purpleinopp said:Unless you added "poison," there's none there. It's just stinky anaerobic (w/o air) decomposition. ... As soon as your stuff dries out, the odor should be gone.
Tiffany, in another thread, someone else and I were calling the anaerobic fermentation products "toxic", or at least bad for the root hairs.
I think the alcohols, organic acids and other fermentation products and anaerobic microbes ARE bad for plants until they have been oxidized (composted aerobically) or very greatly diluted into soil that is, itself, aerobic.
True, "poison" and "toxic" are emotionally loaded words.
And I want to repeat myself from other threads: the problem with letting compost or soil get "too wet" is not really the water, by itself. The problem is that the water fills any air space that is small enough for a capillary film to fill it. Those "air spaces" need to be mostly empty of water and full of air so that oxygen outside the pile can diffuse into the pile.
If you can punch BIG holes into the pile, water can't fill those holes, and air can at least reach parts of the pile within, say, 1" of a big hole. Beyond that, microbes will consume the oxygen faster than it can diffuse through WET spaces.
Once the pile is dry enough that even small channels dry out and air fills them, oxygen will diffuse RAPIDLY through those small channels and aerate ALL of the pile.
Oxygen diffuses so fast through gases that it seems instantaneous.
Oxygen diffuses so slowly through water (that isn't stirred) that it hardly seems to penetrate at all. Water stirred by wind and waves pulls the oxygen down by moving. Stagnant water tends to go anaerobic and stinky.
BTW - "anaerobic" is probably not the the most accurate term. Technically that means NO oxygen or very, very, VERY little oxygen.
What we are trying to avoid is more like "hypoxia" or "hypoxic" conditions. Or "dysoxic".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Anyway, the problem is "not enough oxygen". I think we would seldom see "absolutely NO oxygen" unless we encased the compost heap in a layer of wet clay.
Remember that the compost heap is hugely active with microbes digesting the organic matter. The efficient aerobes will eat fastest and use up the oxygen, then slow down or die. The few remaining aerobes will keep the oxygen levels very low while anaerobic
fermenting microbes get active.
