Speakers: Sarah Janson; Kyle Richardson; Brandon Acuff, naturalist, Len Foote Hike Inn
Moderator: None
Duration: ~5:46 (final caption ends at 00:05:46,400)
Series: Master Composter Course
Recording Date: Not stated in source
Sustainability by Design
Sarah Janson: So the Len Foote Hike Inn has been here and officially built since around Halloween of 1998. We started with this idea of eco-friendly building and sustainability in mind. And when we first opened, a lot of the people that were involved were all chosen for their sustainability efforts.
Three Forms of Composting
And so one thing that we knew we wanted to do from the jump was a lot of composting, which we’ve now ended up with three different forms of composting. Two for food and one for human waste.
So we have our composting toilets that run with airflow and bacteria that… It’s a little weird when you sit down and feel a little breeze on you, but it saves us over 200,000 gallons of water every year just by using those. And that breaks down and we can use it as normal compost.
But on the food side, we have two composting systems, worm bins and what’s called an Earth Cube. And between those two, 100% of our food gets composted here on site and then can get distributed throughout all of our native plant gardens.
The Worm Bins Since 1999
So with our worm bins, that was the first one to come in that started in 1999. So pretty close right after we opened, from one of our naturalists. Started with five pounds of worms and got that up and running, and it is still going to this day.
It’s a little bit…not complicated, but every compost bin is very individualized. That it was…it’s been a lot of work in progress being up here. Because of our remote location, some things are different than what you might do at home, but…
Every person that’s come through has just done their own research and we just really focus on our own bin and are able to use a bunch of different food in there to break it down and have some nice compost here.
The Worm Room
Kyle Richardson: Okay, so this is the worm room. We call it that because in these two bins we have about 10,000 red wiggler worms. We use those guys in a process called vermicomposting. Basically the worms are very good at eating the type of food that we have left over from our kitchen. So every couple of days we come down with this bucket, depending on how, you know, full it is.
Feeding the Bins
And we will take our eggshells and our apple cores and our produce. And then we mix together the paper that we use in the office. We shred that. And we dig a trench in here and we feed that to the worms. Then they’ll turn that into compost for us. They leave castings behind after they eat it, and we can take that stuff out and plant it in the garden and it gives all kinds of nutrients back to the soil for our native plants to thrive.
Harvesting the Castings
And then what we’re doing right now in this particular bin, we have stopped feeding it for the next week and we are going to let all the worms migrate to one side and then we will dig up the other side and we will have fresh compost. We’ll lay it out on the tarp, separate out the bits that haven’t been composted yet, and then let that dry. We take it out to the garden and plant it, and that gets our garden going strong again.
Now the worms don’t eat everything we produce. They don’t do well with dairy products or proteins, and we take that and the rest of our food up to the Earth Cube, along with our coffee grounds, and other things, and that’s how we process the rest of our food waste.
So as long as we are being vigilant about having clean plates at dinner, we’re able to compost 100% of our food right now and the worms are a huge part of that.
The Native Plant Gardens
Brandon Acuff: Alright, so my name is Brandon. I’m a naturalist with the Hike Inn and I’m showing you the end result of all of our composting efforts. Our native Georgia plant life.
We take all the compost that we get from our worms, from our Earth Cube. We take it, we treat it, we bring it out here, and it really gives us some amazing blooms throughout the year. And the public, you know, we try hard to talk about clean plates being sustainable and try not to waste food or waste water.
The Clean Plate Chalkboard
And we keep track of that information on our chalkboard in our dining hall that has smiley faces and frowny faces based on how our guests do on our clean plate plan. So that will, at the end of the dinner service, we gather everybody’s plates, look at the scraps, and depending on how the group does, we’ll see what we do. They get a smiley face or a frowny face.
So we keep track of that information. We talk about that information during the tour. And then we post that information after dinner and after breakfast to let people know that they did a great job on food waste. But any of that food waste that we end up getting, we compost and it ends up going into our gardens for all of our plants to enjoy.
What the System Has Meant
Sarah Janson: So overall, at the Hike Inn, the composting has been a huge part of who we are and what we are. It has really grown throughout the years, from starting with just one small worm bin to now two worm bins and an Earth Cube, and we are extremely proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish and we really love to advertise that to people. And it always warms our heart when we hear back from old guests and volunteers that they saw our system and went home and started it themselves.
Advice for Starting Your Own
So it’s always possible and we always encourage people to try it yourself and don’t give up immediately. You know, it’s a work in progress system, but once you get it up and going, it will really help a lot of people, different parts of your own household and your life. It just becomes part of the day-to-day.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Master Composter Course Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_HikeInnCompost.srt (18 blocks)