L Faye

Rebecca Norman wrote:For your purpose, if you want finished compost, I think you might have good results mixing it a second time with more hops slurry and coffee grounds after the first round has cooled down. Especially if you are using shavings rather than sawdust, this might be necessary. You'll do a first round, learn and change your method, and eventually you'll have a lot of compost. Might take a couple years to get there, though, if you're using wood shavings.

Thank you so much for your input :) hearing how long it takes this stuff to break down for you in a humanure situation was a bit of an eye opener for me, so I really appreciate you giving me a bit of a starting recipe to modify off of as I go.

Currently about 32 cubic feet of the wood shavings, and I'm going to bring in more hop slurry once I've figured out how I'm ultimately going to use it. It's a pretty intense smell and I have close neighbors so I want to try everything out in small batches first. The hops are pretty much unlimited, though, I'm surrounded by breweries.

I like your idea of treating it and then using it as a reusable mulch, kind of a more biologically active micro-woodchip. I'll try out some treatment options over the next few weeks and report back

I have access to hardwood shavings and hop slurry, and am hoping to combine them for composting. Weeds and kitchen scraps will also be included, and I can source coffee grounds from a local business, so it won't only contain hardwood shavings/sawdust as the solids in the pile. But around 90% of the pile will be fine woody material saturated with hop slurry.

I mixed up a trial pile at around 2 cubic feet (inoculated with some mostly finished compost), and 3 days in it is steaming when turned and has my yard smelling like an IPA. So that makes me think that it can hopefully turn into compost on a reasonable timeline, but will the lack of diversity in the inputs cause issues down the line? I'm considering attempting to use some of the bags of wood shavings as human-sized mushroom grow bags as a sort of value adding/pre composting step, but mycology has never been my strong suit.