If you are using straight poop no bedding, then you will need to find a bulky carbon source. poo and paper will compact and go anaerobic on you.I wold look for straw.

Curt :-)

but if you turn it often, I think you'd "fluff" some oxygen into the mix.

My thought is always to try stuff & see if it works.

If you don't try it, you know all that paper will just be sent to the landfill, & you won't have any compost!

The grass (it is brown, though) has grown to about 5 feet - we are going in to bushhog it, do you think using that would be good? Would you layer it 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 like lasagna?... But I want compost in a month... My first real attempt at composting, sorry guys for the 20 questions (hope you don't 'cut me off' at 20, though) lol

G'Nut
The grass will be great, If it was me ,I would mix everything you have up, then add whatever seemed to be lacking. No reason to try to figure it out in advance, but I would mix it right where I was going to make my garden....
BTW...I'm totally jealous ;-)

There you go now your cooking!

I like the idea of mixing where I intend to garden - looking at an attempt at biointensive gardening... I guess the worse thing I can do is think too hard and do nothing :) lol thanks for the advice - I'm still listening if you have more!

G'nut

Yep that grass would be good and you will start finding other thing also I have made pile out of cardboard boxs and manure

The best advise I can give is forget about having compost in a month its not practical definatly not for a first timer

ok, how about 3 months?

Hey G'Nut,
I think if you get that pile all mixed together in your Garden spot and MAINTAIN it at "Temps" You will have a Wonderful shot at having a Awesome Growing season this Spring !!! Hows That ;-)

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The office paper will be absorbed pretty fast so use a lot.

Plan on frequent turning. Really frequent turning if I understand things correctly.

If I understand things correctly, cow manure is wet and will smother. Layers of office paper will not change this. Although office paper is a good source of carbons to feed your nitrogen heavy pile with lots of cow manure.

I have not worked with cow manure but would expect a bunch of wet splats and there fore you want sticks and leaves and stuff that add texture so you get air pockets and things.

Cow manure is wet and super nitrogen so you want to add a lot of browns and turn as frequently as possible.

Grass is high nitrogen so adding grass to cow manure is like putting out fire with gasoline.

I could see compost in 3 months if:

- Your pile or bin assembled all at once.

- Is kept moist

-Has a good mix of nitrogens (cow manure is a lot nitrogen) with carbons ( dry brown stuff like leaves, cardboard, sticks or, paper).

- That the mix is a bit rough and not just a big pile of cow sludge.

- Is turned at least once a week. I kind of expect cow manure to require more turning than most.

- You're OK with half decomposed sticks in the mix. (I'm cool with that. I just spread some of just that.) Sticks take a while to break down but are great at setting up air pockets and adding texture.

I have to speculate without looking at the ingredients and the conditions. I think the very very very best you can expect is three months. I think you should plan on 5 months under good circumstances. You may want to plan your spring on the basis that you will NOT make compost in time and that it will be applied at the end of the growing season.

to sense worth

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I agree that you should compost in place. If it rains, you will get leaching and you might as well have the leachate in a usefull place. I've done much the same thing, adding whatever I could, leaving it as long as I could (sometimes just a few weeks), and have grubbed a hole into it, added a few handfuls of potting soil and planted. Things grew extremely well. I was chastised here for not waiting a couple of years for it to compost properly, but I didn't grow things like lettuce, I grew tomatoes, squash, etc in it so wasn't worried about the pathogens that are a concern. Good luck and have fun. I think it's hard to go wrong with good old farmland poo.

1) Not likely, but as I don't know when your 'spring' is that could be a bad answer. There are guidlines for the organic people to follow when using manures, I'd not stray too far from them.

2) Ratios, always 30:1 but I bet you're asking the ratio of paper to manure. Paper is a pretty strong carbon and manure is a pretty strong nitrogen. If the manure has no bedding mixed in with it, you're going to need a substantial amount of paper. I'd start out with a 3 to 1 paper to manure by volume and adjust from there.

3) Leaves can vary but they aren't usually as strong a carbon as paper so I'd use more of them than paper. It would also depend on shredded versus whole. I'd prefer to use leaves more so than paper because paper has little if any of the micro-nutrients that leaves have. I'm not a fan of paper in compost if there are better alternatives.

If it was me, I'd bushhog the land, spread some manure and get it well tilled in. I suspect there will be a weed or two come up so I'd take the first year and spend it on prep work. I'd also set up your composting nearby so that every fall after harvest, the compost goes into the garden and a layer of mulch (shredded leaves being my favorite) over the top for the winter.

I am not a fan of manure leachate and I would personnaly not allow it near a food garden.

There are some other threads that discussed manures, we could dig them up if you want.

Lloyd

P.S. I am not a gardener nor do I use manures in my composting so, grain of salt kind of thing.