Greetings to the new Dan's Garden Update. Today we will visit the compost facility in Rochester Hills.

First of all the compost starts out as paper bagged leaves and grass clippings. There are rows and rows - about a wide and long as a football field. They are brought in by 18 wheeler trucks (see on left side of picture.)

The rows are a precise distance apart.

(for more info: http://socrra.org/ )

Then they take these behemoth machines that have huge tillers on them (behind black covers.) They are the same width of the rows. They till and grind the leaves and grass in the rows. Then the decomposition starts.

Then they move the compost from the rows to these 20 foot tall piles with this huge front end loader.

Look at the steam coming off the pile of compost on the right. This is a massive operation. And yet there are only two guys that work the compost full time, 6 days a week.

After it stays in the piles for a while, the final operation is through this large machine. It sifts and filters the compost, removing rocks, sticks and other non-composted material. The compost is very fine, usually the pieces aren't any bigger that a half inch.
Here is another view of the size of the piles (truck is probably 12 feet tall.) Look at the steam coming off the pile.

They actually monitor the temperature of the piles and turn them several times. The compost is made out of grass clipping and tree leaves collected from several cities in the area.
This is the compost guy,  and for the life of me, I can't remember his name.

He will fill my little trailer for $15 cash.
I figure I can get almost 3 cubic yards in my trailer. It is pretty heavy, but not as heavy as soil.

If you had to buy this by the 40 lb. bag at a nursery, it would cost you hundreds of dollars.
Back to my garden, when I picked up some of the cinder blocks that had to be moved, there were a lot of big earth worms. That is a good sign the soil is good.
And I expanded the size of my garden by 18 feet. I hope to plant some of the cool crops this weekend. I also plan to till the ground (where I burned some trees and limbs) and plant a 20' x 20' patch of sweet corn.

I am going to add some sandy loam to the compost shown here. Last year I tried growing in 100% compost. Most veggies did good, but a few didn't - especially the green beans - they barely put out.

The raised beds are 4 feet wide. 8" tall.

That's it for now. You can e-mail me at dmb@bovinich.net if you have any questions.

Dan