Monday 6 November 2017

Folk Festival Compost

Last year the Community Garden offered to help the Yack Folk festival 'Green Team' manage the folk festival waste.
The green Team have put a lot of work, over several years, into reducing the Folk Festival environmental footprint. They've installed solar electricity to offset the power used during the festival, encouraged food vendors to use compostable or reusable containers and arranged for waste to be sorted so less ends up in landfill. Small amounts of organic waste have been collected for composting.


For the March 2017 Festival the team wanted to take the waste one step further and compost as much of the organic waste as possible right here in Yackandandah. That's where the Community Garden got involved.
The organic waste was put through a power shredder - food waste, including one wheelie bin nearly full of bones, cups, paper plates and cardboard boxes. We ended up with a trailer full of shredded raw material which then went into the Community Garden compost tumbler with some cow manure and enough water to help the bugs start the composting process.




 All winter Doug W. has been carefully tending to the compost, turning the tumbler regularly and adding water when it looked dry. All that waste paper and food scraps has matured into lovely rich looking black compost and is ready to feed the gardens.
I knew that compost reduced in volume as it went through the process but we were amazed to find that an entire trailer load of material has reduced down to just 2 wheel barrows of finished compost.




Here you can see how good this compost looks.


The cricket club assure us the cups they used are supplied as biodegradable but there's still quite a lot of pieces that have not broken down yet. We'll need to talk to the supplier and check what those cups are made from.










Some of our Folk Festival compost has been spread around the new summer plantings at the Community Garden.









Folk Festival compost feeding the new tomatoes (left), eggplants and cucumbers (below) at the Community Garden.



















































We've also kept some of this great compost to see how it grows seedlings and some to show off at the festival of Dangerous Ideas in Yackandandah on Friday December 1st. Look for the Green Team/Community Garden site while you're there and see how good Folk Festival Organic waste can look when we make an effort.







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