My Insane "Compost"

I am a chef, and collect compost from three of my restaurants. One is European fine dining, one is Japanese, one is a high end pizza shop.

I come home most nights with three 5 gallon buckets, filled with objects that span the globe. There is used kombu and katsuobushi from making dashi, and burned pizzas, stale bread, steamed rice, demi glace, parts of twenty varieties of plant life, lacto-fermented pickles, wood chunks and ashes from oak in one bucket and mesquite or cherry in another.  

I raise chickens, Pekin ducks, goats, sheep, a dog and one ornery donkey. First stop, I pour the most vegetous of the buckets on the ground one square in front of the poultry tractors, and pull it over.

It's like kids at a pinata party. They dive on it and squabble for their favorite goodies: their favorite thing in all the world is watermelon, very soft lettuce a distant second. Their enthusiasm trickles it way down to starches (bread is a decent pick, but rice is barely worth stooping down for).

I move the tractors every morning, so that the layer of poop and detritus gets pounded with South Texas' blasting sun. When I pull them forward one square, everybody else who does not live in a cage (laying hens, and everybody else) comes to see if anything interests them. Thicker leaves go over with the sheep, goats especially like burnt bread. Chickens love just about anything pasty, it seems. The dog looks for stuff soaked in demiglace, bits of butter, a stray pork bone here and there.

I know all this sounds kind of gross, but they love it--it's the noisiest, flappiest part of everyone's day.  (I understand the cross contamination issue this raises, but starting with ducks, so far I have not had any interspecies infections from this practice.)

After one day in the sun, anything left on yesterday's square has dried up like a cracker, positively roasted in UV rays. Since vegetable matter is mostly water, by the second day all that is left is paper-thin leaves, corn husk, a slight darkening of the sand.

Animals poop and pee. I move all water sources, all tractors, all feeding locations. The poop from the birds is nitrogen dense but thins quickly on the sand--dries to a cracker, and powders in days. The poop from the ruminants is about half used stuff, and scattered in a perfect spray of pellets, just as if you'd shook them out with a can. Donkey poop is almost entirely plant fiber, making little oases for the beetles and larvae the chickens enjoy (subsidizing the chickens while spreading piles of ground grass mulch in the process).

Water likewise radiates from a water source. Everybody drinks from a point, and they pee where they feel like it. While they all pee in different places, each species has a different hangout radius and behavior, and you can learn their behavior, how far and how soon you should move everything over to get them hanging over a new space, and roughly control where this moisture and urea end up.

I don't know what you'd call that, composting by entrails?

But the nutrients, minerals, calories and moisture from my buckets are transformed and transferred to the soil and the plants in what seems to be a pretty complete and efficient way: every drop or crumb pays a minimum of two eaters on its way to the soil, pays me in eggs and chicken and goat and lamb and guarding, then pays us again every time it rains.

(And I didn't lift a shovel.)

I love it! If it is working for you, then it seems like a winner.  I bet you could do the same thing in a thicket you needed clearing, to encourage the foot traffic!? Minus the chicken tractor.

Hopefully these "mob composting sites" get a break and a chance for the grass to grow in?

Pictures would be cool if you get a chance!!

Peace

Michael, I have been doing something similar to what you are doing except mine go to the wildlife.

Since with mine, the remains dry up and blow away I am not sure it could be considered compost.

What you are doing is certainly beneficial to all involved.  Much better than it ending up in a landfill.

Thank you for sharing.

Cool stuff. What do you grow then with all that nutrient in the soil? Could you put drip lines in after the tractor and produce more food?  

I like the described system. Michael, if you wander back by Permies, let us know if you're still doing the same thing or how it's evolved in the years since you posted!

Hi, thanks for your interest. Since that post a lot has happened. My significant other left me, took the baby, and left me with the land--which I could not pay for on my own income, and was forced to sell. I took my half of the proceeds and moved back to San Antonio, put a down payment on a small house in a typical neighborhood on the East Side with 1/4 acre. I've been here for about four years now. I garden all the way around it.

Things are different, obviously.

I am surrounded by a civilization of stray cats that the neighbors feed.  They kill anything with feathers that come within three feet of the ground. I have a bird bath that over time I've put up higher and higher on cinderblocks until now, it towers about four feet off the ground, so that passing birds can get a drink without being killed. As for ducks and sheep and all, well, those days are over for the time being. I have had to make do with a new reality, doing my job, being a single parent: living within my means.

There are now two restaurants where before there had been three (Covid took one of them out). The compost still comes, only now I dump it in my front yard where it breaks down (disturbed only by stray cats and dogs), until I get ready to till another square of land. (I know, I know, the word "till" is filled with evil magic, I get it...but you try growing food plants in a no-till sea of Bermuda grass, and you'll see why this is necessary.)

Over the past three years, I became interested in Paul Gautschi's method of permaculture that he calls "Return to Eden": the name comes from this idyllic religious affiliation (that I do not share), but the logic that he describes was worth a shot.

(That...and....with the service Chip Drop, you can have all the woodchips you can stand for free. So if you're BROKE, here is something you CAN do)  

If you're not familiar, the basic idea is this: the ground in places that are naturally healthy is never bare. So, you replicate the forest floor essentially by covering the whole place in at least four inches of woodchips--and (if you can't do anything else) you wait for time and weather (and God?) to do the rest.  Because life WANTS to flourish. When there is rain, it falls through the wood and is insulated against the surface of the earth, evaporation and temperature and tiny life forms are buffered from the harsh elements. Moisture brings bacteria and fungus, which populate the substrate, and begin to release enzymes, break down lignin and cellulose structures, release sugars and minerals and other nutrients--then worms and bugs come for the nutrients--then birds come for the worms and bugs, and--well, you get the idea. Pretty soon you have a microcosm teeming with whatever life crops up in your neck of the woods.

(By golly, it works.)

After about three years of working on this, probably four or five trucks of chips over the years, my soil is definitely rich and spongey. Couple Gaustchi's idea with permaculture's overarching thoughts of key-line plowing and planting on contour, and you develop a system by which the soil gathers moisture and richness over time, and just gets better and better. (Honestly, I can't take any more credit than that. Gautschi was right. Life just WANTS to live.)

Of course there are things I CAN'T grow without the major inputs. I can't afford gallons of fish emulsion and greensand and ironite and whatnot--so again, working within my means--this is kind of slow-boat-to-china kind of thing. I bought a 25 lb bag of Austrian winter peas which I plant for cover on all the rows all the time, as much of the season as the plant will permit, and this slowly adds nitrogen and bio matter to the soil.

It takes to brassicas very well, and I've had good luck with squashes of several kinds. Arugula and escarole that you absolutely can't kill even if you wanted to. I plant about four to six perennial trees or other long term things each year, in the inconvenient places of the yard.

The thought has crossed my mind to try to build kind of a chicken penitentiary with double-lined chicken wire walls that are further apart than a raccoon's arm is long. But...you know, that kind of thing just doesn't fit within the day.

So, you take it one day at a time, you know?

If I recall properly, Paul Gaustchi feeds his weeds and veggie scraps to his chickens, then returns manure enriched compost/ soil to the garden. I think Back to Eden will work without chickens, but probably a lot faster with them.

Thanks for this thread.  The first post was joyful to read and it sounds like it was working well.  I'm glad to hear an update even though some of the parts of that "update" must have been quite hard when they were occurring in your life over the years.  Glad you still have permydreams and are doing your best with what you have.  And glad 2 out of the 3 restaurants survived covid restrictions, even though losing the third sucks.

Michael Sohocki wrote:Hi, thanks for your interest. Since that post a lot has happened....
So, you take it one day at a time, you know?

Hey Michael. The restaurant biz is absolutely brutal with razor-thin margins. Most fold. The ridiculous hours kill relationships. If you're still afloat, you must have serious chops.