Last December before the price went up I bought 3 sling bags of Vermont Compost. They came today (no it was not poor service – I told them I didn’t need them until February). These are big, heavy bags as you can see by comparison with me standing by them. The shipping paper says 5000 lbs of potting mix. They cost $1098 for the compost and big bags they are in. I don’t know how much more shipping will be, but we paid an extra $60 shipping for a truck with a lift gate. (Update: shipping was $530.) These are too big and heavy for our tractor to offload from a semi. Once down at ground level, the tractor slowly moved them with forks in the pallets under them, but Tony noted the tractor wouldn’t want to take anything much heavier, and he really wouldn’t want to try with them hanging from their top straps and swinging around. Low weight is much safer than high weight, and they might have tipped the tractor forward if we tried to move them by the top slings.
This was the most economical way to get the potting mix, but obviously it is not inexpensive. The non-organic ProMix most folks use would probably have cost about $600 for the same amount, and we could have picked it up bit by bit (3 cubic foot bales) as we needed them. In the past we have driven the pickup over (Vermont Compost is just outside Montpelier), but we could get only a limited amount in a load, and then drove back with the truck’s nose in the air. When we got home we had to shovel it into feed sacks for storage. They do pack the compost in 20 and 60 qt bags, and I know one grower who gets these because he also sells them to gardening customers and can cover his added cost that way. That is tempting. These sling bags are made to be hung from a high, sturdy building. Then one can drive under or put something under to catch compost from the bottom chute of the bag. We don’t have that capability, so they are covered in plastic to stay dry and I will dig it out of the top.But, they are enclosed, in bags – we didn’t have to bag it!
I got two different mixes – one bag of their “Fort Lite” which has more aeration and which fills small “plug trays” more easily, and two bags of their regular Fort V which I can use for making soil blocks and in larger pots. I like soil blocks since they don’t require plastic, but they are slow to make and heavy to move around, and take more care than using the plastic plug trays. Well, the heaviness isn’t a result of being a soil block actually – the compost potting mix weighs a lot more than the commercial ProMix type and we started with solid wood trays to hold them in. It takes a dense mix to form the soil blocks. Even light ProMix type organic potting mixes wouldn’t hold together, and they are at least as expensive as the compost. I am trying regular plastic flats for the soil blocks this year. Considering how many times we move them around, that weight adds up. Chalk it up to getting me in shape early.
I put the link to Vermont Compost in mainly because they have neat photos of their hens on the steaming compost piles. They use chickens for insect control. Since much of the compost is New England Culinary Institute waste, the hens get a good bit of their food from the composting piles.
