric seemed thicker/stronger and less likely to tear, thus easier to lift. But leave a whole lot of empty space in either-sized bag or you won't be able to lift them.

It took me about 2 hours to fill those 20 bags with a cubic yard of compost or 27 cubic feet. What sped things along was wearing a large plastic glove to push the compost into the bag AND especially what helped things along was wrapping the opening of the bag around the top of a 5-gallon bucket whose bottom I cut out. This makes fast work of bagging compost--probably way faster than using a shovel. That's what someone on YouTube said, anyway, and he appears to be right, although I didn't use a shovel for comparison. Just used a gloved hand to quickly push compost into a plastic bag whose opening was controlled by a 5-gallon bucket with no bottom. Works amazingly well. (Let the bucket lie horizontally on the ground with the bucket's side touching the ground.)

This is awesome compost. The texture is fine and the color is very black. Whatever made up the compost is unrecognizable anymore (like it should be). Well, every once in a while you'd see a recognizable wood chip, but this compost has very few wood chips in it. This is STLcompost.com's "Lawn and Turf" compost ($29 per cubic yard). Their "Premium Compost" at $26 per cubic yard ain't really the premium stuff. The "Lawn and Turf" is. The $26 compost had lots of wood chips still visible in it and it was hot when you stuck your hand inside the huge pile. It was also a little smelly. That's not good--it's not finished yet, but they were sellin' it. (It's a 50/50 mix of their "Black Gold" compost and composted cow manure.) Now, the "Lawn and Turf" compost for $29 was cool to the touch when you stuck your hand inside the huge pile and it smelled fine. It's located underneath a huge green, domed tent. I think the "Lawn and Turf" product is similar to their "Black Gold" product except the "Lawn and Turf" is finer--the compost particles aren't as big.

They also sell mulches, composted cow manure, various soils, and other stuff too. This place is great. The manure, by the way, was $24 per cubic yard and the sign above it says "Bessie's Best." Nice comedic touch.

I should add: Bring a kettle or thermos full of water so you can drink when your thirsty, and not have to trudge off to the water fountain inside their office. I drank 2 or 3 times during the 2 hours of push-bagging. Thankfully, the clouds obscured the sun in the second hour.

Tomorrow I'll top-dress the lawn with some of the compost, and mix some into a planting bed for squash. The squash seeds have been soaking in water for 5 days.

Should have taken a picture of the car stuffed with compost!

Lloyd

Pt03, wish I had thought of taking a picture but none exist thankfully.

A few months ago I was driving on the highway and saw a Ford F-250 with 4 pieces of train track strapped in the back. The rear window was completely gone and the roof of his cab was now v-shaped.

I have learned, because I do stuff like this all the time, never to buy new cars. I usually have an old small pick-up with a homemade rack on the back. The best sedan I ever had was an '86 Saab 900. With the seats folded flat, and the handles lowered, I could carry my Troy-built rototiller... and a few bags of compost, too.

Thanks for the smile.

For starters, ditch the Camry. Get something German with a fairly stiff suspension like a Mercedes or an Audi. Porsches are particularly good. Forget about the bags. Carefully line the trunk with a tarp, making sure it covers the sides, particularly the back of the seats. Then shovel the stuff in. Periodically push down on the back of the car to make sure the suspension isn't too overloaded. If it bounces reasonably well when you push on it, it is still OK. If the compost is pretty dry, you may be able to fill up the whole trunk and put some buckets in the back seat. If it's wet, the trunk may end up only half full.

Lloyd

Once I thought I was being smart, saving a delivery free of a measly (at least in retrospect) $40 by picking up the tile for our house in my F150. I figured, hey, I had a truck, why should I pay delivery. Well, $40 is cheap when you consider I had to make 2 trips in my truck because the tile was so heavy. Live and learn, maybe.

I'm smiling because this must have been an interesting learning experience.

Lloyd

One time I think someone did make a mistake was on my 1987 Ford Festive (Korean cheapee). The tires still had tread at 52xxx, and they were only 12"! Since there is no free lunch, so to speak, they had awful braking capability. Once I jammed on the brakes on the highway exit in a light rain, and the car came to a stop 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

One reason a car maker will have a different pressure from the tire manuf. max pressure number listed on the tire --- one tire model will go on a number of different makes and models of cars.

There are two other common misunderstood ideas about cars. Jumper cables and the oil light.

Went to STL Compost in Fenton again, just outside St. Louis county. Got their Field and Turf compost again, instead of their Black Gold, even though I'll mostly be using it in the vegetable garden, not so much on the lawn. IIRC, last year their Black Gold smelled a bit, meaning it wasn't really ready yet to be used as compost, but I didn't detect much, if any, bad smell this year from their Black Gold. Their Bessie's Best is part manure and their premium is a mix of Black Gold and Bessie's Best, IIRC. I think the Field and Turf is like the Black Gold but finer for lawn use. Still their Field and Turf worked great in my vegetable garden last year. Lots and lots of tomatoes, eggplants, squash, string(?) beans, basal, parsley, finnochio (fennel?), and it was all top quality. Good compost seems to help so much.

I stored the compost in my garage overnight, because I was too tired yesterday to move it behind the bushes. Later today I'll take it all outside. Nice thing is this compost does NOT smell bad at all. It's been in my closed garage all night, and not a hint of foul smell. This is really good compost!

This year I fit the cubic yard into about 28 or 30 big plastic bags. Last year it was just about 20 or 22 plastic bags. It's much, much better to use 30 bags than 20 bags, because each bag is much lighter and easier to carry by hand. My back thanked me.

I pushed the compost into the bags with an oversized rubber glove. Much easier than shoveling. Important thing to do, as I may have mentioned last year in this thread, is to control the opening of the plastic bag with a 5-gallon bucket whose bottom has been cut out. Lay the bucket sideways on the ground with the plastic bag attached behind, and just shove compost into the bucket-bag combo. You can work fast that way--much better than a shovel, I think, like that YouTube person recommended. I think I may have provided a link to the YouTube video last year in this thread, or in a different thread.

It took about 15 to 17 rubber-gloved shoves of compost to fill each bag to the right weight for me. Twenty or more shoves caused the bags to be too heavy and not easy to carry.

Last year, I used 2-millimeter thick bags that were much tougher to tear. This year I used 1-millimeter thick plastic bags, and must have torn 5. Don't use 1-millimeter thick bags (go for 2 mm) because you can even tear the thinner bags while your handling them with just your hands inside your car, not just on the abrasive ground. My hands tore a hole in a bag just while lifting the bag when it was already inside my car's trunk, to reposition the bag. Two millimeters will save you time and energy. Once a bag is torn, you have to place it inside a second bag. I can't emphasize enough how much happier you will be using 2-millimeter thick bags over 1-millimeter.

It took me about 2 hours to shove 60 to 66 percent of the cubic yard of compost into the plastic bags, and about another 1 hour to shove the remaining third of the cubic yard on my second car trip. So the glove-shoving alone took about 3 hours, then there's drive-time to add onto that, and unloading the bags from the car, and the preparation, etc. I also ate and rested a bit between the two trips. All-in-all it was about a 5-hour project for a cubic yard.

Last year, I did it when it was nice and warm. This year it was windy and cold, probably between 45* F and 55* F. Much better to do it when warm, and not windy.

Lloyd

Forgot to add: these were 55-gallon plastic bags (this year and last).

Also the Field and Turf compost has climbed in price by more than 10 percent this year. Went up from $29 per cubic yard to 32.

Something occurred to me yesterday. Do you guys think they treat the Field and Turf compost with less of an eye toward human safety than their Black Gold or Bessie's Best composts because most people use the Field and Turf on their lawns while the Black Gold and Bessie's are used in the vegetable garden.

Like I mentioned, the Field and Turf is finer in texture than the Black Gold and Bessie's Best, but I hope they don't treat it with lower safety standards because it's used more for lawns than veggie gardens?

Lloyd