Here are 7 composting tips to help you take your compost to the next level of beautiful finished compost.
Composting can be hard! Once you get beyond the basic 3 or 7 steps of composting there is a lot of nuance and can be road blocks to getting that perfect finished compost. Here we cover 7 composting tips and tricks to hopefully help you over these road blocks and take your compost to the next level.
Quick Navigation
- If You Can, Time Is Better Than Turning
- Moisture
- Make It Your Homestead Cemetery
- Compost Everything, Almost
- Have Enough Mass
- Test, Try, and Experiment
- Green Manure and Cover Crops
- Recommended Resources and Books
If you Can, Time Is better than turning
To help your compost pile decompose you can turn your pile. Turning is a great way to get compost in a hurry, it jump starts the system and gets it going quickly. But truthfully, turning compost isn’t necessary and is a lot of work. Turing compost by hand, especially on the scale of doing it for your whole garden, can be tough. So if you can, slow down and try not turning it it. In the summer it takes us three months to finish a pile without turning, as opposed to three weeks. With all the stuff to do here on the homestead not turning is a much easier pace to keep up sustainably.
Moisture
We live in a desert. We struggle to keep enough moisture in our piles for the microbes to stay active and do their jobs. If you live in a different climate disregard this tip, but if you also are in a dry place this is CRITICAL. When you are building your pile get it wet. As we build are piles we do it with two people, one loading on to the pile and the other spraying it down with water. If we are building it with just one person, we make very thin layers and spray each one down as we build.
Another trick to keeping moisture in your pile is to compost things that already have moisture tin them. We have a neighbor who has a lot of fruit trees, we add the wind fallen fruit to our compost and it’s perfect because the fruit adds moisture to the pile! Fallen fruit and overgrown garden produce are all great candidates for this position, though anything that has moisture built in can fill this role.
On to tip 3 of 7 composting tips!
Make it Your New Homestead Cemetery
There is no better way to jump start a pile than to add a dead chicken to it. It is amazing! In a good active pile in the summer our deceased chickens disappeared in two weeks. We have had a baby pig decompose in a few days. We put all the accidental deaths, all the animals that we have to put down and all the viscera from butchering in the compost. It is a great way to kickstart the pile and is a clean efficient way to use and recycle all the deaths that happen on the homestead.
If you add dead animals to your pile take precautions that scavengers don’t get in and raid. A sheet of expanded metal does this job just great for us.
Compost Everything (Almost)
There are lists of stuff not to compost, but really, unless it is a toxic chemical, compost everything, or at least try to. The problem with a lot of the items on those lists isn’t that the items on them won’t compost, but that they won’t compost in mass quantities. If you add a layer a foot thick of ash on compost will it work? Probably not, but it will if you empty your ash catch on your stove once a week onto it and layer it well. Use your common sense and just because one person said not to do it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Have Enough Mass
For our next composting tip, compost works better at a certain mass. A good rough rule of thumb is that you pile should be the size of a Volkswagen beetle. Our piles are about 4’x4’x4′, and they have done wonderfully for us.
Test, Try and Experiment
You can do EXACTLY what someone else says works great and gives them the best compost in the world and your compost will turn out poorly. Composting is individual and nuanced. Don’t except anyone to give you the magic bullet. So have fun, read books, learn what you can and try it out, make a few dud piles, experiment and finagle till you figure it out. This is the only way that you are going to figure out what works for you.
On to the final tip of the composting tips.
Use Green Manure and Cover Crops
Composting is wonderful and it crucial to maintaining soil health. But it is a lot of work and can become impractical for large gardens. In these cases explore green manures and cover crops. They work well and are a good companion for composting.
Our favorite book on green manures and cover crops is Homegrown Humus, by Ana Hess. You can get a copy here on Amazon.
Recommended Resources and Books
There are our 7 composting tips! Below we have included our recommended composting resources.
One of the best classes I have ever attended on composting was presented by Bruno Follador from The Nature Institute. Here is a link to some articles and videos from him.
Holy Shit by Gene Logsdon is a great place to start when it comes to composting manures. Find a copy on Amazon here.
Teaming With Microbes and it’s companion book Teaming With Fungi are must reads! They are amazing and will help you get the understanding of what is happening in your compost pile. Get Teaming with Microbes on Amazon here, and Teaming with Fungi here.
Check out the homesteading resource page for more awesome books and resources on homesteading!