Last week! (but the composting will continue....)

This week I was not able to do much with the bins as I was incredibly busy. Still, I did help pick up some horse manure with garden club, which I added to the compost bins. Hopefully this will not only add microorganisms to "jump start" the compost, but also it will dry out some of the bins because of all of the shavings in it. Basically the main problems with the bins are the same- they are too wet, have too little material, and the things in them are not broken up enough. To address these issues I added some dried weeds from the garden on top of the manure, and I used a shovel to try to break up some of the bigger things. Sometimes the shovel just seems to pack things down, which is somewhat counterproductive. Thankfully next semester there will be a student worker part of whose job will be to take care of the compost. I just had trouble because it is so time consuming to walk to each bin, especially with a shovel and large bag of manure/dried weeds. If the dried weeds, grass, or leaves were added to the bin more often I think it would help a lot. Plus the bin near MS/HB actually seemed to be doing ok, although it was of course too wet and not quite broken up enough. Hopefully in the future we will have usable compost!