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Scott,
Try "Hand's On Agronomy" by Neal Kinsey, the US
"Albrecht" Agronomist
Cheers,
Darren Doherty
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2001 6:33
AM
Subject: Re: home made fertilizer
Toby could you send me your email address so I can pick your
brain off line?
I am looking for a good simple book on CEC in
soil.
Scott
At 10:00 AM 3/20/01 -0800, you wrote:
on 3/19/01 10:51 PM, Evan Davies at
evangardener@hotmail.com
wrote:
> The reason there is no smell using the sawdust method to
store urine, is
> that sawdust, or wood shavings(sawdust will absorb
the liquid a lot
> quicker)is a large proportion carbon
For
those who are interested, that's one of several reasons. BTW, I
prefer
using fine shavings unless I can get coarse sawdust, because the
sawdust
from all but the big mill saws is too fine, and often packs down
into a
gooey, anaerobic lump that gets really foul in the center and is
hard to
spread out evenly in a compost pile. Which leads me to additional
reason 1:
Using shavings or sawdust, which have lots of air between
the particles,
results in aerobic fermentation of the urine, while a
bucket of liquid will
quickly become anaerobic. Anaerobic processes are
far more stinky than
aerobic ones. Aerobic fermentation will yield more
nitrate (NO3), not a gas,
while anaerobes, lacking those oxygen
molecules, are forced to make gaseous
ammonia, NH3. Bye-bye
nitrogen.
Also, shavings and sawdust have lots of surface area,
allowing quick
colonization by huge numbers of microbes, which will
metabolize the ammonia
and other volatiles in decomposing urine before
much of it can outgas. Any
gases from the puddle in the bottom of the
bucket must rise up through this
fluffy bacterial filter before they can
escape, and get absorbed. And third,
wood has an extremely high C/N
ratio, 400-800 to 1, so any nitrogen in the
urine will be quickly gobbled
up by microbes to be bonded to the
overwhelming amount of carbon they get
from the sawdust. The bugs are
building molecules of roughly 12:1 C/N, so
they'll lock up nitrogen quickly
to do that (which is the opposite
situation we hope to have when we're
fertilizing, where we want to
release nitrogen--slowly--rather than tie it
up).
I like to build
my compost piles on the woody side, more like 40:1 C/N.
Nitrogen is lost
rapidly even in compost piles that are built to the ideal
25:1 ratio. In
a fast, hot pile of 25:1, the rapid metabolisms of the
microbes often
lurch into anaerobic processes and give off a lot of ammonia.
You can
catch that ammonia by adding gypsum to the pile (the CaSO4 of
gypsum
reacts with ammonia to give non-volatile ammonium sulfate) or, if
there
aren't lots of seeds to sterilize in the pile, I just make a
woodier 40:1
pile and let it moulder more slowly. This cooler pile seems
to leave more
nitrogen in the compost. At least the resulting soil tests
higher for
nitrogen, so I assume that's what's happening.
Hope
this isn't too tedious. Thanks, Evan, for giving me an excuse to
blather
about soil chemistry, one of my pet
subjects.
Toby
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