Composting bedding hay and vericomposting

One of the best things for composting is hay. It adds a great carbon or brown ingredient that most compost piles need.
But before you go out and put tons of hay used for animal bedding, here is one thing to consider: If you are using hay that has been used by a farm animal as bedding, then the hay will have animal waste in it (normally a GREAT thing for composting).

BUT if the animal (sheep/cow/horse) has recently been de-wormed, THEN you could be doing lots of harm to your garden. The de-wormer has a vermicide in it that can also kill garden worms. Even worse is if you compost like I do where I first hot compost scraps, then I put them into a vermicomposting bin to finish the composting and make nitrogen that is even more accessible to plants. If I use hay that contains waste from animals that have been dewormed, then I might kill all my red wigglers and create more harm than good.

So make sure you know the source of any bedding hay that you add to your compost pile. Lucky for me, the person that I get it from doesn't believe in deworming her sheep, so I get a great carbon source without any risk to my worms. In the end I have great compost for my vegetable garden. And yes, I do track my composting with Plangarden software. I take composting very seriously since I started many years ago with clay soil and only in the past few years have built up a good loose rich soil for my vegetables.