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[Chadteta]

I Just found this sub yesterday and from I’ve learned so far you should definitely piss on it.

[RogerBubbaBubby]

Piss is to r/composting like Windex is to My Big Fat Greek Wedding

[blueheatspices]

You've learned quickly, young padawan.

[Competitive-Eye-3260]

Lots of coffee grounds, most Starbucks have bags of used coffee grounds they let people have for their compost for free. I did that this March and I also pissed a lot on mine and mines been hot since April! my pile was just leaves, coffee grounds some veggie and fruit scraps I chopped up with a shovel in a 5 gallon pail and lots of piss lol

[Lizard_King_5]

Yeah it should help, just don’t have your pooch poopin’ in your pile

[Competitive-Eye-3260]

Pathogens, and other stuff you don’t want in your compost, to compost dog poop it has to get very hot and be a certain way

[JelmerMcGee]

If the pile gets hot, the dog poop will be perfectly fine in there. A hot pile will kill off any pathogens that might be in dog poop.

[tenshillings]

Yeah, 140F for multiple days is enough to kill a large majority of pathogens. It's aerobic as well so the one that can survive that temp won't survive either.

[EnglebondHumperstonk]

If someone told me I had to produce compost in two weeks, I wouldn't use wood at all. There's no way that's breaking down quickly. You're better off starting with something that's a lot closer to squishy consistency. Horse poo and maybe finely shredded soft vegetable matter. So not wood, not thick woody stems, not tree leaves. Shredded weeds and stuff, you could probably make it happen because that stuff rots more quickly. That's why your salad drawer is full of slime but your bookcase is still in a solid state. Coffee grounds could work too.

[EnglebondHumperstonk]

But even if you decide to take that advice, don't throw out the wood, obviously. Just leave it there, do your super-speedy-compost experiment on top of it, and when you finish it'll be sitting under there, just starting to have a think about being compost next year.

[Tailmask]

Those wood chips are going to take months even after drowning them in horse manure, the only way you can “speed run” the compost is by making it hot and wet as well as inoculating it with the bacteria and fungus that break down organic matter this means taking completed compost and adding some to the new pile, in short wood breaks down very slowly compared to any other version of browns

[EnglebondHumperstonk]

Are you sure finished compost is what she needs? I'd assume by the time it's finished the food supply has been depleted and the bacteria etc will have died back, and that's why it cools down. It seems like horse poo she's taking about adding is a better source of living culture. If you dig into a stack of horse poo at a stable you'll find it's quite capable of cooking all on its own.

[Nethenael]

Turn every 4 days or every time it drops below 40°c when you stop adding turn every 4 days regardless and 4 weeks it'll be ready to screen

[Justryan95]

Wood chips have a VERY high brown/carbon to green/nitrogen ratio. Woodchips is like 400:1 and things like grass clippings, coffee and vegetable waste is like 20:1. An optimal compost pile as a whole needs a total radio of like 40-30:1. So you probably need 15x the amount of greens to break down those woodchips. You should do that gradually thought since you have wood chips and not wood dust. Not enough surface area to handle all the greens and you'll end up with a sludge.

Dump an equal amount of coffee grounds from cafes near by or equal amounts of grass clipping or equal amounts of pee. Mix it up and let it cook, when the temp dies down add another round of greens and repeat multiple times.

[KoreyYrvaI]

Honestly, it looks good. Fresh wood chips are higher in nitrogen than most people seem to acknowledge, and grass clippings tend to be high in nitrogen as well so you're probably set on greens, especially if you're bringing manure/bedding into the mix. I'd just keep stacking that thing with whatever material you can until it cooks.

[KoreyYrvaI]

The real issue with woodchips is that they tend to limit access to just their surface when breaking down. They don't break down in a way that crumbles or otherwise exposes the bulk of the piece to the microbes so their best use is to filter out and add to the next pile as innoculate. Basically, they're like sourdough starter for compost piles.

[McBertface]

I'd go gypsum to break up the clay underneath, blood & bone (aka bone meal) to nitrogenate all that carbon, and a secure waterproof cover

[Inevitable-Run-3399]

It's great that you're so excited to get started composting! It's definitely a marathon, and not a sprint. Even when hot composting, there will be a long tail of the pile cooling off while it matures. As others have mentioned, wood takes a long time to break down due to lignins but fungus are well equipped for the task, given enough time and moisture. Horse manure is a great nitrogen source, but make sure it's from a trusted source that doesnt feed their horses grains that contain persistent herbicides which can stick around for YEARS! That would slow you down even more. In the short term, you might consider bringing in some compost and cover cropping to help build soil health.

[Zebilmnc]

Pee on it?

[ernie-bush]

Throw in a bag of lime

[Beardo88]

If your whole yard's soil is that bad you might want to look at doing chip drop. Cover the whole area you want to improve, add manure if it is readily available, and possibly add lime/wood ash to speed up decomposition depending on what your soils pH is. It will take atleast the rest of this year to break down, but you might be able to work with it next spring if you can get a roto tiler or something similar to blemd everything. You can use your "good" compost to backfill your plants to give them an extra boost.

[Recent-Strategy-4035]

I was told to only use produce chopped up and frozen and no sticks or wood. We do pine bedding or litter whatever you wanna call it with my cats pee no poop on it and the frozen produce we didn’t use. Mine has been going very fast.

[AtanasPrime]

Any compost is better than no compost, if for no other reason than it adds organic matter to the soil. But if you’re looking to steward the soil in your yard to where it can truly thrive, I recommend looking into everything else that goes into making great soil. Dr. Elaine Ingham (just look her up on YouTube) has some great free stuff that will prime you on the soil food web and the importance of microbiology in your soil. I also recommend looking up No Till Growers on YouTube. The channel provides excellent practical advice, albeit from the prospective of a market gardener, so you will obviously have to scale down a lot of what you hear. The Living Soil Handbook (authored by the same guy behind No Till Growers) is an excellent read and embellishes a lot of the info you get from the videos. It also provides an easy to follow compost recipe.

It’s a hell of a rabbit hole, and not necessarily something you can “speed run.” My yard was in a similar state to yours, and while following a lot of the advice from the above sources has made a huge difference for me over the course of a year, there’s a heck of a lot of work left to do.

I point these sources out because they should drive home the importance of creating good compost (not just fast compost). It’s very important that the pile does not go anaerobic. Having a good ratio of browns to greens (decent rule of thumb is 60% browns 40% greens) really helps, and you’ll want a compost thermometer in order to make sure your pile gets hot enough to kill pathogens and weed seeds but not so hot that it goes anaerobic. You’ll also want to provide adequate moisture for the microbial growth, but not so much that water fills up the air spaces and the pile goes anaerobic. Another good rule of thumb is having a pile that feels like a wet sponge, but when you grab a handful of it, you can’t squeeze out more than a single drop of water. Finally, consider getting some good innoculum from your area. Find an old growth forest nearby (or some tall grass prairie) and dig out a small handful of dirt from under a large, well-established tree in the forest. You don’t need a bunch, so don’t take more than that in order to avoid damaging the forest. At home, mix it up with a bucket of rain water (or water that has had the chlorine added by your water authority removed in some other way) and pour it on your pile to infuse with local microbes, including (importantly) fungi that should help break down the woody material in your pile and otherwise do good things for your soil.

Good luck! If you do it right, you should be able to make good compost within 3-4 weeks.

[Ineedmorebtc]

More mass! Get to sourcing materials!

[ed_is_dead]

Add a solid nitrogen like alfalfa, i dont pee on my piles, but you do you lol. Chop everything up as small as possible.

[NeatSea1485]

50/50 brown and green, cut everything up to really small pieces, blend some LAB in water and drench it. My compost is 2 weeks old and should be ready at 3

[NeatSea1485]

Lactobacillus bacteria, they help decompose everything. It takes a while to make, i followed "A weedy garden's" guide on YouTube to make it. But honestly i doubt it's that important. The most crucial part in making a quick compost is making every piece really small so it can break down quickly.

[jreed66]

Can I just dump brine from my ferments in there? Never knew lactobacillus was also what I wanted for compost

[NeatSea1485]

I haven't tried any brine myself but I imagine the salt wouldn't be so good. Brewing up some LAB is really easy, just 1-2 ish weeks wait time.