Growing Great Compost

Everything you need to know about the art of making compost

What you’ll learn
How to make high quality compost
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Description
A workshop for those of you wishing to reconnect to the natural world and those of you wanting to ensure your daily actions contribute to a regenerative process for life on earth.

Includes over 2 hours in videos, the Koanga Composting Booklet and a generous database with design plans and all the references needed to enable you to make compost capable of growing soil, nutrient dense food and reversing climate change.

The understandings and skills Kay Baxter has built over many years of working in this field are now available in a affordable and easy to access online workshop.

Episode 1 – Introduction

Hear Kay’s compost story, failures and success.

Learn about why bought fertiliser is not a sustainable or regenerative option for medium term or long term.

Learn about Koanga’s goals for composting.

Learn how humus slowly builds naturally in the forest at air temperature.

Learn how to speed up our soil building potential by making compost and working with heat.

Understand the ‘laws of nature’’ (principles of science) around making successful compost.

Understand why metabolic and structural carbon make up 90% of the volume of a Koanga Best Practice compost heap and what the characteristics of these carbon forms are.

Learn how different carbon forms affect our compost making process.

Understand why making a compost heap with material that comes from your own garden will almost inevitably be recycling deficiencies, and why that does not build soil.

Learn why it is critical to add minerals if we wish to grow soil and nutrient dense food.

Understand which minerals are missing in most NZ soils and where to find them

Episode 2 – Koanga’s Heap

Watch the Koanga Garden Crew make a heap in the Thorny Croft seed garden, using the principles you learned in the first episode.

See how we build a heap from beginning to end using Environmental Fertilisers minerals as our added minerals to build soil and high BRIX seeds.

See the quantities of minerals added for this size compost heap.

Understand that building amazing compost is something anyone can do.

Episode 3 – The Design Process

Know the appropriate amount of compost to apply to your garden beds.

Understand how compost made with different ratios of Nitrogen and Carbon affect the quantity of humus produced.

Learn the difference in quality and quantity of production made possible with different Carbon and Nitrogen ratios.

Learn to design your gardens to ensure you are able to produce the amount of compost you require to be building soil and growing high quality vegetables.

Learn what compost crops are and how much carbon is in the various crops so that you can make informed choices.

Learn about how big your garden needs to be in order to produce enough carbon for your compost to be building your garden soil.

Learn what to do if you have a small garden that is not big enough to produce all the carbon you need to make a minimum size compost heap.

Episode 4 – Materials

Watch Bob and Kay collecting and making the ingredients for a compost heap on their house site using only locally sourced materials to provide the minerals required.

Learn how each input is chosen and what it will offer to the compost heap, and what other options might be.

Inputs include bone and shell ash, biochar, seaweed, clay, comfrey, alfalfa, and carbon from the garden including corn, chia and buckwheat.

Episode 5 – Kay’s Compost

Watch Kay and Vitor making a compost heap using the above inputs in Kay’s garden (including large corn stalks) with no chopping or machinery involved.

Receive lots of confidence and reinforcement that we can all do this easily in our own gardens and get excellent results if we follow the principles learned in Ep. 1

Episode 6 – Observation

Learn the importance of building a relationship with your living alchemical compost heap and how to do that, using all of your senses…. Observation skills.

Understand the usefulness of recording information about your compost heap using the form provided in the database.

Reinforce that achieving our compost goals is dependant on following the pattern language described in Ep. 1

Learn ways to manage your compost to a successful end result and what to do if you end up with an anaerobic heap, or a heap that gets too hot.

Understand the three stage that a compost heap goes trough.

Learn how to regulate the moisture levels in your heap

Understand what happens if the compost heap heats up too much or if it doesnt heat up at all

Episode 7 – Chicken Compost

Learn that there are other ways of making compost but that the ‘laws of nature’ around building humus still hold

In this episode you will watch Kay creating a situation for her chickens to make compost in the chicken house

Learn the key things to keep in mind to ensure this method is capable of being useful in the garden or forest garden

Who this course is for:
Gardners