The successful compost is ready – it has now fallen to roughly ambient temperature.
unfortunately the temperature logger failed when I was on holiday so I don’t know what the profile was as it cooled down. And yes, it didn’t spend three times three days above 55C – more like three days and two days. There’s still more to learn here.
Time to look at this and see what sort of microbial stuff is in it. I shook this up with about 20 times the amount of water and put a drop on a slide
According to Elaine Ingham’s rules of thumb this is probably a good sort of soil fungus, because if the little round cocci are 1µm in diameter the fungal hypha is about 4µm. I could see that this one was slightly tan coloured, but the incandescent lamp of the microscope plays havoc with the white balance of the camera, making everything bright yellow.
This next one is narrow and clear, so not good in the morphology rule of thumb that fungi < 3µm in diameter and clear are undesirable soil fungi.
I saw no protozoa or micro-arthropods. That’s either because there aren’t any or because I didn’t recognise them. The dilution is high, – it appears that Ingham starts at 5:1 so I’m four times less likely to see these at 20:1.