Do You Sterilize Your Compost?

DrFever said:

mellow i think you need to put it in paint on your computor then click url and post it here not sure

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thanks DrF.... i entered the title and authors into "scholarly articles" on google and it spit out an online url for me.

malignant said:

I think you guys have me sold, I'm going to build a bin too, but Endur brings up a good point, do other types of worms produce more or richer castings? Or does it not make a difference?

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Not much of a difference IMO. It all depends on what you feed them. Better food=better castings.

AFA type, I have 2 bins, one of red wigglers and one of european nightcrawlers. They are both the same family, Eisenia. Fetida are the red wigglers and Hortensis are the Europeans.

I started the euros mainly for fishing bait, but I'm really liking the action in the bin from them with my bedding. They go deeper top to bottom and seem to burrow more. The RW tend to hang at the top and if food gets buried .........

The RW are supposed to be a bit faster composting, but not so much faster that it's really noticeable to me. But, I just harvest the entire bin every 3 months or so and get ~ 10 gallons of vericompost, mostly castings from each bin. Enough to make ~8cf of my mix.

Wet

Great post! Red Wigglers seem common, great reproducers.

It's important to let the compost to go a long time, like 9-12 months. Ideally the heap is located above fertile ground so worms can finish it off. Or alternatively let it go one month then feed it to a worm bin and let them sterilize it.

If you're hot composting, you'll kill off everything inside but you could be done in a month. Cold composting takes forever, but you'll have worms, etc.