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| Is it possible to hot compost a pile of leaves and nothing else by using household ammonia in a hose end sprayer to wet it? I understand the ammonia is a CHEAP liquid form of nitrogen...I'm just not sure if it would be enough N, or how often i would need to spray the pile of leaves.
I have other hot compost bins setup but wanted to see if this would work as an experiment. |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| Go to your co-op and get urea. hortster |
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| I don't usually jump in on this kind of stuff, but that sounds like a pretty toxic experiment to me! I imagine you probably don't want people going "but how about X instead", but. There's so many free nitrogen sources around that will benefit the compost. I get the mowing guys to drop off clippings for me, but puttingbiocides, let alone systemics, on the lawn is very rare here, so different situation maybe. How about all those coffee grounds? Last but not least, there's urine... |
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| If you sprayed straight Ammonia onto the leaves that might work, provided you could stand being there long enough to do that. Should you dilute the Ammonia you could well then need to add too much water the the mix and the aerobic bacteria that you are trying to feed could not function in the absecne of air. |
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| I'll give it a shot and report back. Since leaves are in great abundance right now and I'm admittedly a bit lazy in trying to round up UCGs and grass clippings, I'll give the ammonia treatment in a hose end sprayer to a pile of leaves a try. Feijoas, I thought about the urine, but I'm not sure if I could save up enough that would activate and entire 4x4' pile of leaves. Hortster, I'll have to look into the urea from my co-op. Do they give it away for free, and in what form, thanks. |
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- Posted by albert_135 Sunset 2 or 3 (My Page) on Sun, Nov 6, 11 at 13:08
| First, a tangent perhaps: there was a time, back in the 50s, when farmers would rent a gross gadget to inject ammonia gas into the soil. Here is one discussion marked as updated 2005 so apparently they still do it. Using Anhydrous Ammonia Safely on the Farm Now, how would spraying ammonium hydroxide solution on your curiously named "browns" work. I would conjecture that you would need to get a chemistry student to study the U of Minnesota bulletin and calculate how much acid you would need to neutralize the hydroxide and hypothesize whether it would work at all. |
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| NH3 is still used up here (a lot). Lloyd |
Here is a link that might be useful: (NH3) Anhydrous Ammonia
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| lj, urea is a fertilizer, 46-0-0 and is not free. It does provide a high nitrogen source in granular form. hortster |
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| If I decided to save up my urine, how much would be necessary to add to a 5'x5'x5' pallet bin of oak leaves? Does urine keep? Pour it straight on or use hose-end sprayer? |
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| Hot composting browns can equal Hot Composting Leaves, without additional ingredients. The poster did not specify the type of leaves. While oak is is my main leaf; many of my local leaves are sweet gum and maple. When I make a large compost pile (4' diameter, 24" higher, or bigger) with shredded sweet gum and maple, the core temp. often reaches 140F. I would call 140F hot. A sweet gum leaf recently fallen off the fall tree would not really be a 'brown', of course, with a C:N ratio of maybe 25:1 to 40:1. |
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| Household ammonia has been diluted with water and using a hose end sprayer to apply will weaken it further, assuming WATER pressure is the motive force. The pelletised urea is more economical on a N/unit basis though maybe not as convenient for you. I don't know how much urine would be req'd. for your oak leaves, but I would use the natural sprayer. The supply is reliable if sporadic. Urine will keep if in a closed container, that is, not offgas nitrogen. It will not remain inert though. There are many that believe the organisms converting it are beneficial to plant life and deliberately steep the liquid. |
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- Posted by JamesMarconnet 7 (My Page) on Tue, Dec 6, 11 at 5:52
| I read recently about how adding high-nitrogen lawn fertilizer or urea to a compost pile gives it "shocks" of instantly-available water-soluble nitrogen rather than the slow release nitrogen the UCG, grass clippings, manure etc. provide. So for hot composting, you'd logically need to add the instant N periodically during the desired period of hot temperatures. Organic gardeners would understandably have a heart attack if they read about such an unorganic practice. But this time of year, if you had lots of leaves available, and basically nothing else without buying it; then using the cheapest and most-storable source of N available for hot composting would seem to me to make more sense than just letting your piles or expensive tumbler, in my case, sit and wait for the grass to grow green again! Plus my local grass is Bermuda, so it won't grow green again for a loooooong time! UCG is great, and my local Starbucks is a good, if undependable source. But collecting enough UCG for batch hot composting of shredded leaves would require a lot of gas and driving time to go collect it, plus a lot of outside storage space. Jim Marconnet with a bag of lawn fertilizer on hand, and thinking of buying some Urea when the bag gets low. |
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| "using cheap strong instant N sources to hot compost shredded leaves in the winter?" Never done it. Won't work in my climate. Lloyd |
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- Posted by toxcrusadr (My Page) on Tue, Dec 6, 11 at 11:33
| James wrote: "UCG is great, and my local Starbucks is a good, if undependable source. But collecting enough UCG for batch hot composting of shredded leaves would require a lot of gas and driving time to go collect it, plus a lot of outside storage space." Fertilizers also have significant inputs. Ammonium nitrate, for example, is made by burning natural gas (3-5% of the world's supply), and then of course it has to be shipped to the store where you buy it. It's going to be different for each person, but for me the whole concept of composting is low-input recycling close to home without a lot of fossil fuel and chemical inputs. I'd rather pile up my leaves and let nature do its thing. Plenty of grass clippings in spring to mix with the half-rotted leaves and make some nice compost during the summer. |
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- Posted by JamesMarconnet 7 (My Page) on Tue, Dec 6, 11 at 13:39
| Thanks toxcrusadr, for your inputs. I imagine your name says a lot about you and what you want and what you do. Sometimes people simply want to do what they want to accomplish. In my case, it's to use an expensive ComposT-Twin tumbler that I have set up to quickly hot-compost things that I have on hand or that I can buy very inexpensively in order to have enough compost to add to my several back yard flower beds in my suburb home with a finicky homeowner's associaton over this winter to have them in good shape to grow lots of vegetables in them next Spring and Summer and Fall. I'm between jobs, (and the economy is so bad that I may never ever work again!) so I must minimize my expenses, be that gas, driving time, purchased stuff, cranking time, etc. Jim |
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| I use urine and kitchen waste. When I lived in a more isolated place, I would just step out to my compost pile when necessary. In my neighborhood now, can't do that. I just use the extra large plastic coffee creamer bottles - on weekends I'll fill it once a day, during the week not so fast. It is not often that I make a compost pile all at once, instead building it in layers with leaves I shredded previously, the few green weeds I've pulled, the normal kitchen waste, and the urine. Just build it in layers. Once I have a bin completely filled, when I have a chance I turn it into a new bin, moistening it as I go, and it always takes off in a smoking fashion after that, cooking down about halfway by the time I need it. I have one bin about full now, I've just finished using all the leaves I shredded last fall and saved for compost cover. I have a completely finished bin that I'll probably use in the spring. And I've started my collection of leaves and things that need shredding. I'll probably fill at least three large bins for compost cover throughout the year, using the rest to mulch all over the place. |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Wed, Dec 7, 11 at 11:28
| You can make the starbucks thing work. Call them ahead of time, and keep stopping in. If you pick up a batch of coffee daily in a few weeks you could get quite a lot. If you are like me there are dozens of different starbucks to try. But, you have to be persistent. Some people don't like to deal with it. If you don't call ahead, stop in with a container and get what they have on hand. You can try the dumpster, but they started locking them up. I can't get to a dumpster at all around here. I would not use ammonia. That is a poison. It could hurt the worms or the microherd bacteria you are trying to cultivate. |
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- Posted by JamesMarconnet 7 (My Page) on Wed, Dec 7, 11 at 22:00
| I've been rescuing worms from my concrete driveway when it rains. I guess they crawl out of the front yard onto the concrete looking for some Serious Worm Action! I pick them up with a toothpick under them and a spatula under them while transferring them into a plastic worm bin. Most of them are tiny, 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches long when relaxed, longer when crawling. But surprisingly many are already sexually mature. No, I don't know exactly what sort of worms they are. But clearly they are surviving my front yard with the lawn fertilizer that I use there. I'm getting a lot more worms in my bin this way, albeit tiny, than I did trying to get Canadian Night Crawlers to be fruitful and multiply in a plastic worm bin with shredded cardboard bedding and pureed and frozen kitchen scraps and coffee grounds for lunch. Now to let them grow a few months to see what type worms they really are. Jim |
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