Good luck and enjoy presenting! If you are willing and allowed to, could you share your full slidedeck afterwards? Or at the odd chance of it being recorded, please share the video!
Really cool that you are doing this for your local community =)
Nice pile there! I'm guessing this Composting Day is a (US) national thing? A quick search shows 'Learn About Composting Day', is that the one?
Please tell us more. Over here (Netherlands) we do have a 'national compost day' in March, where you can go and get compost from the municipality. Great initiative, though the quality of compost is questionable as it's the end product of whatever the municipality collected in the green bins over the year. And people put in, well, everything. So, it is definitely not a 'Learn About' day, while we could use that for sure over here in my experience.
Sounds good to me. I wouldn't sweat it and just give it more time. You have a somewhat decent balance of greens and browns? Not trying to compost a humongous amount of orange peels?
Just to be sure, your pile is directly on the actual soil? Second, how are the moisture levels? In my pile, I noticed an increase in worms when I things were wetter than they were before. Depending on your setup that might be tricky to control. But moreover, time. In the first months I hardly spotted any worms in my pile. After say two years, there are plenty. Never added them myself, they just found the party.
Main mod here! I won't dispute I have been less active over the last couple of weeks (holidays and other reasons), but I think /c/composting is not doing that bad. It's not high-traffic, but there are posts every few days and I'd say it's not anywhere near dead.
When I created the community, I thought about how much I should post and opted to hold back to see how many other compost enthusiasts would come out of the woodwork. Perhaps I have been a bit too conservative, though?
Please watch out, there supposedly can be very toxic things in a heap in certain stages of the composting process. I'll try to find out proper info and sources when it's not hours after bed time but please watch out.
While I don't have hands-on experience with such a cold climate, two things popped in my head. First, maybe you are better off with one big pile. More volume means the heap will be able to keep higher temperatures. The snow on the cover might actually be a very good insulator as well. Second, and this might be the number-nerd in me, but I'd actually track the temperature with a compost thermometer. I guess you won't be turning the pile often, and for sure not in winter when it's covered in snow, but that way you can keep track of what your pile is doing.
I hope someone has better, actual practical tips for you, but keep us updated on this one!
Perhaps I'm missing something here but that headline is quite misleading, isn't it? The NY residents have to separate their green waste. The fact that that wasn't the case already surprised me, but, this sounds like a big win.
Please consider making a dedicated post for that (or any other similar) video if you find it, sounds like it deserves its own place and that way more people might find it.
I had to lookup 'coppice' and 'pollard', didn't expect to learn something new within the first five posts on this community. If you know of any nice introduction video on the topic, please post it to the sub.
No worries, hope everyone and everything is alright over there. Thanks for the update.
Bookmarked, gonna need to find some to time properly check this out, thanks for sharing!