Sounds like a lot of wet greens. I would try and find some leaves or shreaded paper to mix in to get the browns to greens at about 3:1. Get a thermometer and turn it when the temperature drops below 110.

Welcome to composting. There is no one right way to do it. You might have seen the initials IACBTC which means 'it all comes back to compost.' So you can just pile everything in a big pile, even whole big sunflower plants, and EVENTUALLY it will all be compost. If you want to get compost faster, and not have a slimy smelly pile, then there are tricks to make the process easier. If you can, it usually is a very good idea to have the pieces of plants chopped up. They will compost faster. So if you can cut up stalks, chop them or mow them over, they will break down more easily. Some larger pieces help, in my opinion, to allow air to penetrate the pile, which is needed for compost to occur. However if you turn the pile often, this will aerate it, make it compost faster, and so you won't need those larger pieces (several inches not feet long). Then there is the rule of thumb to have browns and greens in the compost. A good mix of those 2 "kinds" of plant matter will help the mix stay a good consistency and not get slimy. Too much "greens" will get it slimy. The basic way to tell which is which is that Greens would be things that are typically moist, like fresh grass clippings, weeds, coffee grounds, tea bags, etc. Browns would be things that are typically dry like twigs, dry leaves, shredded paper. There is no way to get an exact mixture but try to have both browns and greens in there and not a preponderance of one. You really didn't have to till the soil first but it's ok. It is ok to add some other compost or just garden soil or a compost stimulator that you can buy (not necessary really) to "inoculate" the new compost and get it started. But there will be bacteria there to get it started anyway. Aged manure is better not real fresh manure, and is great to add to compost, esp. with stable straw mixed in. It sounds like you have alot of greens in there (which is nitrogen rich) and sounds like you need to try to find some browns (carbon rich material). After you read this, I hope it helps you some, and you can go back to the FAQs and maybe it will start making sense. Keeping the pile moist but not real wet also helps, but some folks just leave it. IACBTC eventually. As far as seeds go, you can read about hot vs cold composting and whether or not seeds survive. It would not bother me to have some seeds in there unless they were really obnoxious weed seeds that I just hate, like crabgrass of something that might survive. Compost everything that you can - it's good for your plants and it's good for the planet.
Laurie

You can also check the long running discussion here called - What Have You Fed Your Compost Pile Today (just down the page) for all sorts of ideas on items to add to the pile. Another good one is called What are you Using for Browns?

Start stockpiling carbons (dry browns) like straw, shredded paper, cardboard, etc. as they are always hard to get until the leaves come down in the fall and you will need plenty of them. Tell Grandma to start saving up the kitchen scraps too. ;)

Enjoy learning about composting.

Dave

Thanks for all the input. I was wondering about the browns since in spring there aren't a lot of dried leaves around lol. When I mow can I wait for the class clippings to dry and then that would be considered a brown? Once again thanks for all the advice.

Don't be confused with the brown/green thing. Browns are carbon-rich, no matter what color they are. Greens are nitrogen-rich, no matter what color they are. Grass clippings are greens, and will still be greens even when they dry. Shredded newspaper, cardboard, and bark are good browns you can use. Fresh leaves are also browns, in case you do some pruning in spring.

witeowl is right on! It's best to learn from day one to avoid using the green/brown labels as they will only confuse you. Folks have the tendency to associate them with the color rather than the content and the color of most things is not relevant.

Best to use either the nitrogens/carbons labels or the proteins/carbohydrates labels. Or at least think of them that way. ;)

Grass clippings are nitrogens no matter what color they are. Cardboard is a carbon no matter what color it is. A bale of straw, NOT hay (it's nitrogen), but straw, is a good thing to keep around as it is in many ways the perfect carbon and will go along way toward balancing out all the nitrogen sources we all have available to us this time of year.

Dave

Ok cool. Is the reason that leaves in Fall are considered carbon because they aren't just dried, but occur when the tree goes into dormancy?

Thanks for clearing that up.

In fall, trees remove the sugars (which are the greens) from the leaves and store them for the winter, leaving the high-carbon parts to dry up and fall off. This is why fall leaves are "browns" but spring-summer leaves are "greens".

"Fresh leaves are also browns, in case you do some pruning in spring."

"In fall, trees remove the sugars (which are the greens) from the leaves and store them for the winter"

Sugars are made of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen (for example, glucose is C6H12O6). Greens are high in Nitrogen.

Chlorophyll is what makes leaves green and is also the compound that has the nitrogen in it. So fresh leaves taken in the spring are greens, but leaves that fall off the tree (and have lost their color because they no longer have chlorophyll in them) are browns. If you dry leaves or grass, you mostly remove water from them. You may lose a small amount of nitrogen to off-gassing, but they'd still be considered greens.

("IALBTC - It All Leads Back To Compost"

--Professor Dirt)

Start with what you have on hand and don't worry too much about how the mix is going. While it would be optimal to have 3 times as much browns, usually considered a high Carbon material, as greens it is not all that necessary to have that unless you are really paranoid about it.
Freshly fallen tree leaves, while considered a brown, will have a C:N ratio closer to 40:1 while those stockpiled until spring will be closer to 80:1. But the only difference in handling them, from my experience,is the amount of moisture needed with less needed for newly fallen leaves then for those not picked up until spring.

One of the FAQs said that dried grass clippings are browns, but what you guys are saying makes more sense.

A brief intro to composting
"Dried grass: either mow and dry or rake up dead grass from the lawn"

Yeah, my Dad wanted me to dig a whole and pile it all in there so we wont just have a lump of stuff on the grass, hope thats ok. Because of the hole, my plan now is to get the mix ready and then lay some finished compost over it to kind of incubate/cook it.

Bump

I kinda scrapped the pile. I took out everything (just greens) and put newspaper on the bottom of the hole I dug, and then ran over the removed items with the lawnmower, scraped up what I could and added it back in. My carbon troubles are also over, as for fourth of July weekend I went camping and was able to collect a lot of old leaves that have just sat on the floor of the woods from last fall (nice and aged). Another triumph was that I paid these kids to get me some worms and they came back with over 50 big ones. When I returned home I also swept up quite a bit of grass clippings that had been fried in the sun. I actually have more carbon than nitrogen now and it was quite the opposite not too long ago.

Yay for me. =)

I don't mean to be a Negative Nancy, but for the future I'd recommend against taking anything out of campgrounds or other wilderness areas. Mother Nature needs those browns too. :smile: (I hope I don't offend, but I believe in the "leave no trace" mantra, and figure that most composting folks might want to consider it also.)

Re: green leaves, I was going from a book that listed "fresh" leaves as a C:N ratio of 40:1-80:1, but can see that the word "fresh" could have more than one definition, so I'll stand corrected.

Well it wasn't at the campground. We were dropping our camper at my aunts house(easier to store, she has some property)after leaving the campground and I just got a trash bag of leaves from there. They normally burn their leaves so I didn't see the harm. However, your thoughts are noted and I take no offense.

Ah, I totally misunderstood! (Glad you weren't offended.) Pax. :)