I know they're friends, and expected/welcome in a cold pile, but was wondering if there might be an imbalance I'm not aware of. I think they particularly like the horse manure I sprinkle in there...

I'm a deep lurker on this sub. For almost 5 years I've been running this slow maintenance (medium size?) compost pile out of necessity. When I decided this would be home to my family, the terrain had a lot of overgrowth. There was so much garden waste not even the city wanted it. So I had to come up with a solution..

I knew little about composting, but somehow I've built a perfect home for these little helper guys.. isopods. Today.. they are thousands. Whenever I scoop a full fork, you could literally hear them running back inside. In about 1 month whatever I drop and tumble in that pile will slowly disappear. What looks like a pile of garbage to some, to them is a first class all inclusive hotel. Now they're my neighbours. I feed them, in return they help grow the greens that feed my family.

There is so much joy in this process. I think this natural connection is deeply rooted in us, we somehow forget about it. Like it runs as a background process that we do not know about. Yet simple enough.. there is so much fulfillment in running a compost pile.

Sorry for the long post. Simply wanted to share.

I don't turn much. Full of worms though. The only water it gets comes out of the old pee hole

Do you consider this compost to be complete? The fine wood chips don’t seem to be breaking down anymore. Thanks !

Hello!

I thought about posting about this here because my approach to gardening is trying to buy as less as possible and rely as much as I can on what I have.

I live in Buenos Aires, southern hemisphere, so about 45 days ago I started sowing tomato seeds. Last week I moved the seedlings to 1 Liter pots, with a mix of around 50% compost, 25% coco (half fine, half chunks) and 25% rice husks. I also added some homemade biochar in the mix, for better nutrient retention. The plants receive around 6-7 hours of direct sunlight, and during the night I enter them home.

There will be another transplant to their final destination, which are 50cm deep wood planters, in a couple of weeks.

For this season I wanted to challenge myself to rely only in my homemade compost instead of buying. I'm afraid a big part of the compost used was still unfinished by the time I repotted them, because as you can see in the pictures below my compost pile still had some leaves pieces, wood chunks, and the color wasnt completely dark. I don't think my compost classifies as hot: I have multiple plastic containers and inside tons of worms, so if they are alive I guess it means I'm doing cold and slow composting.

Could it be that my own compost is playing against me? I'm noticing that, except on the biggest plant of the pictures, the rest is looking quite yellowing or lime-green.

I'm currently watering them 2 or 3 times a week, and one of those days instead of plain water, I water using a compost extract solution, with a part of urine 🙈 for nitrogen (1 part of urine, 20 parts of compost extract solution). I also added a layer of leaves on top as mulch.

Can somebody point the problem here? I suspect the unfinished compost is the top culprit, plus probably the urea might be burning the roots? And now that I think, the leaves mulch might also be stealing nutrients?

I tried to challenge myself to buy as little as possible, but I'm open minded so if for this time is better to just buy a bag of finished compost and transplant them again, I will do it. Whatever it takes to keep my plants healthy!

Thank you :)

Yooo I’d love to include of picture of precisely what I’m talking about, but it’s currently dark outside and I don’t feel like flash photography is a very good storyteller.

But basically I have a rabbit. A bunbun. I love her. Her litterbox litter is pine pellets.

As I’ve learned about compost, I’ve gathered that a rotting stump (=wood) can really zap the nutrients out of the ground. Therefore, it makes me curious… if I compost some pine dust or pine clumps that are saturated with bunny urine, how does that count toward the compost? Is the urine still beneficial to what’s below in the pile, or is it neutralized by the pine?

I also throw a decent amount of rabbit poo in there, too. I’m assuming that’s a brown, right? What’s a good green to brown ratio?

Is lazy composting (like what I’m doing now before I even have all the facts) still beneficial even if it’s not as efficient?

We bought a house a couple of years ago with an apple tree that obviously needs some pruning and care based on the many many small apples it produces, but the real question is, what do I do with the 40+Kg of rotting apples, can I just pile them in a corner like I’m doing in the back, should I add all of them to my cold compost pile? Any ideas are welcome as right now the box of apples is becoming wasp heaven…

I'm getting mixed results looking on Google.

I have a couple of questions regarding adding pee to my compost pile, if the kind users here wouldn't mind answering to the best of their knowledge.

My compost pile consists mostly of browns sadly, and the greens that I have added, are now browns and haven't produced very much heat / breakdown. The bin is small and almost full from adding over the last 18 months.

1. Is it okay to use pee compost on vegetable plants grown for consumption?
2. Does anyone know how this is affected if one (or both) people take medication?

Additionally, will this fix my issue somewhat? Thank you in advance!

I collect 1g compost bags (from kitchen) into 5 gallon buckets and adding water to each one.

I need some help. I'm a beginner, at least with horse manure. I've been able to make hot garden compost from grass clippings and sawdust but horse manure is new to me.

I've gotten access to about 1 cubic meter of about 1 year old horse manure that has been left outside in large huge long piles. it is all passive cold composted and not yet done. I will get it delivered in a few days.

the horse manure is:

- still smelling a bit

- has a clay/sticky slimy texture

- if left in sun gets a rock hard crust

- it is dark, not much visible horse manure to see

I am in north Germany, gets somewhat rainy cold winters and sometimes freezing temperatures.

what I can add to the manure ?... I have:

* a lot of Douglas fir fresh fine untreated sawdust

* Some organic straw

* access to water

* Some half finished hot garden compost

* horn shavings medium coarse (14 % nitrogen )

* possibly a small bucket of freshly shredded green wood chips

* A passive plastic composter with holes(1 cubic meter size) with lid. I can drill more holes in it.

* direct access to clear, yellow, stinking warm human piss

* garden fork, shovels, patience, the will to learn this 🤔

I would like to pile? this half finished manure in a separate pile (I guess?) over the winter and maybe turn it sometimes during the winter and make it as finalised as possible for April/may next year and make a new no dig bed with it.

In spring, once I spread it over cardboard , I will put some garden compost on top of it as top dressing. that's the idea anyway. I think I'll plant potatoes and maybe Rutabaga.

what should I add to this half done manure over winter , how to pile it? any other idea/plan? cover it? add straw? sawdust? sandwich with straw layers? put it in the passive bin and drill more holes? take it out and turn it 3 times over the winter?! put a pipe with holes in it in the middle?

I'm a complete beginner with composting horse manure and a beginner at winter composting.

any help appreciated.

I started composting about 2 years ago and then about a year later we adopted a pit bull puppy that started eating from the pile. So I decided to cover the pile with leaves and stop adding to it. I kept collecting food scraps thinking I would start composting again eventually but I never got around to building a fence for the compost. (I did eventually build a 30' x 12' pallet fence to be able to start my first garden this last spring and my first year of extremely cheap vegetable gardening has been a great learning experience. 👍) I eventually filled two 5 gallon lowes buckets with food scraps, pressed the lids on tight, and left them outside in the Georgia heat for almost a year now.

I've got a big pile of wood chips that's been sitting around for almost a year also so I recently decided it was probably a good idea to just bury the food scraps under the wood chips and hope my dog doesn't decide to dig it up. Although now that I'm writing this I'm remembering that my dog likes to dig occasionally and may just decide to dig up the new smelly pile... Anyways. I have recently acquired some more pallets so I will eventually build a fence for my composing area. So I still need to ask... Is this still good for composting or do I need to dump these buckets in the trash? There isn't any meat, bones or dairy in the buckets.

Just wanted to share how happy my little pumpkin plant seems to be in its compost pile 🎃

Gonna throw all my vegetable kitchen scraps in on top of this 6 mo old leaf and grass pile. Threw a bunch of seeds I saved into it the other day. In the fall I’ll load it up with grass clippings and leaves. Piss on it all winter. All while saving any seeds from any store bought produce and adding through the spring, saving until the following spring after that.

Hopefully this speeds up the decomp process. The late Floridian summer has gifted me gallons of water and lots and lots of greens for the compost. It’s not getting particularly hot though, so if y’all have advice on raising temps, please lemme know!

My maple tree (and everyone's in the neighbourhood) is dropping leaves early this year. An arborist told my neighbour that it's happening because the trees are sun scorched. Mine also has black spots on the leaves, an obvious sign of a common disease. The arborist said NOT to compost these. does anyone have any input on this? Ive put them in before but my composter was running hotter then. This year its been much cooler, just around ambient temperature.

Hi all; I have a compost bin made from old pallets. I am throwing anything organic to the pile. If i think there is too much green, i am adding some woodchips or dried leaves. But i don’t really care too much about ratio or temperature etc. During the year i mixed the pile few times. Almost never water it. Summer was dry and hot. At the end, after a year i got this on the bottom of my pile. Now i am using this compost for mulching the raised beds.

Using a Geobin and building up the material still! My question is… do you all compost food content as well? To be specific, like if you for instance compost an apple or orange peel, do you remove anything left of the actual fruit before doing so?

I have because of animals but it feels tedious. Do you all do this as well?

Made the pile a year ago with roughly 1/4 grass clippings, 1/4 pulled weeds(mostly crab grass), 1/2 cardboards. I believe I only flipped the pile five times over the whole year.

Plan to use it on my raised beds only so that the weed seeds won’t cause too much trouble.

Just wanting to share my progress:

I started the main pile in the middle about three months ago with old bedding from the chicken coop and it is now a main attraction in the backyard. Currently I am mainly adding old rabbit bedding and leaves from the leaf pile on the left. For aeration, I use a post hole digger to dig some holes in the pile, and the chickens scratch at it. The first dirt picture is from one inch into this pile.

The pile on the left is just leaves, and seems to be breaking down nicely. The second dirt picture is from that pile.

I also set up a Johnson Su compost using 4ft tall hardware cloth and adding chicken bedding, freshly pulled weeds, and a mix of each pile. It never got hot…but I water it with the old duck water every day and plan to add worms soon.

Next I plant to try a bokashi bucket; I am thinking of sealing off a big trash can (filled with Italian restaurant food waste), drilling holes on the bottom and up the sides a bit, and digging it down into the middle of the compost pile. Thoughts?

Any ideas, tips, thoughts, suggestions, or encouragements are welcome — and I’ll probably start pissing on it :)

This is the 3rd time I've harvested since starting my compost after my daughter was born 5 years ago. And the first time she's helped me harvest. Feels like a huge accomplishment since I started composting due to all the food waste that came with feeding her. She helped me sort and pull out worms. We got 7 full buckets!

I am making slow, lazy compost. Throwing what i have, when i have. Turning pile few times a month.

I started new batch last September. Today i wanted to take whatever is ready. I digged my pile and seperate top, middle parts. Sifted the bottom, half ready part.

You can see the photos. First one is still composting.

Second one is what i have after sifting the middle and bottom part. I will use this as mulch on vegetable patch.

Third one is the greatest sifted mulch i’ve ever have.

I am surprised that i have a lot of sifted, fluffy, ready compost for my seedlings.