Edmonds Landscape and Construction Services Ltd.

Owen Davis Site Tour June 1, 2001

Owen Davis Specialty Soils and Compost Ltd. produces various compost products and compost-soil blends. This is a pictorial overview of our visit to their facilities for a tour and explanation of the composting process.

(Click on any of the thumbnailed images below for an enlarged version of the image.)

		All composts begin with initial feedstocks including municipal solid waste compost (MSW) from the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) green-bin program, mill waste, lawn clippings, leaves, etc.
		Owen Davis forms large static-pile compost heaps that are turned four times per year.
		Owen Davis allows 18 to 24 months for wood chips, paper products, and many food wastes to break down in the composting process.
		This is a small static pile of mature but unfinished compost. It still contains some plastics and other foreign objects that will go through a screening process, but it is now fairly dry, dark in color, odorless, and contains lots of earth worms.
		For some compost products, topsoil and peat-moss are added to create blends for different end-uses.
		In order to investigate new techniques and new materials, some experiments are performed on site. The dark blend in the foreground is an immature biosolid blend with topsoil, and the dark pile in the background is a mature biosolid and topsoil blend. The images below are close-ups for the immature and mature blends on the left and right respectively.

		As a final step, compost is screened with a 1 inch mesh to remove any foreign objects or large materials that have not been composted completely.
		The fines of the compost are collected at one end of the screening machine...
		...and the rejects are collected at the other end.
		The top grade Good Earth Compost is kept under cover. It is a very dark, rich, dry, high quality compost.

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