I've always been taught you should never mulch citrus. the ground from the trunk to the drip line should be clear, even of grass, and never put anything right up next to the trunk. Of course, I was also told only to fertilize them three times a year in huge amounts, which didn't work with mine. I started fertilizing a little bit every month, and they finally started bearing, but then it seemed there was either a windstorm that blew off the blossoms or a cold snap that froze the fruit, so I finally gave up on them.

As for the swimming pool bins, without browns, all that stuff just rots, it doesn't compost, especially if it's sitting in water, and it breeds mosquitoes too. If I were you, I'd try some direct composting with that stuff, or trench composting. That's what I do, and it works fine.

I can't advocate for the permaculture movement, since I've only been touching on certain areas of permaculture for a few years and haven't went full-force into it. They seem to believe that chop-n-drop is good for everything. I'm having less luck with it than many food forest people claim to have. Maybe in the long run, I'll have a different opinion about it.

My swimming pool bins either don't have have a liner in them, for the leaf mould swimming pool bin, or have drainage holes in them, for the kiddie pool compost bins. So, there's no problem with flooding or mosquitoes. They do get brown materials, just not as much as I'd like. About once a week, I add peanut shells to them, and every once in awhile, I get paper shredder happy, or I pick up some small twigs or brown leaves or dried grass and throw it on top. About twice daily, I add coffee grounds. However, the green to brown ratio is still not to my liking, as I've said. For a larger bin, I'd put more browns in it. That's the plan, to learn and evolve.

Another thing is that, as I add more livestock to the mix, like rabbits, horses, cows, chickens, and maybe turkeys or something, a lot of those animals will take care of a large portion of those extra green materials, and it may all balance itself out in the end.

Impressive work!

I cold compost in a cylinder of hardware cloth - about 4' tall & about as wide. It's mainly kitchen scraps, paper (lots of paper towels from work) & yard waste (minus the worst weed seeds). Every few seasons, I just remove the cylinder & move it to a new spot & transfer all the un-broken-down stuff from the top to the new bin location & use the pile of compost found underneath, sometimes I screen it, sometimes I don't.

Since it's cold composted, I don't use it for mulch or top dressing unless screened, but put it in planting holes or otherwise cover it somehow to prevent any undigested seeds from germinating. I also make tea w/ it.

FWIW, I had a large galvanised tub of shredded yard waste (I have an electric chipper/shredder) left sitting out since last Fall, which has become rich black humus all by itself.

Instead of cows, you could have milk goats. Something like Nubians, Kinders, or Nygerians. Some people are now raising mini-Nubians in the Gainesville area.

Goats make good manure for gardens and it can go right on the garden just like rabbit manure does. You could also get milk for yogurt, some kinds of cheeses, and to make soap. They don't eat as much as cows or need as much space. That said, I still want to get a little jersey heifer to raise someday. There are so stinking cute!!

Hi

I started what was supposed to be a "compost" bin from left over materials when I rebuilt the above ground water garden . 4x8 foot buried about a foot so is around two feet total depth. Lined it with weed block Started with mostly yard trimmings then the kitchen leftovers then added soils from repottings.

Has been interesting to watch it evolve over time . Most interesting to me is that it is still not full after around 5 years even though when I add materials easily two feet over the edge within around two months it drops way down averages around a foot low. even the potting soils drop. It is never going to be full lol

Second is the earthworms ,millipedes gazillions of them and I thought originally I was going to have to put them as the bottom is closed

Weeds are not nearly the problem I thought they would be in spite of the rich soil that has evolved though it's an almost magic seed bed. Also has an incredible ability to absorb and hold water though never becomes muddy

And last it does NOT cause palm fronds to decay in spite of chopping them up which was the main purpose I built it lol gary

The other day, I bought a cubic yard of compost from a pretty distant composting yard. At this place, you can actually see their compost piles, which seems to amount to 99% trees and tree prunings and probably 1% mostly bagged leaves and maybe occasionally produce waste. I didn't see any fruit or veggies in the piles but did see a peach pit and watermelon seed during shoveling it out. There is a lot of wood pieces in it too. While the look of the compost didn't impress me, it did had a sponginess to it, and a very slight stickiness. I'm not sure if it was worth $15 in the gas tank and a few hours of driving to get, but I guess we'll see how it does this season, as I put it on all of my fruit trees, vegetable gardens, and just planted a bunch of soybeans in my new raised bed. which is where the majority of the compost was placed.

I have to find more ways to produce more compost in the future, for sure.

Permaculture is a long game, and chop and drop is to build soil slowly. I've seen permaculture work, then I've seen it go horribly wrong. I'm sort of a "let nature take its course" person. I don't worry about composting. I just drop it all on the ground like nature would do and let it turn into whatever it turns into. It seems to work o.k. I'm not trying for prize-winning plants or veggies. I just want to not have to weed, water or fertilize. I call it "lazy gardening."

I've decided to transform the leaf mould bin into a compost bin sooner rather than later. Instead of emptying out all of the leaves, I've started incorporating grass clippings and kitchen/garden scraps into the bin, making sure it gets a good green/brown ratio. Over time, by turning the existing brown materials in with the new green materials, it should make good compost. The negative about this is that I won't be able to use this stuff for about two years, when I could have actually collected leaf mould in one year. The positive is that compost is more nutrient rich but can also be used the same way, as a top dressing or mulch, for water retention and weed suppression, but giving those plants a boost that leaf mould may not do. I'll work green materials in for about a year (or unless we get it so full that it absolutely can't hold any more) then setup another swimming pool composter up. On appx April 2018, the plan is to collect compost from the first bin. On appx April 2019, I'll collect compost from the 2nd bin. Then, April 2020, from the first bin, and on and on.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly building up a small farm, with rabbits, cows, chickens, and eventually, ducks, possibly turkeys, etc. Rabbit poop = instant garden fertilizer + worm food, for vermicomposting, to collect worm castings for the garden, and the worms themselves could feed some fish, for a future aquaponics setup. Cow, chicken, duck, and turkey poop will be composted. As of right now, it's all about slowly moving forward, to try to obtain a balance, where everything works together.

You're heading in the right direction. You can speed up the composting of the leaf mould by adding shovelful or two of dirt and some nitrogen fertilizer to feed the bacteria. I used lawn fertilizer at my old place, and it worked well. The bacteria eat it all up, so it doesn't hurt anything. If you don't want to use chemical fertilizer, plain household ammonia is actually a very good nitrogen fertilizer. I know you've said you don't want to turn the pile, but that really does help speed up decomposition. This is a good tutorial for making a 3-bin system with pallets

3-bin Compost System

I can't see it being easy turning a swimming pool this size full of composting materials, and when I setup the second compost 'bin' next year, it's going to be 16' round. When the first bin is done composting, it'll too expand out to 16' round. All I can do is turn it at the top.

As far as ammonia or fertilizer go, I'll be using my homemade coffee brew, a small amount of compost from my other bins, and maybe occasionally, homemade potash. Poultry droppings will probably heat up the bed a bit as well.

Within the last two or three days, I put in about 150+ gallons of grass clippings, and that was just raking up small areas where the grass hilled up after mowing. When I actually get a grass catcher, I should get a lot more.

Just moved about 200 lbs of active compost from one of my smaller compost bins to the larger swimming pool bin that I was initially going to do leaf mould in. This introduced a huge amount of worms into the new bin and will allow me to continue to throw kitchen scraps in the smaller bin until it's full or overflowing and then just dump a large load on the larger bin, as needed. It'll be easier doing this than to go all the way to the larger bin every time a 1 gallon bucket of scraps are emptied out. It's also going to be a lot easier to balance out any green/brown ratio issues like this, as I can mix in shredded paper or brown leaves with my potato fork, until I can find a nice (hopefully metal handled) pitchfork at a yard sale or flea market for cheap.

Well, Sultry_jasmine_nights, I got some goats... lol

From left to right, we have a 3 month old Swiss Alpine/Nubian cross female, a 4 month old Swiss alpine male, and a 9 week old Nigerian dwarf male. The alpine/Nubian mix came straight from a small family dairy/farm. It's sad, because this couple got the dream property and farm they always wanted, but a myriad of illnesses (the people, not the animals) has pretty much forced them to sell the majority of their stock. They were selling 3 month olds, 8-10 month olds, and also the milkers they've 'trained' to be comfortable around milking. I'm not sure how hard it is to train a goat to milk, but the lady told me that you have to start young and have a lot of physical contact with them, to get them comfortable with you doing it, and at the same time, warned me that if I tried to make a puppy dog-type pet out of it, it may not ever breed for me, because they create a bond with humans and not other goats. She tried to talk me into getting an older one that was already trained, but they were about 3x the price, and I don't really have any way to haul a 150 pound goat.

As you can imagine, I've been super busy with all of the farm animals and gardening, erecting fences, and before fall gets here, I'll have to get another pen ready, to separate the boys from the girls. I'll probably get a Nigerian female before then, so that each pen has two goats and they won't try to hurt themselves for being lonely.

Awww they're all so cute!! You are gonna have your hands full with all those baby goats. They are so cute and funny always getting into trouble lol. The alpine/nubian should give you a lot of good milk when she's older. If you do get a nigerian baby girl, you should probably only breed her to the dwarf male so the babies aren't too large for her to birth. Make your males' pen farther away from your house lol...they can get very smelly when sexually mature lol. U could pick one male for your breeder and castrate/band the other one as a wether as a companion for your female. Sometimes males are kept by themselves...they will mate anything that is in there with them and even do odd things to themselves and even pee in their own mouths and squirt it all over themselves to make themselves "smelly" for the girls LOL!

My family use to raise goats in the late 80s. My father acquired a billy goat that stunk up the whole neighborhood. He was nasty, constantly peeing on his own face. The strange thing was that there were no females around, but I guess some go in rut even without a female around. So, he borrowed a livestock trailer from a local horse dealer, to get the goat back to its original owner. When he brought the trailer back to the guy, we heard about it for a long time, how it stunk up his trailer. lol

But anyway, I'm definitely not going to breed a Nigerian female to a full size male. I'll probably breed the swiss alpine to the apline/nubian mix, and possibly later on, the Nigeian male to the alpine/nubian, to create a mini dairy goat with slightly more butterfat in its milk.

Thats a funny story about the trailer. I went to the farmers market one time quite a big place. Soon as we pulled in we could smell something rank. Turns out someone had a billy goat in a trailer, tryingvto sell it, at the very back of the place prob more than an acre away lol..

The compost pile is working fast now. It seems to be falling about 12" a day, since I've been adding cow and rabbit manure in it, along with a small amount of duck and goat manure. If it works any faster, I'm not going to be able to keep up.

Does anyone know the conversion rate of cow manure from cows that are eating grains and grass to finished compost?