Compost

[MrDirtyBoots]

People like to overcomplicate things.

We have been making perfect compost for years. We add anything that will break down.
Grass, weeds, raw/cooked food, chicken poo, dog poo, humanure, grass, dead chickens (on ocassion), basically anything that will add nutrients to the soil.

Forget about turning etc, if you add a variety of things and keep it moist but not sodden it will heat up in no time.

We usually have about three months after we finish a pile before it is crumbly good stuff.

Simple and uncomplicated is how I like to keep it.

 

[SKR8PN]

Personally I have never put any cooked food in my compost pile. The only thing it gets is leaves,grass clippings, small sticks/twigs and raw leftover kitchen stuff like carrot trimmings, old lettuce and coffee grounds. I would be leery of putting anything that contained any oils in the pile, like salad dressings or anything of that nature.

 

[inchworm]

What about white paper and paper towels?

 

[greenrootsmama]

We burn most of our paper and we haven't used paper towels in over a year so none of that goes into the compost. We put tea bags in the compost too. We don't drink coffee but I know several people who put the filter paper right into the compost along with the grounds so I would imagine that paper towels would be ok too. I also put newspaper in the ground in the fall when I'm preparing it but I don't know about white paper.

 

[SKR8PN]

I put the paper filters in with my coffee grounds.

 

[freemotion]

I never turned mine, either, because of the horse it was mostly the dry stuff. It was huge and took a couple years to get nice and brown. But did amazing things to our poor, sandy soil.

When I got chickens, everything changed.

Those birds are compost-turning machines! The spend hours every day digging in the pile. It turns into brown gold within weeks without any effort on my part. I throw everything in there now, practically, because they will eat a lot of stuff, too. Then poop it out and compost the poop!

I do put my coop cleanings in, since I use the deep litter method, it is not too hot and the girls dig it in pretty quickly. I put leaves and shavings in my coop. I also toss in veggie scraps all winter, in the good weather, they go right on the compost pile.

No science or layering here. Whatever I have gets thrown on the pile.

When we lived in an apartment, I used a ring of wire fencing to contain the pile so it was nice and neat. You can unhook the ring, move it over a couple of feet, and shovel the top layer into the bottom of the new ring until you get to the good compost on the bottom, which then goes into the garden. There are many, many methods out there! All worth the effort!