Will It Compost? - Palm Fronds
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
- 7 months ago I tried composting palms. Let's see how they look. Studies in Saudi Arabia have shown that it is possible to compost palm and turn it into a coir/peat substitute for potting mix. Read the study scialert.net/f...
Watch previous videos in this series:
• Composting Palm Fronds...
• Make Your Own Peat / C...
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Well that was a great Christmas present I don't really get the obsession with uniform compost... it's like feed the little guys with a banquet then starve them, kill them off by surface application and sunlight. I see no problem with some wood hanging out in the bed for potential fungal food and non broken down mulch as soil insulation and evaporation barrier. It's only if you have a tiny growing space that composting time becomes an issue. Many gardens can afford a quiet long term compost area. Palm fronds make great mulch at the bottom of swales. You can use the swale as a path. Merry Christmas. Love your experiments.
Diego, thx brother. Your engineer brain may save our planet. Absolutely love your podcast
Might be interesting to measure the pH, maybe it is good mulch/compost for blueberries for example, that like more acidic soils, which is often hard to create
I have some land in central Florida that is thick with native trees.. mostly Saw Palmetto palms, Scrub oaks, Pines. If you look at the floor you will see 100s of years of decay over sugar sand. I cleared a 40x40 patch and stacked it 10' high. Because the stack has some sand mixed in so it's rigid and tight now - so rigid I climbed it to take some great pictures of the clearing. It's been 2 months, it's not covered or anything but I'm sure the Florida sun and rain are doing what natures does. My hope is that in like a year it's material that when mixed with the sand will supply nutrients and structure for other species I want to propagate in the perimeter like Yucca Aloifolia and Dracaena Fragrans ..
It's Christmas for me when Mr. D-i-e-g-o releases a new video :D
You're the man Diego!
Thanks Diego. Great stuff as always.
Thanks for the video. Happy holidays!
5:40 or right around there. Time,time,time seems to be an issue with many. In this world of instant gratification folls are unwilling to allow nature to take it's course. I know this. Multiple speices wood chips, Palms included. Roughly 18 months later we had garden gold. The nitrogen was a little to high for some. Hard squash grew vigorously but got bloom rot. Lettuce,Kale,Collards and the like could not have been happier. Thanks again Diego. Merry Christmas.
I absolutely love all of your experiments Diego! This is exactly what I like to do myself. Just keep trying and observe. :)
Roughly six weeks ago had a chip drop delivery. Mostly coconut palm. The trunk, the coconuts you get the picture. After sorting out the bulky stuff laid about foot deep on essentially bare sandy soil. No cardboard no watering before hand. Checked at the ground level the other day. Crazy amount of life. Worms,centipedees bugs galore! No science to back up my theory. Maybe he coconut meat and water had something to with the dramatic increase in life. Wanted to share my observation.
Hehe thanks for the credits. I actually saw people who have machines to turn the palm into smaller parts so it will decompose more. Most of my potting soil is based on it I believe.
Palm fronds work fine. I've used them for years. They are great for getting a pile hot quickly. I don't discriminate. I use oleander too.
I threw some small stumps in with my mostly leaf compost, keep wet and turned, broke down well after about 6 months, very satisfied. I also have cut the palms off the branches and shredded them for mulch, a lot of work but makes a great long lasting mulch.
Nice work, watched several of your vids.......thousands of palm fronds on my 10 acres in Mexico and my simple solution is let goats, sheep and even pet rabbits eat the fronds to give instant animal compost. Obviously the stems are left over which I collect and bury in raised beds (machete off the first 4 or 5 rows of spikes first) .
I found California to be very interesting. I was especially curious about why they grow their shrubbery on top of poles.
That being said, There's no substitute for grinding whatever you are trying to compost as fine as possible from the start. Turning the pile and frequent watering is also very important.
It was interesting to see what a pile will do with no maintenance. Do you consider urea to be an acceptable source of nitrogen?
Great video!
Yes I think i would keep breaking it down as top mulch, wouldn’t plant in it.
If it’s free and doing good for the environment it’s a 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
It's really curious that something like palm fronds would be thought of as "impossible" to break down when what I'm getting from the episode is they are basically equivalent to wood chips from a more "standard" tree, which don't suffer that same misconception. Is it because climates with palms are often drier, so a pile of fronds could last a significant period of time?
Correct, I live more down south than Diego but it's almost the same type of weather, pretty much mediterranean. Here we have a long summer without rain and when it does rain it is often not close together and those are the worst conditions for decomposing organic matter. I have seen palm frond heaps that are just there for years and they barely even break down naturally. Like Diego, you have to put them in a chipper to get the smallest particles size and you have to add water and nitrogen constantly for them to break down correctly. I even prefer to compost inside bins to keep a more stable humidity level since I've had a lot of trouble with compost drying out and that forced me to constantly add water (which is a scarce resource here).
Thanks for sharing the study and this video.
Interesting results. Did you do a 2021 update on this?
I wonder if you could inoculate it with edible mushroom spoor. It would speed up the process I think and maybe get you some food.
Get some magic going.
Makes sense. Some of the most fertile soil in the world are on tropical islands which are primarily palms.
Did you shred the palm fronds? I cut a lot from my grandmother's yard and dug up over 50 palms to build get a garden. I don't want to trash the palms because the berries are medicinal and i was thinking I could use the fronds for bio mass but i wasn't sure how to deal with them.
Yes, they were shredded first. If they weren’t they would take a long long time to break down.
@@DiegoFooter How did you shred them? And what size were the palm particles after shredding?
A landscaper did it using a commercial tow behind shredder. Check out the intimate video to see that starting point.
Just an FYI. Careful with green palm as mulch. They get hot very quickly. They can burn tree trunks if mulched too close. That's the only thing that I've found to keep in mind about using palm as mulch.
I have lots of fronds and a property thats just sand (and a backhoe digger) so going to try just digging a big pit and covering them over to see if it holds the moisture etc to plant fruit trees over. Also want some road kill and charcoal to throw in.
I'm on land in Brazil, and we have SO MANY palm fronds... BUT we are hand-powered and don't have machines to grind the leaves first... any advice for what to do? Make a pile and go at it with machetes? Thank you for any advice you have!
Also, we don't have easy access to rich microbes to add... would yogurt or some other thing we can get at a store work, like maybe burying scrap meat & bones under the pile?
This is great info! thanks so much!
Interesting point, here in my part of CA, same deal Palm fronds are chipped too big to be used in the garden, and landscapers work do it any finer. Id do this to my own fronds but the maintenance and cost of the machinery is too expensive. But if landscapers chipped them small or fine id totally take em. How did you ground them up?
Landscaper dropped them off chipped - it’s my neighbor so it makes it easy. 😉
Thank you sir! How about putting it through the bioreactor?
That has been happening this whole time. Still in there and about 50% broken down.
Everything in nature can be decomposted its Natural
Time plus water do a good microbiology and a new compost
I will Mix it with a other homemade compost a New compost New microbes New fungie
That the best for the garden soil
Merry Christmas Sir Diego 🥂
Can’t find a follow up, how did it turn out how long did it take?
Interested in seeing that seed start test, looks good though even as an additive for a potting mix for drainage an nutrients. I hear palms are high in phosphorus i got a bunch down here in Florida.
After digging through it more I decided the core needed to be composted down more before I could test it with plants. That's happening now.
@@DiegoFooter interested to see this too. I have a few palms on site and they seem to break down when left in a corner of the yard unmanaged. Not like your stuff as I didn’t shred them, they dry out and seem really brittle months later. I imagine they’d compost fine at that stage. As such I mostly use them as feedstock for biochar right now.
Nintendo/Mario bros, Yes! Already had encyclopedia Britannica and Atari.🤣 I digress...Thanks for the video, I wanted to know what happened after all these months. Of course, in retrospect, I wonder how it would compare with a pile inoculated with some compost and another pile with worms plus castings?...easy to ask in retrospect😁. Keep making content! Keep asking questions!....Btw, were you the student in class that relentlessly asked the teacher questions til they had no answer?🤣🤣
Probably! 😂
Diego, how did this soil, mulch, coir work out? Did anything grow in it? I saw another Asia video showing them soak the coir to lower tanin or acidity.
Looks great to me, not sure we have any palms in Latvia :)
What if you added a sugar input, lacto bacillus, and some kind of mushroom slurry then let it cook for a few months out of the sun.
Here at the caribbean is the same have a lot, and breaks really fast
Did you add manure of any kind? That would probably break it down
Maybe the palm would do better at a 50 50 mix in a bioreactor? That is, if the finished product is actually good for plants as you were saying.
You should rename it to, PALM FRONS, Will it COMPOST?
I like it.
Wow the video atcually did really well
I think it looks pretty good...considering what it was...
You mention needing space, could you go up instead of across?
Yes. That’s where the bioreactors fit in.
@@DiegoFooter oh ok, thanks👍
This looks like you unwrapped a NES Power Glove. Looks cool, but in practice just kinda meh-needs more time in development.
Could you try turning it into biochar?
That probably be tough given the difference in particle sizes. You end would probably with a lot of ash. Or would need TLUD setup.
Nothing wrong with an encyclopedia! 😂😂
I hate them, I burn them in my burn barrel then put the ash in my compost.
do the work
Maybe hot composting would have worked better? Or peeing on it
It didn't need pee.