Caba, PH – Compost manufacturing – 1 May 2013

The new compost manufacturing building, which Quest built, is delivering a number of quality and productivity benefits.  It enables the compost piles to get hotter because of the metal roof and reduced ventilation, which produces better quality compost because it kills off the un-wanted bacteria and produces final compost after only six weeks.  It also takes less time once a week to turn the compost piles from one pen to the next, and protects the compost from flooding during the rainy season.

The first harvest produced 250kg and the second increased to 290kg when the team increased the amount of raw material they included in the batch.  The third harvest was 260kg.  The garden shop uses 10kg of compost per 1 meter x 6 meter bed when building the organic vegetable gardens, so one batch is enough for two gardens of 12 beds each.

Well done to the Quest and Happy Shine shop teams who collaborated to design and construct the building with help from Michael Foster when he very kindly visited as a volunteer from the UK in March to assist Cora, Quest and the Happy Shine Shop.