Commercial Compost

One also has to take into consideration, once upon a time there were a lot more farmers out there tillin' the soil. The number has been condensed for economic reasons. From what I have seen around my neck of the woods, crop rotation and fallow schedules are a thing of the past. Heck, with the fertilzer dumped on, they can grow crops in sand with a good irrigation system! It is all about the almighty dollar, plain and simple.

Bear in mind, the government is protecting "us",.....uh...what did I just say....well, thats what I heard, anyway!

Waste sawdust.   He has a mill, and cut all the  2x6 floorboards in his house built like a barn.  Few other mills in the area.   Don't know.  Haven't been up there for two years.

Should go visit and see how the fireplace worked out,  He has a length of 8 inch drill casing for a chimney running up through two stories.  This pipe is surrounded by a stone well that forms an air channel around the pipe. At the bottom he has a four sided airtight fireplace.

Your problem with leaf pellet production will be the handling of a large volume that has to be reduced to a small volume.  Otherwise there is nothing majic about the process. Get a local U to build one.

Mulcher drops chopped up leaves into open side of pipe in which a piston connected to a crank moves the leaf bits to end of pipe where they are packed as each extra charge of leaf bits gets added until the mass escapes through a plate drilled full of holes. It works like an old hay bailer.

Build one. Have a thosand of them made in China - retire. 

I live in town but own some property 45 minutes away, so I have a lot of neighbours.  One of my farm neighbours actually bought up old small machinery for manufacturing wood pellets when a growing business upgraded.  He has built a building and now has the three phase (600 VOLT something or other -I'm really not good with numbers) but has not got operational yet. 

He has been building a house with the plasti-fab stuff and designed his own monster central fireplace. While it was under construction I worked there in shirt sleeves when no fire had  been on for the weekend and the temp outside was -20C.

No,-  frade not - I don't watch very much TV - can't bear to watch all the stupid crooks and stupid CSI scripts.  I can not believe that when you get a finger print off a door knob you get one print and only one print.

Anyway, - that's why I know a little about pellets, and other than that, I no nuting. - but willing to learn.

Scrubbers for creosote? What else? Those stoves burn two pellets at a time in a firebox the size of an ashtray.  Can we not just modify the burn, or slow the exhaust down until the whole mess condenses in the pipe?  It does after all use a powered intake and very slow exhaust flow. 

Sorry, I really don't know what I'm talking about, - ever. 

You're killin' me. I almost peed my pants! OK I can hardly type!!!!!

Funny you mentioned the UK. Did you ever see Good Neighbors? Hilarious.

Leaf matter particularily oak leaves contain lignin, a natural glue. I am in the middle or should I say second half of manipulating leaf and wood matter into usable wood pellets. What did somebody beat me to the punch? If so, fill me in, I want to hear about it, especially if they built a "scrubber" for residential use.

My favorite cleansing and fattening medium for crawlers is corn meal. Tossed in a batch of Jambalaya and you have yourself one heck of a culinary treat.

Kathleen Rolinson it's all about me, is a worm composter.

People with only one arm do better with vermiculture. 

My mother has a bucket of worms in her small apartment and she is a vegetarian, so she has a lot of kitchen waste.

The worms are small redworms that can tolerate the higher temperatures and do an excellent job.  Easy to feed, quiet, don't need to be exercised and if you're short of food you can feed them newspaper. 

If you're really short of food I suppose you could fry up the worms.

As for cutting that much grass.  Have you thought about growing quality clover or somesuch and buying a pellet food extruder?  That sounds like a business to me.

Oak leaves should be formed into a low pile and allowed to sit over winter.  In the spring the acorns gathered with the leaves will germinate and produce lovely little seedlings.  It's a natural process I guess. Works well with nut trees too.

Composting is an interesting process, but some folks believe it is a universal dispose-all.  It's not.

1) You should never compost anything you wouldn't have put in your mouth or eaten when it was fresh. 2) Never put meat in the compost. 3) Composting is an aerobic process.

Violating these basic rules is how E. Coli gets into the compost.

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I've got one of those big compost tumblers.  It's either too big or too small. 

We don't produce enough kitchen scraps, I can't garden, and it's too small to handle even a tiny fraction of the yard waste (if I was collecting yard waste... it used to be ~500 cu ft of grass clippings).  We probably get >1000 cu ft of fall leaves and twigs.  Twigs & branches don't compost.

Does anybody share my situation?  Do you have any advice?  I'm also looking for a kitchen solution that doesn't smell up the house between trips to the composter.  The tumbler's got 2 clasps and it's a real challenge to open & close with one arm, so a better solution is being sought.  Something that I can do without offending the olfactory sensibilities of the house, or bothering the missus