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How Do I Make Compost?

The essence of making compost is combining four simple ingredients:

Organic Soil Water Air

  1. Organic (natural) materials, like newspaper, leaves, grass, fruit and vegetable scraps...
  2. Soil, which contains the tiny creatures we call micro-organisms that actually do the work.
  3. Water
  4. Air

If you have a pile of leaves or a bag of grass clippings, you have the makings for a compost pile. The air, water, and soil are everywhere. All you have to do is gather up the organic matter and mix it with the other ingredients. There are various ways you can do this process, some take longer than others to finish. I have composted in all the ways known to man and can tell you from that experience, that you will get the quickest and most complete batch of compost by using a compost tumbler or similar compost maker.


The Compost Tumbler 9.5
The Compost Tumbler 9.5

The tumblers allow you to easily control the ingredients in the perfect porportions to allow the process to work in as little as 2 weeks. If you want your compost, and you want it now, a tumbler is the only way to get it. Conventional piles will take years to finish composting, bins still take months and lots of back breaking mixing to finish, as well as being exposed to varmints. If you have a huge amount of leaves (consider yourself lucky), you can stock pile them until you need them. They may begin to break down before you put them into your tumbler, but that's ok. You can keep them in anything to keep them from blowing away.

If you have a compost tumbler, you simply fill it 2/3 full with leaves or other brown material like pieces of plants, grass clippings that are dry, add something green (like fresh green grass clippings, plants that you have pulled up, kitchen scraps, etc.). The brown material can be shredded newspaper or other paper, branches and prunings. The woody material should be shredded up first so it will break down quickly. The smaller you make the particles that go into your composter, the quicker it can be eaten by the tiny creatures and turned into humus. You can run your lawn mower over some leaves, use the catcher, and then dump it into the composter. A shredder machine is nice to have for the woody materials, but if you don't have one, just set the tree trimmings and the like aside for now, and use the more breakable materials.


First Week Compost
First Week Compost

There are a few theories about how much brown material to green material to put into your composter. I have read it should be a 30:1 ratio, brown to green; some say it should be 50/50. If you know why you are putting the different things into your composter, you will be better able to judge for yourself what goes in and how much. The goal is to convert all those leaves and other materials into "black gold" (fertilizer) quickly.

Some of your material is dry or processed, like leaves and newspapers. This should make up the bulk of the ingredients. You also need to add something that is green, because fresh green material starts to break down quickly and will help to activate the decomposition quickly. As soon as you cut it, grass starts to convert its chemistry to Carbon Dioxide, and this process creates heat. When the micro-organisms in the soil get warmed up, they start munching away on the brown material, trying hard to eat themselves out of house and home. They will be multiplying at the same time, and so the process begins to speed up as the days go by, and they will generate some heat themselves, and now you have what is called a "hot" compost. You can feel the heat from the outside of the tumbler when they are active.


Compost in Progress
Compost in Progress

You will need to add some moisture in the beginning, and check it once in a while to see if it needs more moisture. You do not want to keep it too wet. The most important part of speedy decomposition, I believe, is adding air to the pile on a regular basis. You turn your pile by tumbling your compost maker, which infuses air all over the pile. If you were just using an old fashioned pile or bin, you would have to shovel it all over to get the air inside and the outer materials nearer to the center where they can break down more easily. Most gardeners and composters are not inclined to do all that shoveling every day. With a compost tumbler, it's so easy to do it by turning the tumbler or the handle. You can then open it up and look inside to check on progress and moisture levels.

During the decomposition process, the compost will change in looks and smell. At first you will smell grass clippings as they give off their carbon dioxide. Then you will start to smell the different levels of decaying from the different materials, and all of it will become darker and reduce in volume. It is actually much easier to monitor compost in a tumbler than in a bin.