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It's always a great time to start using the HOTBIN Mega compost bin on your allotment
• Compost within 90 days, all year round
• Excellent quality compost
• Option to make Biochar Super Compost
• Space saving - replace 3-4 pallet frames, 12-16 ‘daleks’, more space for growing
• Kills weed seeds
• No turning
• Year round performance
• Large volumes of green waste (i.e. plant material)
• Often large pieces of plant material and not easy to shred or chop
• Lots of the same item at one time – e.g. clearing out potato crop, end of tomato season, end of cabbages
• Longer season – stretching through winter (e.g. brassicas)
• Existing composting tends to be incomplete and takes a long time
• Often lots of weeds – normal ‘cold’ composting won’t kill weed seeds
It’s straightforward
• Put the bin together as per the instructions. (Remember to take the charcoal out of the bag and add it loose into the tray in the lid)
• Gather your waste vegetables, weeds etc. Preferably shred and chop it up
• Load the waste in, put the lid on and wait for the temperature to rise!
• If you are making biochar super compost – sprinkle the composting agent onto the compost waste each time you add more waste
• Note: On first use, you need to get the bin 1/3 full before it will kick into the hot zone
• Thereafter you need to add 20Kg (a full wheelbarrow) each week to maintain the hot zone.
• On first use, sprinkle in some old compost on new waste to add microbes and ensure a fast start
• Keep going until full
Take off the ratchet straps. Lift up one of the wall panels away from the base. You need to lift before you attempt to push out the panel as the wall panel ‘interlocks’ with the base. See our blog
Yes preferably chop. Composting is always faster to get going if you shred and chop waste. There is more surface area for microbes to attack and you are giving them easy access. The outer peel and stems are designed to protect against microbes – the chopped surface has no protection. (Think of this as infection in open wounds vs unbroken skin).
With allotments, if there is no shared shredder, chopping is often just too time-consuming. If you don’t chop, then gently push down the waste so pieces are sitting next to each other. Also, factor into your expectations: you add a solid Brussels sprout stem – it is going to take longer to compost (even at 60C) than a chopped-up stem.
With most allotment waste, the waste will have near-perfect ratios and there is no need to worry or check.
If you are adding high carbon items like wood chip, straw and sawdust they will need balancing with high nitrogen waste like grass, weeds or chicken poo and vice versa.
Don’t over worry if you do not have enough to keep it running at 60C. When you add waste, it will quickly heat up again. You may find it useful to look at our hints and tips and “routines”. You will quickly establish which option works for you.
If this is the first time using a HOTBIN, it will be worth holding onto a sample of your old compost and taking some notes so you can compare it to the HOTBIN compost.
When you empty the HOTBIN, might we suggest you have a look back at the information on your old compost? If you have a sample, take a handful, dampen it and roll it into a ball in your hand. Do the same with new compost. Now leave both in sun to dry. If you have a nice full day at the allotment, come back every 3 hours and prod them. One will dry out faster than the other into a brown friable pile. You can find out more about types of compost colloidal humus here.
The 450 and 700 litre bins look about the same size as a pallet frame bin compost bin. But that’s where things end - do not be put off if you have 3,4, or 6 pallet frame bins. The Mega bin hot composts at 40-60C and will churn through waste 4-32 times faster than a bin in ambient air (the exact speed depends on what you add).
A large pallet frame when full will get hot, but it is likely to only stay hot for few days and the outer layer will not get hot. You will need to turn the outer material several times to get it all composted. Why not have a no turn system and spend all the extra hours growing lovely vegetables.
No dig requires compost. Usually it is recommended to add this as a top covering.
There is a widely held belief that earth worms and insects will pull compost down into the soil and eat it. There are videos showing worms pulling down leaves. To a small degree yes, earthworms will eat leaves, but they have no large mouths or teeth; they feed on the soft mushy outer edges that the microbes have already started to digest. The bits pulled down still need to be decomposed by microbes and fungi. If your soil is in good condition and has lots of worms, they will take down small bits of well matured compost faster than rough mulching compost.
Most of the root activity is under the surface around 5-10cm in the so called Rhizosphere. If you are NO-DIG, here’s what we recommend:
Spread the compost as normal in a 5-10cm layer. Water it in using a hose pipe and copious amounts of water (subject to hose pipe bans etc). Don’t be afraid to really pour it on – your goal is to wash all the really beneficial small particles of humus of the larger bits and down into the soil.
A lot of compost comes out of cold heaps only partially degraded. Large bits of compost on the surface dry out. With hot composting (and especially hot composting with the biochar composting agent), you get far more complete breakdown. In our recent tests of ‘flushing’ we found only 10% of the original compost was left on the surface – this is against 50-60% of the usual compost we purchased (after washing, it was clear just how much wood chip was in the compost!)
Like all gardening there are pros and cons of each method.
From our perspective here are some of the cons:
• This is a form of ‘cold’ composting. By this we mean is the compost pile temperature follows the ambient air/soil temperature so in the UK5-15C which means the composting process is slow.
• You lose a large area of ground while the process takes place.
• In winter, when the temperature of soil falls below 5C, the microbes stop working.
• Weed seeds are rarely killed in cold composting.
• There is no science behind layering, it is a compost myth. Microbes cannot jump between layers. If they need more nitrogen (from the greens) it is inaccessible in the layer above (browns, high carbon). There are thousands of large scale compost sites all over the world composting millions of tonnes of plant waste (the UK process about 15 million tonnes into 5 million tonnes of compost a year). We do not know a single site that uses layering – they all shred and mix.
What it is hot composting and the benefits of using this method
Post By Tony Callaghan On 21/03/2022
SoilFixer Compost Activator (Humification Agent) Spring stock now available &nbs..
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