anna swing

This sounds pretty similar to my worm compost set up, which I learned through classes taught by Jock Robie. I have an 18 gallon storage tote with a wooden platform at the bottom, 3-4 inches of newspaper, and the rest is full of moistened shredded newspaper. I add food to the corners.

Your layer of compost is a new twist to me. The worms I have eat their shredded newspaper bedding. That makes me wonder what made the difference: the leaves or the compost? I fed my worms some rotting apples last year and they really seemed to thrive on it, but I've been nervous about adding much from outside. Now that I think about it, I spread out the rotten apples much like you describe spreading out the compost. That's really interesting. Maybe not all worms can make it to the corner to feed? Or are we introducing some organisms from outdoors that help decompose the food scraps so they taste better to the worms?

I'm dealing with a similar problem, only my sawdust is spent cat litter. If you come across any low effort ways of breaking this stuff down, I'd love to know. I added the urine saturated sawdust to some of my compost piles last year and overwhelmed them. I had two containers that were just rotting apples + sawdust and the dust seems a bit more broken down in those. I hope it starts to degrade more quickly once spring kicks in here. I'd like to experiment with pine eating mushrooms, but that's probably not very realistic. If your dust is hardwood, that may be worth looking into for you.

That's a really good point. I've been looking at super saturated piles as the snow melts, but now that you mention it, they seem to be already drying out while everything around them is still saturated. I wonder what would happen if I mixed in rotting pine from the woods.

I don't like killing anything either, but I may be less quick to notice that my cat has a vole this year after what they did to to my apple tree rootstock this winter. The rootstock was not mulched but was next to a strawberry bed covered in a deep layer of pine needles.

I am thrilled that the 2 year old trees made it through unscathed, but 80% of my rootstock is denuded of bark. The small trees have wooden edging, weed screen, and a 2-3 inch layer of bark mulch. It does seem like the thickness of the mulch makes a big difference. The rodents in my area seem to glory in cardboard and newspaper, so I am not going to use that anymore.

I have about 10-20 gallons of waste pine sawdust each month. The dust comes from equine bedding pellets which I am using as cat litter. No solids, lots of urea. The volume is too much for my compost piles to cope with.

I've been thinking of trying to grow some Phoenix oyster mushrooms in a separate sawdust pile. I don't want to eat them - I just want something that will break down this sawdust more quickly. I'm especially curious about whether or not this would work if I don't pasteurize the sawdust before adding the spawn. There sure doesn't seem to be much bacterial or fungal activity in the pile now, so I'm not sure that there's much to kill.

Has anyone tried this or something similar?