Skip to content

ABC: Always Be Composting

Composting is easy and you can do it. If you want to start composting, this post is intended to give you the nudge you need to get going. To start, some musings on why composting is important. Then some practical information showing how to build compost bins for free from recycled materials (it’s super simple), and how to use them. Finally, I share my experience with following (and not following) generally accepted composting guidelines.

The Importance of Compost

Compost is the center of the circle of life. It’s the hub of the gardening wheel, the fulcrum of the soil improvement lever. It’s where everything comes from, and where everything is going, and yet only a stop along the way, albeit a powerfully transformative one.

“The organic gardener does not think of throwing away the garbage. She knows that she needs the garbage. She is capable of transforming the garbage into compost, so that the compost can turn into lettuce, cucumber, radishes, and flowers again…With the energy of mindfulness, you can look into the garbage and say: I am not afraid. I am capable of transforming the garbage back into love.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

I think Thich Nhat Hanh must be a gardener. He uses compost analogies repeatedly, encouraging us to embrace things that we might otherwise perceive as negative so that we may transform them, and thereby be transformed ourselves. Leaving spiritual aspects aside, composting is a skill that can profoundly change our sense of the value of things commonly seen as waste. By completing the cycle of fertility on site, we break through the delusion that anything can be ‘thrown away’. There is no ‘away’ in the ecosystem, just different places within it. When I gain the ability convert organic waste into soil fertility, putting any of it in the landfill starts to look like foolish thing to do.

Composting turns garbage into gardening gold– we are always producing a stream of organic waste, we could always be composting. Compost is the perfect soil additive– simultaneously a fertilizer, moisture retainer, soil improver, and garden probiotic. It’s even a weed suppressing mulch if you lay it on thick enough. I have never had too much compost, it’s the limiting reagent of the soil fertility equation.

How To Compost in Recycled Bins for Free

How to compost? It’s not much more complicated than making a pile of organic waste and letting it rot. Keep this in mind when the composting rule boogeyman starts to worry you. You are simply guiding decomposition towards an inevitable end point, you really can’t do it ‘wrong’. The rules are just guidelines to help you arrive at the desired result quickly, but everything rots if you leave it long enough.

I will go into more detail about composting rules (and how to break them) later, but for now here’s the short form: Make a pile of mostly carbon sources with some nitrogen sources mixed in. Carbon sources are dead brown things like fall leaves, paper waste, and wood chips. Nitrogen sources are fresh green live (or recently alive) things like lawn clippings, kitchen scraps, and herbivore manure. Exhaustive lists of carbon sources and nitrogen sources are readily available online, these are just typical examples to give you the general idea. Let water and air move freely through the pile so that it stays moist but not wet and has enough air space for aerobic life processes to do the magic decomposition for you. Make the pile big enough that these life processes can heat up the center of the pile to a temperature that kills weed seeds if you can, but if that doesn’t happen it’s not the end of the world. Turn the pile from time to time, so that the stuff on the outside ends up on the inside and air spaces are reestablished as things settle. If you don’t manage to turn it, it will still decompose, just more slowly and better in the center than the outside edges. But mostly just make a pile and let the inevitable happen. When it’s done, you will have dark rich compost that smells like earth. I takes as long as it takes, on the scale of several months to a year.

It is certainly possible to compost in a pile with no container, but I favor a compost bin. There are many styles of bin. This one is my favorite. Wooden pallets formed into a box. That’s it. Pallets are free and sized to make a pile that is big enough heat up, yet not so big that you couldn’t turn it with a shovel. I don’t get fancy with joining the pallets, some scrap wood and bent nails will do. Sometimes I line it with leftover chicken wire if I happen to have some. The pallets will rot over the years. No need to put a great deal of effort in building your rot boxes, unless you just like to. It’s nice to add a removable front pallet; I use loops of rope or wire at the top and logs at the bottom to temporarily hold it in place. Bonus points if you make a row of adjoining bins, so each additional bin only requires three pallets. That’s it, nothing complicated.

A note on process. If you happen to have all the bulk materials on hand to build the pile all at once, do it. It will heat up and break down quickly this way. More often than not though, materials trickle in, one batch of kitchen scraps at a time (I collect kitchen scraps in a small cardboard box on the counter and dump the whole thing in the pile when it’s full). I add nitrogen sources to the pile as I have them, and pile on carbon sources to balance from some stockpile. Bagged fall leaves are great. Pick them up from the curb in the fall and stockpile them in the bags. One bag is about the right amount to match a box of kitchen scraps or fish heads. Arborist wood chips are good too. I have a row of compost bins conveniently located next to my chip dump spot (I get the wood chips delivered for free by the truckload from https://getchipdrop.com/). That way I can shovel a large amount of wood chips quickly without having to wheelbarrow them over to a distant compost bin.

Compost Rules, and How to Break Them

People get so hung up about composting right and wrong that I think it can be a barrier to doing any composting at all. If you are brave and bend the hallowed rules in public, the self-appointed compost police will sometimes try to shame you for composting wrong. I want to disarm that by going through some guidelines one by one and telling you how I have broken them and what happened when I did. I hope you will be encouraged to experiment and find what works for you in your situation.

  1. Thou Shalt Perfect Thy Carbon-Nitrogen Ratio. The ideal ratio is a matter of much debate. I can’t precisely measure the contents of my inputs anyway. Lots of carbon and a little nitrogen. Approximately 30:1, or somewhere in that ballpark. The ratio matters because the metabolism of the compost pile requires a certain amount of nitrogen in order to break down carbon at any rate of speed. Too little nitrogen and your carbon will only break down very slowly. Way too much and the nitrogen won’t all get used up breaking down carbon. The excess will rot along biochemical pathways that are stinky. I live in the country and nobody has to smell it but me when I mess this up. Things might be different for you if you have neighbors who are not cows. I have a stinky compost pile right now. Yeah, it’s not perfect. Nothing is. To paraphrase Joel Salatin, stink is waste. Any time you can smell rot, whether from manure or fish heads, that’s nitrogen escaping that might otherwise have been captured in the finished compost.
  2. Thou Shalt Not Compost Unclean Things. People will tell you there are things you should never put in a compost pile. I believe these pronouncements precisely to the extent that the pronouncer can back it with experience. Beyond that I use common sense. The first thing people say you can’t compost is meat/fish/eggs. I compost these with abandon. I have groundhog guts and crappie heads in one of my piles right now. The main thing is to make sure that you only put in a little at a time– these are potent nitrogen sources that need to be balanced with a whole lot of carbon source. It helps to bury the stinky stuff completely under wood chips or similar, usually this will contain smells. The worst case is that you put in too much and the smell attracts critters that like to dispose of dead things. That’s okay too, sometimes I get wild black soldier fly larvae in the pile. They clean up animal waste quickly and make good fish bait and chicken feed to boot. Another discouraged item is oil/grease. At one time I had a job where I was tasked with composting the food scraps from a barbeque joint, composed primarily of soggy french fries and rib bones gnawed meatless. I put them in a tumbling hot composter with lots of brown leaves and it composted fine, greasy as it was. I probably wouldn’t go pouring fryer grease in the pile though. The last thing on the no-go list is human/dog/cat manure. This is discouraged because closing the loop on this source of fertility also can close the loop on the parasite life cycle. This is something that deserves respect for sure, and yet people do compost these wastes safely. Municipal sewage services do it all the time. Look up humanure, it’s fascinating. Places with serious water problems (Australia) have gone to composting toilets to prevent wasting water by flushing, and they do fine. I haven’t tried it. Yet.
  3. Thou Shalt Turn Thy Pile. If you turn your piles regularly, they go faster. If you don’t, they go slower. I like both. Buy a fancy tumbling composter if you enjoy the look of the thing, or you need to keep your dogs out of your compost pile. Or don’t. It’s going to be fine either way.
  4. Thou Shalt Take Thine Temperature. Okay, I don’t really disagree with this rule. If you get the carbon-nitrogen ratio about right, and make the pile big enough, and get the water content about right, it will heat up to a temperature that kills weed seeds. This is a desirable outcome. But there’s a difference between a desirable outcome and a requirement. If your compost pile doesn’t heat up to the magic number, you are not a failure. I am still proud of you for composting. I like you anyway, and so do your plants, who will still enjoy your slightly less than optimal compost. Besides, the birds are pooping new weed seeds into the garden right now whether you like it or not.

In summary, compost is important for your garden, for you, and for the planet. It can be free if you want it to be. Don’t sweat the rules too much. Always be composting!