“Waste Not: Wool Pellets Make Great Soil – and Business”
“…To make use of waste fiber, Charlene made dryer balls, felted soaps, needle felting kits, and more. It required intensive labor. “It took a lot of time and a lot of water,” she says, “and I wasn’t making any money on it.”
Fiber mills produce waste, too. “We needed to come up with a better strategy for our mill waste,” Anna says. At Long Way Homestead Fibre Farm & Wool Mill, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, mill skirtings were piling up. “I was skirting hundreds of fleeces every week. We could not add more to our garden; I could not turn the compost by hand,” she explains. Anna tried to give mill skirtings away at events but had no takers.
When she walked into a greenhouse in Winnipeg, Anna saw wool pellets – made in the U.S.A. – on the shelf. “I thought, ‘Can I replace these with locally-made ones?’ It’s a product out there already,” she says. “I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. Maybe it was just instinct, but there are a significant number of knitters in my life who are also gardeners, who really love wool. I thought it would work, maybe make a little bit of extra revenue and we wouldn’t have to pay for mill waste to be handled.”
Wool pellets are raw, low-quality wool or other fiber compressed into pellet form. They are a fertilizer or soil amendment, worked into the soil, with an application rate of approximately one half cup per gallon of soil. Since wool holds 30%-40% of its weight in water, pellets can help soil stay moist, and slugs avoid the tiny fibers that swell in water and stick out. Because fiber composts in soil, wool pellets need to be added to the soil periodically – every six months or so for ground use, or whenever plants are repotted…”
Read the full article at https://fibershed.org/2024/03/13/waste-not-wool-pellets-make-great-soil-and-business/
