11d • General discussion
Highlights from the windrow compost piles
Here's a little journal style update about the last few weeks of my experience with microscope viewing my compost piles.
Have questions about anything I bring up? Please ask! I love to bring clarity to the little bits and pieces.
If you caught me in the last couple weeks, you may have noticed that I was dumping buckets of microbes on a long compost pile. This was in response to having taken some samples of them for some time on the microscope, and seeing a reasonable predator population (in this case testate amoeba), but a somewhat low population of the bacteria, yeast, and spores that they typically feed on.
I didn't hate the ratios I was seeing, but it looked emptier than I wanted. This made some sense to me because the piles had dried further than I would have liked in an ideal situation. They weren't *dried out*, but didn't have the drop of water from a squeeze that I'd really be going for. - More on compost moisture another time.
I'll probably post some photos of what I was seeing that week in the comments to give a visual to the comparison.
Since I had 2 piles, I decided to remoisturize them differently. On one pile, I only added water as I regularly would with my soaker hose. With the other, the same, but I also manually applied 25 gallons of Microbe MasterMix. My theory was that perhaps I would see a significant boost in that pile relative to the other pile.
As fate would have it, we got quite a lot of rain this last week. I could tell the compost loved it. The garden soils all loved it. It was a long, slow drizzle that is not typical for this season in Arizona.
So now I had a new variable of amazing rainwater influencing all of my piles equally.
The results were pretty spectacular. In both piles the testate amoeba counts were much higher. They looked full, and the landscape of bacterial jiggling was filled out. I was truly impressed by the ability of the piles to increase their robustness with a simple return of more ideal moisture levels. That is not always the case for compost.
I did a fungal:bacterial ratio test and got 60% fungal to 40% bacterial (1.5:1). I'm pretty happy with these numbers and am also considering how to possibly boost them before springtime. Winter can be excellent for a pile.
I also found that the pile I *didn't* apply microbes to had a slight edge on rough spore counts and testate amoeba numbers. I didn't take enough samples to say that's definitive, but more spores does make some sense because the pile was made with more carbon initially. (I'm not running true side by side tests here.)
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Highlights from the windrow compost piles
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