Day 21 - Tuesday July 18 We reach 148 degrees!

 After Saturdays' drastic measures, moving the sukumo from the wooden barrel to the plastic garbage can and adding hot water, the temperature rose rapidly to 145 by mid afternoon the next day, but then it started slowly dropping again. By 9:00 am this morning it was down to 129. 

For today's changeover, we completely emptied the plastic garbage can and moved the rice hulls from the wooden barrel into the plastic. The rice hulls were completely dry. 

I left the sukumo in the burlap bag again and kneaded it while in the bag. It was dry and compressed. 

Over the course of about a half hour I kneaded it, broke up the clumps, and added 2 quarts of hot water. 

then I put dry straw on top of the rice hulls, set the bag of sukumo on top of the straw with the thermometer probe tucked neatly inside, piled in more straw, but weights on it, put a huge plastic bag over it all, then put the sheet and the ceremonial cloth on stop and tied it down. 

Previously when finished the temperature has been in the 80s. Today it was 105 when I finished at 11:50 am.

By 12:43 pm the temp had risen to 128. We were gone for the afternoon, and when we got home at 5:17 pm it had gone down to 126. I made sure it was catching the full early evening sun, and went inside and had dinner and a Zoom meeting. We were planning to put a heating pad in with it, hooked up  to the thermometer to control the temperature. 

We went out at 8:36 to do that, and found this:

The highest temperature so far and only 2 degrees from our target. So no heating pad yet. We moved it inside and will check it again at 11:00. We won't put the heating pad on it tonight regardless, because we wouldn't be able to monitor it throughout the night, but will do so in the morning if the temperature has dropped. We need it to be at 145-150 for a good 10 days in order for the compost to work.

Stay tuned,