Just so I got this correct, some combination of compost and rabbit manure.. with the rice hulls and shredded straw only to provide enough texture/aeration?
Yeah, start there. You can always add more bulk later. Make sure the straw is good and wet so it’s starts rotting ASAP. Cheers Os
damn, that's a great price!! sounds like you are about 2-3 hours from me so too far a drive to your supplier I'm sure to make it worthwhile. damn best and ONLY place I can find local so far for rice hulls is a small brewing supply store. He sells only in 1lb (one pound) bags for $3.09/lb. your haul would have cost me $92.70! Granted, I'll save a ton more than what the gas will cost me but it means having to drive to central jersey and nothing is really worth that LOL yep, i grew up in jersey, just more south of you, and people from south jersey don't really consider much about exit 6 or 7 really "Jersey" anymore, just an extension of NY LOL LOL LOL I've been refusing to pay his prices but I'm about to breakdown as i'm getting ready for me next soil mix I have to make and may just have to bend over and shell out for 7-10 gal. but hey, his malted barley grain is also overpriced so I have that going for me too!! LOL problem is he is the only supplier around I've found so i guess i just have to get used to bending over....
Thanks, TimJ I burn mostly oak in the house, just for the simple fact that between oak wilt and the gypsy moths, oak is pretty easy to come by also, ash in my barn. Glad now that we didn't get rid of the other hand meat grinder we have, never use them anymore since my wife got a grinder for her kitchen-aid mixer. I might start playing around with bio-char, really not sure why i haven't yet.
Yeah, I definitely had to hunt around for that price haha. It's insane how much some businesses charge for what is essentially a byproduct of the agriculture industry. I don't actually live in jersey, I'm on the other side of the hudson.. my inlaws live down there so every time I'm in the area I make a mental checklist of things in the area I can get that I normally couldn't score at home (Tbh I loath living in the city, should have never moved here ugh)
I'm in the 'burbs, but as far as I'm concerned it's still too close to cities for me, i HATE cities. grew up on a farm so used to lots of land and room. HATE not having it anymore. my wife likes cities. We literally joke we are the couple from Green Acres - just not on the farm as i'd prefer. LOL I'm not in NJ anymore either though. only get there to see relatives anymore so pretty much similar to you. still a hell of a price on those hulls! deals like that you definitely take advantage of when your in the area
Tell me about it. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin where cows outnumbered people ten to one. Went into the military for a decade, moved around all over this globe and then landed in the big apple only to fall in love with a city loving carribean girl. Life has a funny way of moving us around lol. I'd be happy with suburbia at this point, its at least a break from the concrete and steel of this urban jungle I'm caught in at the moment. Our hobbies (gardening, vermiculture ect) seems to thrive despite our societal trappings, much to my relief. No matter where our feet are planted at the moment, nature is bursting at the seams to pop out. It's our job to make it happen
small frickin' world. We used to get most of our cows out of Wisconsin. I remember the stories of my grandfather going to buy cows in the middle of Wisconsin and how ungodly cold it would be - especially in the boarding house he would stay in . Wisconsin in the 1920's, 30, and 40's in the middle of winter! LOL LOL LOL
Aw lawd it was ungodly lol. All the mulch in the world wouldn't provide a blanket thick enough to prevent the ground from becoming a frozen rock. Our high school had snowmobile parking if that tells you how podunk and cold it was lol Those dairy cows ate extremely well... kelp and all sorts of grass combinations to keep em in tip-top shape. Looking back on things my vermiculture-minded self is irked at how much gucci manure I simply shoveled and tossed out. Lawd knows how much kick-ass castings I could have produced haha
snowmobile parking at the high school simply means it's too frickin cold to live there. MOVE!!! LOL know what you mean... didn't know about nor care about organic farming practices when i was younger and getting rid of the old cow bedding and manure was just a PIA chore. now i'd love to have all that great cow crap and hay and straw, and corn silage feed. basically all the identical stuff I just had to pay for in a local compost. we used to just load it on the mane spreader behind a tractor and when the wagon was full we would spread it out in the fields. usually only took 2-3 days before the wagon needed to be spread. and we had multiple farms so LOTS of crap! if only i had that crap now..... oh well... sigh
I also upgraded to a #12 electric meat grinder for sausage making and had the old hand crank on the shelf collecting dust. After reading some of Coots old posts on bio-char, I wanted to give it a try. I'm frugal and couldn't see purchasing something I'm currently throwing out. That's why I use fireplace charcoal. I sift the charcoal in my worm separating box. It's just a simple wooden frame with 1/4" hardware cloth attached to the bottom. Then rinse the remaining ash off. I grind when still damp. I've ground dry,wet is less dusty. Good luck puffnstuff1960.
After the advise to not touch the wormbin for 3 weeks. It's been almost 2 weeks and I poked around a little in there, good amount of mold chunks and pillbugs in there. Just sprayed a little water on the top leaves and left it alone. Found a cluster of these little long clear/white worms, didn't do much with them. Maybe babies. I'll give it another two weeks or so to just sort itself out Sent from my Pixel 3a using Grasscity Forum mobile app
So I went outside of my usual bunny manure source and picked up some bags of what was said to be manure... turns out it's a bit of manure and damn well everything else too. Newspaper liners, food pellets, some type of Timothy hay or alfalfa (not completely sure tbh). So now I have a bunch of random stuff instead of the manure that I actually wanted. I don't have browns to mix in to create a thermophilic pile. Not sure what to do with this stuff besides soak/age it then feed it to the worms, if it's not too nitrogen heavy. Picked out the urine soaked newspaper so hopefully it's balanced enough. Any suggestions what I should do with it?
WaldenInTheCity, did you separate out the rabbit poop? All I see is bedding,newsprint and fur. Is this something you purchased?
Nah, the manure is in there.. but it's maybe 10% of the total volume. Most of it seems to be some kind of straw bedding. I really have no idea what to do with it as my initial plans accounted for mixing straight bunny manure with compost, but it seems like I got a pile of bedding instead. It was free, of course I can't complain but that said I doubt I'd do this again. I'm soaking it in a big tote to leach out the remaing urine and dull any excess nitrogen it may have in it. I suppose I can just soak and rinse it until I feel it's safe enough to mix into some compost for worm bin bedding. I really wish I would have gotten straight rabbit manure, this is a bit more work than I wanted it to be tbh
I've never purchased rabbit poop myself or used it. I've seen rabbit poop sold on craigs list for $10-$20 per 5 gallon pail. But, the pictures show a bucket filled with round droppings. I've always followed Coots train of thought that plants feed plants best. I've never used manure on my indoor plants. But,to each their own. I know many folks have great success with horse and chicken manure. I may even try some coop poop on my tomatoes outside this year.
My school of thought is to view animals as a pre-composting mechanism... just another way to streamline the nutrient cycling from plant to plant. Plant grows, plants harvested, plants fed to animals, animals poop, poop fed to worms, worm castings feed plants. It certainly can go from plant straight to plant on a long enough timeline, but herbivore animals just kind of speed up the process of breakdown imho. I'd love to live in an area where a couple chickens and rabbits can be used to keep my garden supplied with most of its inputs via composting/vermiposting. They're a fantastic source to have for the home gardener
I do understand your train of thought. Mine would be that I do live in the country. My brother raises hogs and beef cows. My sister raises chickens, another friend raises rabbits. Every single animal is fed feed stock that has more than likely been sprayed with pesticides,and insecticides. Some feed stock is also grown with chemical fertilizers. I don't see any labeling of this on feed bags. As I stated it's just a personal choice to use leaf mold and compost I make with leaf mold and dynamic accumulators. Again, most of my inputs come from our property which make this possible for me. My compost then runs through my worm bins. So, I do use manure, worm manure.