Hi, and welcome to my video about hot composting with the Green Johanna 330L hot composter. It’s a great hot composter with a huge capacity, built in the UK with 100% recycled plastic.
This video is about my first trip up to my in-laws, who have been using the Green Johanna for a few weeks, and I’m here to see how it’s going.
As I opened the lid for the first time, I saw straight away that the food waste that had been added recently had not been mixed with much brown waste and what was sitting underneath was a large amount of matted grass clippings.
For hot composting to work, you must ensure you have a good mix of green waste like food waste and brown waste, which is paper/cardboard, chippings and prunings. The other thing you need is air, so it’s essential to mix and aerate the contents of your hot composter regularly.
In this case, we are lacking some dry brown waste which will help absorb much of the wet food waste and stop the contents from getting too wet, which will lead to it having no space for air and result in a slimy, smelly compost bin. When that happens, the heat will not spike enough to achieve the required 40 to 60 degrees celsius for hot composting.
I’ve had the kids help me rip up a few cardboard boxes, and my mother-in-law found a load of shredded paper in the shredder we can use.
We’ve ripped up so much cardboard we can store some for later. And I stumbled on a little storage container in their garden. This will ensure that the next time food waste gets added, we can balance it with some nice dry brown waste which is a bit bulkier and will keep some air pockets present.
They are just using uncooked food waste at the moment whilst they get the Green Johanna up to 40 degrees C, and then they will start to add cooked waste to help get them to send less waste to landfill and move more towards a zero waste lifestyle.
View the Green Johanna in my online shop
The Green Johanna comes with a wonderful compost aerator. I absolutely love it, and it’s really helped in this case.
By the way, excuse the silver tape - I stored something heavy on top of this whilst it was in storage. The Green Johanna is a very robust unit that offers a rodent-proof design, and it is fully guaranteed for five years.
As you can see, the aerator works well and aerating will pay dividends in heating the compost bin. It’s great you get this included with the Green Johanna. They really understand what you need to hot compost.
As I mentioned before, many grass clippings had matted at the bottom, so I wanted to make sure I got that a bit looser and get some air in. I enrolled my father-in-law to find a garden fork and mix it up even more.
Lastly, I wanted to show you that you can add bark chips as brown waste to help keep air pockets present and add organic material to your compost bin. In this case, I’m just trying to get the heat generated from it going cold, so I added a couple of handfuls and mixed them in.
And there you have it. A sneak peek at what I get up to on family holidays :)
