I am thrilled to introduce my featured guest today on a webinar by John Lee Dumas and the guy hosting the webinar wanted a business example and she explained she sold compost tumblers and I was able to connect with her and today here is her husband Java from Java’s Compost!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I live in the NE my wife and I and our 3 children

NE region of NJ

we own a little company called Java’s compost

Java’s Compost Service

we basically offer 2 services

one is a do it yourself option

basically the do it yourself option

we have a starter kit

set up

a set of items that a backyard or home composter might want

keep things simple

We want to set up a system for people. A lot of times when your steps are not clear, its easy to get in your compositing efforts. At some point the system breaks down

The system

includes a tumbler

includes a square rectangle shaped bucket that its easily in the sink or a corner or someplace

and a counter top

all optional

if someone says, I have a composter already in the backyard, we will work with whatever system they have or whatever they want

Compost Orientation

Also, we have an option for an orientation where we go over the

dos and don’ts in your backyard

what can you compost

what are the important steps

the recipe

so people are well educated or better educated

they know what whatever happens you can always remedy your system

Things that can come up can be

smell or pests

dy

full

I love this because one I am building a garden course, and I feel like the first step is building compost and people are like ick, no, but I love the orientation idea I think you should have a compost orientation webinar.

Compost Orientation Webinar: we have been talking about for a while

how can we digitize this whole thing where we have the resources that we make available for a broader audience

strategies

techniques

etc

we haven’t had time to get around to it,

definitely

god willing

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Well you know interestingly I don’t have a ton of gardening experience, but my first exposure was as a small boy. I grew up in San Francisco CA I was about 15, w

when I was about 4-5 years old we had this backyard area

my mother when she was in her late teens lived on a farming commune in West VA

She picked up some farm-gardening experience and she decided to plant some simple vegetables

go out there occasionally

I don’t remember specifically what she grew tomatoes or anything

I thought this is pretty neat, I remember I didn’t know you could grow food in your backyard. Most kids grow up and think you get food at your local market

That was my first exposure.

We had some family friends in northern California, and they had a small homestead, and that was a very powerful experience

I think we only went up there once or twice but it left a lasting impression

animals they were managing

They were doing all the things a homestead does

churning their own butter

cream

do those things

gardening

basic animal husbandry

the beauty

magical most of that

really stuck with me

Over the course of time, it’s been mostly circumstances or time that has allowed us to do some gardening, or prevented us from doing as much as we like

Those are  my early experiences  to growing your own food and a little bit of self sufficiency

To be perfectly honest, I still feel like I am about as close to doing all of that as I was when I was 5-6, as far as being able to spend chunk of time doing any of these things

that is our hope to do more of that in the future

We did have some time, when we lived in a different town and the kids were  much younger

joined the community garden

having

bring my boys down there

manage my plot

when everything was really popping

beets were coming up

string beans

cabbage

tomatoes

all these beautiful things.

magic of seeing that stuff on your kitchen table

everybody was impacted

new town we haven’t been able to start it yet, but again, god willing we will be able to that’s one of our goals.

But what I love about that is you’re actually talking about exactly what I think is important that even though you’re not ready to garden now, you’re figuring out the compost part before you get to garden.

I’m trying really hard not to interrupt because I was actually interviewed the other day and realized what people are talking about.

so the full service where we provide the same kit,

you get

• a tumbler
• a bucket
• bin

we take care of the composting

the only thing the family does if they want the full service option is they scrape their plates and clean out their fridges , whatever they are doing in the bucket we provide them

That bucket is put out once a week similar to their garbage, and we bring it around back on their property, and manage everything on their property and they get 100 of the finished material with minimal work. That’s the full service option

you can get a significant amount of material that way.

Full service

• a tumbler
• a bucket
• bin
• we take care of the composting
• manage everything on their property
• they get 100 of the finished material with minimal work.

4-5 member family

You’re producing upwards of 5 gallons or more a week, you’re filling up your bucket to the top

that’s over a 1000 lbs of food scraps every year for that family

you break it down

ends up being somewhere between

200-250 lbs of composting material per person

which is actually the EPA average that they have listed on their website

for food waste per person

When we’ve done data collection we come up just about their number

@241 lbs per person

our numbers come up about the same.

so you can get a lot of material

In the end you come up anywhere between 5-6-700 lbs of material a family would have at their disposal

they can put compost material on their

• vegetable garden
• landscaping
• lawn application

we can do that as well

landscaping application

do that as well

I wish you were here, my mom’s neighbors could use that. Your pictures are so gorgeous and the things are clean

Do you mix it in with grass clippings etc? Leaves, how does that work?

what we

the tumbler that we use fro the most part

Jora form composter

that the manufacturers recommended carbon input or dry material is wood pellets

used for horse bedding

it’s a soft wood, I believe it’s pine

collected at lumber yards

from the sawdust

pelletize it

incredibly effective

very efficient

that’s the carbon input that we put in to every batch that we put into the composters

Every week this is what we do

this is what we tell the diy customers

work out your ratios before hand,

fill up the first fraction of the bucket

1/4 or 1/5 of the way with the wood pellets

that changes the ratio, typically you look on line, you do some reading

if you look online the ratio is typically 2-3 one

dry to wet

browns to greens

you typically have more of your carbon rich material then your nitrogen rich

because it’s pelletized

but when you’re using the wood pellets

moisture it expands

In the brochure, it says something like,

carbon-nitrogen

dry-wet it’s only 1-10 when you’re using the wood pellets which is a significant reversal the extreme

normal carbon material that you put in

it expands a lot typically we don’t go with 1-10 we go with 1-4 or 1-5

we have found that when a family is just starting out we encourage them to use more then less, start out with 25% of your bucket with wood pellets for the first two weeks

2nd two weeks so 20%

then scale back you can use less and less, so you are dealing with smaller ratios

once you get a good healthy

that will help element odors sand pests etc.

very effective way of managing your compost bins

wood chips in our own composting efforts over the years we have used a mix of wood chips and pellets

years ago we would save up our paper bags from local grocery store

every couple of weeks, I would go through and spend 12 hour 40 minutes, shredding paper bags and adding that to the compost bin but when you have a ready supply of wood chips or pellets it makes it easier to manage the labor you have to put into

only down part

the more labor intensive dry material

more

the free dry material

• paper bags
• junk mail

more labor intensive

super simple material requires a little more to access you either have to find a

• tree guy
• neighbor who just took a tree down,
• wood chips
• tree taken down
• or pay for wood pellets

pros and cons and all the different options

a lot of times

different carbon sources and components

all the options

in this day and age

people are so busy they just go with the one that’s simplest

least amount of labor

as you said earlier or maybe it was on your website, they’re already buying this and spending money on it.

do you want to tell people what it looks like? Because I’ve been to the website and seen it.

dEsigned in Sweden but it’s manufactured in China, around 1992?1994

There was some claim to them being the first or if not the first

the original tumbler

whether they were one of the first or just t created a really nice version

it s a very

created a really nice version

nice looking piece of equipment

• galvanized steel
• weather resistant paint
• olive green color
• insulation

styrofoam ~ polyethylene=food grade styrofoam

not polystyrene is the stuff outlawed in CA for use n outlawed for use with food materials

not a harmful material

in terms of the design

it’s simple to manage

the turn on it is super easy

used many different types of tumblers

old tumblers

difference between these different models

there’s so many ways to compost