Ruth Stout style composting (2 spots) - PEP BB gardening.sand.RuthStout

Thanks, a few more pics of scraps and pics of burying them should do the trick.  

Justyn Mavis wrote:I have a few Ruth Stout Garden Plots through the land. 1. Is at the educational lab, and the others in the gardening zone. Below are pictures of adding food scraps to the educational lab stops. Included in the pictures of 1gal buckets, 5 gal pails.

Here is an update from today. These are both 5gal pails. This is my field Ruth Stout Rows.

Since it is impossible for me to accumulate 10 gallons of kitchen scraps, I will do this in chunks.  In order to not spend weeks doing this to find out I'm doing it wrong I'd like some early input.  I see from the directions that I need to include a picture of the bucket next to the hole, which I didn't remember when I was out there.

The area in question.  If you look closely you'll see the reason why I'm starting over in this area.



A 2.5 gallon bucket with kitchen scraps.  Its not completely full so let's call it 2 gallons.



Dug a hole:



Put scraps in the hole:


Covered the hole back up:



Is that the right track? Thank you.

You're on the right track Rob! You don't even have to dig a hole as long as you cover the surface with some form of mulch.

Yup, and when you do want to post it, please put all the photos in one post so that the approver only has to look through your stuff once.

Because I live alone I can't gather ten gallons of kitchen scraps at one time.  So I have broken it up into five segments.  You will see that each time there is a 2.5 gallon bucket with 2 gallons of scraps in it.  Each time I made a hole in the existing mulch, added in the bucket, then recovered it with mulch.

I had to do this six cups at a time.



So I've collected my photos here: https://permies.com/t/147818/Ash-Ruth-Stout-Composting-BB#1154420

My containers overall mostly had coffee grounds, vegetable scraps, discarded science experiments (i.e. spoiled leftovers), and the occasional donated spoiled produce from friends to whom I've described SKIP.

At first, my mulch was just dirt. Later, I had twigs and leaves, too. (so fancy!)

OK I think I screwed up the directions for documenting this, and now i have to go out and collect all the compost again from under the mulch, put it back in the bucket, etc.  I have pics of the buckets full but not next to the hole opened up, and pics of the hole opened up without the bucket.  And today I learned I am even worse at following directions than I thought was possible for any intelligent life form.  Hm.  The Following Directions airhead badge is next on my list.  I just have some weird mental block here.

I realized my mistake on the one i did today and redid it, so you can see the time-stamps don't quite go in order, because the picture of everything covered over again is right before the picture of me re-dumping the full bucket into the hole.  (It's not that complicated, Josh, how did you ever pass driver's ed?.)

I'm just going to post what I have and see if it's close enough.

My buckets were filled with our own food scraps plus some I got from a neighbor who was no longer able to get them composted (they would go to landfill, thanks Covid-19!).  The scary prickly things are chom-choms or rambutans, my partner is Vietnamese.  Yes, we have a banana tree in zone 6, don't laugh.  It supposedly would fruit in an indoor space with enough sun and maybe some steroids, and we planted it out cause it seemed it would be happier.  Also it makes us look like REAL permaculturists.  Fun fact--you can use the leaves as disposable plates.  You can also see bits of sugar apple in there, the lumpy fruit.  She orders this from the tropics, it doesn't grow around here.  She hates hot weather but can't live without fruits from her home climate, go figure.  Also I was lazy and stored up the second bunch of compost in 2 kitty litter buckets for probably a month while August made me feel like a raisin in the sun, and weirdly maggots and black soldier flies had managed to lay in there!  The white bucket was just about full both times, and it is a 5-gallon bucket as far as I know, standard 5-gal garden bucket.  

Shoot, i left out the 2nd compost bucket before pic when it was actually full.  I can merge this all into one post if it helps, I just am trying to not use the "edit" button because sometimes it says that makes even more work for admins.