Hey there everybody
For folks who are unfamiliar with us, we’re a small scale plant nursery that follows permaculture and regenerative agriculture principles. We’ve used tons of wood chips over the years and we’re getting ready to receive more over today and tomorrow. What would you like to know?
What are you doing to limit the risk that you’ll end up with compost getting hot enough to catch fire?
It gets monitored and turned regularly. We don’t see it dry out much since any turning brings the ducks running from their pond to pick it over for worms and the region has relatively consistent rainfall throughout the year.
What part of the planet are you located? What are your 3 favorite food bearing plants?
We’re in Maine, in the New England region of the US.
Hands down favorite plant is Ceanothus americanus, New Jersey Tea but it’s a tea plant and not food. I’m also a fan of the Amelanchier family, which may be called serviceberry or saskatoon. We grow and use a whole bunch of Monarda fistulosa, which is called by a number of common names but is an amazing US native plant that supports vast numbers of pollinators. We harvest leaves to dry as an oregano substitute and harvest flowers for tea.
I’d recently read about using compost bins inside greenhouses as another source of heat and CO2 - have you done anything with that and if so, what was your experience?
We haven’t yet - currently we just have a small hoophouse for season extension. We have a friend who is planning on replacing some of their steel fence and we’re hoping to get their top rails so we can use another friend’s jig to form the structure of one we’re planning. Once we have a covered space that can accommodate the pile(s) necessary to buffer temps it’s definitely something we plan to use.
Are you planning anything unusual for the new structure? Given the climate where you are, a passive greenhouse or a walipini set into a south-facing hill could be really useful. I worked on a farm growing up in a similar place and never considered until recently how poorly traditional greenhouses/hoophouses fit our climate.
Best of luck!
Ideally I’d set up a few bioreactors and possibly some tubing and low wattage fans on solar to move the air around and warm the root zone. Polycarbonate would be a longer lasting shell but our connections with some other local nursery affords us the chance to receive offcuts from when they rewrap theirs.
I actually talked a friend into doing a walipini but his site has conditions to really maximize its usefulness. Our slope is west-facing and not as great from a structural point of view. Also my wife saw a picture from his project and is not enthusiastic about the idea of replicating it. If I can convince the town planning board to give us a variance I’ll likely build a greenhouse backed against the thermal mass of the house’s west face.
