Exclusive unpublished photos of World's First ZerO Waste Golf Course

Welcome to Dairy Creek Golf Course, the first zero waste golf course in the world

This is the view from the clubhouse deck looking out over number 9 green, with one of seven extinct volcanos which surround the golf course

These are the two Earth Tub vessell composters we are using to compost green and food wastes. You can see our wooden bins, where we hold wood chips, grass clippings and curing compost.

The next pictures show our worm set up

Our worm bin is a recycled fiberglass trough 16 ft long, 4 ft wide and 2ft deep. it's divided into 8 foot troughs. It was once used on a commercial fish dock in Morro Bay to maintain live slime eels while they were processed for live shipping to Korea.. Right now, we're only using one side for worms, while storing harvested castings on the other. Considering that worms double every 90 days, probably won't be long before we use both sides for worms.

You can see our worm casting harvester. It's a tube of 1/4 screen that rolls on caster wheels in those plywood inverted wedge shapes. You put in a bucket load of material from the worm bin into the top side of the slightly sloped tube and rotate by hand. All the great vermicompost and castings under 1/4 inch shakes out into a trough under the screen tube for collection. Undigested food and anything larger than 1/4 and all worms roll out the other end into a trash can. The can, filled with worms and clumps of vermicompost larger than the screen gets dumped  back into the bin. Eventually, the density of worms to vermicompost in the bin becomes optimal to efficient food waste consumption.

Next I'll show you our compost tea operation

This is a 100 gallon brewer. It is owned by Jenny @ Central Coast Compost Tea Co, of Cayucos CA, one of our founding partners. Jenny brews a fresh certified organic product under license from Natures Solution.  Below, the 500 gallon brewer we're building this week. The vessel is a cone bottomed 500 gal tank that was once a wash water separator recycler set up.

Compost tea is made by generating bubbles into a vessel of water that has a quantity of compost, worm castings, and some microbe food such as kelp, humate or sugar. Bubble the water for 24 hours, and you have a microbial soup called compost tea. These disks are air defusers to create bubbles in the tank. We chose to make this bubbling system easily removable when we clean the tank, so we used a cam-lock connector on a flexible hose.

We're going to put the compost mix into this screen container made out of five gallon buckets and window screen. It holds around 8 gallons of compost mix. We'll suspend it into the vessel of actively aereated water.

This is the cart we made to transport food wastes from the kitchen. You can see how the wooden top is hinged and has a hasp installed in front to keep the raccoons out at night. We hook it up to the bag straps on the back of a golf cart and it makes a great trailer to transport from kitchen to our composter demonstration area. The kitchen staff fills it during the day, and early the next morning we empty it, rinse it clean and return it to the back of house.

This is the zero waste demonstration park as seen from number 8 tee (par 3, 100 yarder over a pond - green to left of picture.) The composters are behind the pumphouse barn. From this vantage, the worms and tea brewers are behind the fence on this side of the barn. We chose to be close to the pumphouse because we plan to inject tea through the irrigation system all over the course.

I'm glad I finally figured out how to share these pictures of our zero waste set up at Dairy Creek Golf Course in San Luis Obispo California.. I hope you enjoy being the first to see them.