Enrichment Separation Operations

I have separated out a couple of grades of composted material with sand, clay, lime and cow manure added for fortification. This product is still loaded with seeds of an undesired nature. I have processed about 4' of the pile.

I used the three sieves, to the left in the picture above. I fabricated these using hardware cloth (wire screen) for the sieve. The far right shaker is a 1" sieve, or coarse, the middle is 1/2", or medium, and the left is 1/4", or fine. Starting with the coarse shaker on top of the steel tub, I tossed in a couple shovel fulls of the raw pile and shook it till nothing else was left that would pass through it. I tossed the material left in the shaker sieve, "grade 4", back on top of the pile. I kept up coarse- sifting the pile until I had a tub full.
Then, I dumped out the tub, and processed that material back into the tub shaking it through the medium sieve. The material left in the medium sieve I am calling "grade 3". I made a separate pile of grade 3 seen here the furthest from the tub, by the compost pile.
I dumped out the tub and again put that material through the fine sieve. I call the material left in the fine sieve "grade 2". That is the small pile between the tub and the small pile of grade 3. The material that passed the fine sieve, into the tub, is "grade 1".



The photo above is a better look at the three grades of material yielded by processing. From the fine to the coarse, clockwise starting in the lower left, is grade 1, 2, and 3. Grade 4 is back on the pile.



This photo is of Grade 1. It looks to have a good bit of the enrichment additives in it. Some of the additives stayed with grades 2 and 3.
I've done this separation process before without adding anything to the compost. The fine stuff turned into fine dust as soon as it dried out. The other two continued to rapidly break down to dust as well. The end result was material that would not hold moisture or support life. That made me feel as though it was not worth having all this vegetation piled up in the yard. After giving the matter some thought for a couple of years, I decided on this program of experiments. My hope is that this will poduce a new material I am calling soil, or dirt.

Due to the large amount of grade 1 material produced, I am thinking that this separation was long overdue. As I said before, the compost process is continual, like a burning fire, or melting ice. I'm thinking the first separation needs to be done more frequently.
As for additions, I will add cow manure to the raw pile, and the other additions in subsequent processes. This will be the basis of the next generation of experiments.