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Soil, Compost & Mulch

So my compost got hot and...

17 years ago

I got a thermometer and put coffee grounds in my pile, et voila, beautiful temps for about 2 weeks! It took a few days to warm up, but then it was 120-130-140 for quite a while. It dropped back to "steady" in the past two days, so today I turned it. In addition to whitish mold inside, I also saw something that looked powdery white or light gray. It was in the hottest part of the pile. I had put a lot of shredded paper in, and most of it has composted now, and I had to wonder if that ashy looking stuff was cooked paper?! Is that possible? The pile was damp - it just really looked like ash.

Thanks for any insight.

Pat

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Comments (4)

bpgreen
17 years ago
It's possible that it's ash, but it's more likely that it's some sort of fungus.
julianna_il
17 years ago
I get a lot of ashy looking stuff when I get my pile heated up. It's almost like ashes you'd see in the fireplace.

I think it's just ash from the cooking process or something, but nothing to worry about. The great thing about compost is if you have a problem, you can add something and usually fix it.
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All grass WILL get hot. The "ideal" ratio tells ya what proportion of carbon can be eaten by a mass of beasties who form their bodies from a certain amount of nitrogen. If you have more carbon than that ratio, the beaties can't reproduce QUITE as much, and the carbon is eaten a bit more slowly. If you have more nitrogen than that ratio (as you did) some of it will escape into the atmosphere (go sniff tomorrow and see if you get a smell you haven't detected before - probably a little bit ammonia-y). So ... your ratio wasn't quite right. But it wasn't not-right in the direction that leads to not-hot. it was not-right in the direction that leads to "some of the stuff gets wasted into the atmosphere". (Some people care a LOT about piles that don't smell even the littlest bit, because they have compost skeptics nearby to allege that they've done something wrong if there is any odiferousness.) Bottom line: too much green can get hot (tho it can sometimes fail to get hot). Too much brown can't get hot. I hope that helps!!!! Also --- when you say "turned white due to the heat" ... lots of people think that white stuff is ash. No no ... it is growing stuff. It is actinomycetes. These are bacteria which were classifed until recently as fungi 'cause the seem externally fungus-like. I think they're the coolest thing about composting with grass-heavy piles!!! lcpw.
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Turning it will speed up the composting. You'll know its done when the temp is the same as the outside temperature. I'd quit adding stuff, and just let the microbes do their own thing. I think you should turn it fairly often, so the heat doesn't just decompose stuff in one place.
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Kimmsr
17 years ago
There often can be some of your material that has the appearance of a piece of something that has been burned and it has and that is called "flash". There are some people that have not seen that and consequently deny this will occur, just because of lack of experience. Many of these same people have denied spontaneous combustion can occur in a compost pile, in spite of repeated news stories to the contrary, again due to lack of experience.
Fungi may inhabit your compost pile and may digest some of the material there but will not leave that material looking like it has been burned, that only happens when the material has been burned, when flash has occured.
pablo_nh
17 years ago
There are molds/fungi etc. that leave a lot of powdery spores. Having grown mushrooms- I can tell you that in some stage of their life they may produce lots of spores etc- they're powdery white.

I get it in most piles. I have serious doubts that most of my piles get to temps that actually burn leaves etc.

My dearest Irish grandmother had a rock that looked exactly like a potato. That doesn't mean that it was a petrified potato.

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