Ingredients
All ingredients are accurately listed but measurements are a bit ad hoc!
- 1 shovel of wood chip
- 1 shovel of digestate
- 1/2 bucket of straw
- 1/2 bucket of hay
- 1 shovel of organic waste
Method
- Ensure a small dog is running around your feet trying to trip you up.
- In a discarded large dog bath (Murphy dog hates water) mix together the woodchip and digestate. The woodchip comes from our biomass boiler site and the digestate from a farming neighbour’s electric/biogas producing business.
- Fold in half of the hay and straw (produced on our farm).
- Mix in the organic waste (from our salad and vegetable business).
- Fold in the remaining hay and straw taking care not spill any and until all ingredients are well mixed.
- Transfer to a suitable container. Your compost is now ready to spread but at all costs do not eat!
Digestate
A word on our digestate combined with a brief science lesson. Digestate is a nutrient-rich substance produced by anaerobic digestion. Our digestate is a bi-product of a friend’s electric/biogas business. Crops such as maize, sugar beet and grass are harvested and mixed together with a hefty size of livestock manure. This reaction produces a biogas capable of driving a gas engine which in turns drives an electric turbine. (The electricity produced can be wired into the national grid.) The remaining product is known as digestate which contains all naturally occurring minerals, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium and so is a nutrient rich substance.