Making a compost heap

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I had a great time yesterday!

We spent the weekend at Panaruban where a young American couple have had plans to start a compost project.  They have a new baby and their academic research priorities - so they had made a start ... and then stalled a bit.  They had obtained and cleared a site, but hadn't made much progress in actually building compost piles.

On Friday I went off to look for something to contain the compost.  I was hoping to make a version of my Australian system (see earlier compost blog post), but I couldn't find the reinforcing mesh that I thought I might use to create a containing circle.

What I did find was some lengths of galvanised fencing material.  They were 2.4 metres long and 1.2 metres high.  We cut them in half and set off for the site.

At the site we cleared the ground and made a square compost bin.  Because most Indonesians are somewhat shorter than me, I decided to cut down one side to make it a bit easier to load material in - and then place it within the heap.  Heap construction makes a big difference with composting - to the speed of the composting process - and also to whether it creates a nuisance.

Nuisance is easily avoided by putting anything that might smell or attract scavenging animals in the middle of the heap and covering it.  In Australia (or New Zealand) you encounter people who think that composting is dirty and, in some way, unhygenic.  In Indonesia the prejudice is even stronger.  The expectation seems to be that it will smell and attract rats.  Done properly this just does not happen!

Here the team of Eman, Wagiran and I are connecting up the first two pieces of the heap, before attaching them to the stake we have put at the corner.

Once the container structure was complete, we started to fill it.  There was not much material actually to hand - so I didn't expect to get very far.

However, we were being watched.  The elderly gentleman next door had been watching what we were doing - and after seeing that we were running out of material, he offered us some sweepings from his yard.  When these were enthusiastically received he went off into the surrounding areas and came back with baskets and baskets of fantastic compostable green material.  Here is one of our helpers (Nawang) emptying one of maybe 20 baskets of material that Pak Tatang gave us from heaps that were within 20 metres of our site.

We didn't take them from an existing compost heap.  Rather, it was just rough green material (not good enough to feed to cattle) that had been cut from somewhere it wasn't wanted and put in a quiet corner where it would eventually decay in place - but not be subsequently used (as compost) other than in just building the soil where it was dumped in a corner or a little gully.

In Indonesia you see these heaps of organic material laced through with plastic rubbish almost everywhere you look.  If they are inconvenient - they will often be burnt.
Smoky, smelly fires of green material (and plastic) are just everywhere.  It didn't take very long before we had a modest bin full - but with a 'hole' in the middle.  Into that hole we tipped a bag full of what can only be described as rocket fuel (in composting terms).

I asked our hosts for the weekend whether I could get some cow manure from their small dairy farm.  Pak Iskandar have me a whole bag of manure that had first been through his biogas system.  The material he gave me was almost compost like already - with very little smell.  Fantastic stuff!

When I think about the biogas process - it produces methane - which is CH4.  I think that means that all the nitrogen I need for the compost heap should still be there and still available to balance out the carbon content of the other material.

We also put in some kitchen scraps, but when I think about it, I don't think the compost heap is the right place for kitchen scraps in this environment.  Almost every house has chickens - and scraps are used to feed them.

In permaculture terms feeding scraps to chickens would have to be a better use than composting it - particularly seeing that the cow manure is available as a source of nitrogen (which cannot be fed to chickens).  The chicken manure would be an even better source - just the same scraps ... but after they have been through the chicken.

So here is Pak Tatang and I admiring our completed compost heap - after I put on a topping of grass and sawdust.  The finishing touch will be some sort of cover to stop the rainy season rain so soaking the pile that it won't compost properly.

I wouldn't mind betting that this heap will compost very well.  I look forward to getting reports on its progress.  Overall, the site looks pretty good - with one completed heap and another underway.

I am a bit ambivalent about the process however.  I find myself asking myself how I'm different from the Green Revolution gurus who came into Indonesia (and many other places) with 'new and better' technology that turned out to be 'new' but, in many cases, anything but better.

While I might think composting is better / purer than artificial, chemical fertilisers, what do I really know about how the farming systems of this area of Java really work?  My instinct tells me that, if I observed for a while, almost certainly I would learn things that would cause me to modify processes and better integrate them with pre-existing systems.

Of course the great guru of composting, Sir Albert Howard, did his learning in an environment not that dissimilar to a Javanese village.