The best compost contains a wide variety of ingredients. Would you want to try to live on only 2 food items ? The human body & the compost pile both need a well-balanced diet.

I think it depends on what your purpose is. If you want high quality compost for your garden, more ingredients would be better. If you want to dispose of waste items in an ecologically friendly manner, it would be fine.

I could live on beer and pizza, yes. ;-)

Does a compost pile 'need' more ingredients to function??? I mostly broadcast out UCG's, and thought having them composted might be an improvement. Plus I can use up the ever-increasing newsprint pile (my mom's daily paper).

Cheers,
Michelle

Having more ingredients would be better, but you can definitely create compost using nothing but UCG and paper.

I kinda look at it like junk food. Paper is highly processed like white rice and white bread and sugar.

The microorganisms break down and nutrients into a form the plants can use. Leaves will provide more nutrition, like whole grain bread.

:)

If you are waiting to build the pile because you don't have other ingredients, don't wait, go ahead and build what you can with what you have. As you get other more varried ingredients you can add them then. The more variety the better the compost but you can still make compost with just the two ingredients.

guess my microbes aren't particular...

I've used paper/cardboard & coffee grounds before, & the soil has gotten better & better.

Adding organic material to the soil is a good thing.

Go for it!

It's all good. Start with the paper and grounds as the major part of the pile, and toss in anything else that comes to hand - a weed, a handful of leaves, an apple core, something green and fuzzy from the back of the fridge. Your compost will be beautiful.

Paper may have a large volume of carbon and the Coffee grounds a fair amount of other nutrients, but the two mixed together as the only ingrediants in a compost pile are not compost and will produce a good, nutrient rich soil amendment. You need a wide variety of material in a good compost pile.

"the two mixed together as the only ingrediants in a compost pile are not compost and will produce a good, nutrient rich soil amendment."

Make up your mind. First you say they aren't compost, then you say they'll produce a good, nutrient rich soil amendment.

A mixture of those two ingredients is not compost, but if you mix them together, they'll decompose and produce compost. I know that for a fact, because I've made compost that way.

In a perfect world, I would have used a variety of ingredients high in nitrogen and a variety of ingredients high in carbon. Since I live in the real world and the ingredients I had on hand were coffee grounds and shredded paper, I made compost with those.

I think that paper and UCGs will make compost. I think that the paper will want to be shredded, wadded and moistened and mixed with the UCGs. I wonder if it will heat up.

I think this would be best if it was mixed with soil, not just piled on top of the soil.

"I wonder if it will heat up."

I had a bin filled almost exclusively with UCG and paper reach 165 degrees last spring (maybe early summer).

I'm not going to address whether it would be best to mix it into the soil or put it on top, since that's a topic that gets debated (sometimes heatedly) here often enough and it has nothing to do with the question the OP was asking.

The reason I had suggested tilling it into the soil is because of the relative lack of biological diversity of a mix of ground rinsed coffee beans and wood pulp. Leaves and grass are more likely to have enough various Potassium, Phosphorus, Nitrogen and trace minerals to actually grow something in.

The UCG/paper compost will have humic acid, and that's good for soil, but it might be a bit lacking in nutrients. Just a guess, but it's why I suggested tilling in - it might do more good if it were in contact with the soil.

I plan to till most of the resulting material into a new bed. We have adobe clay soil and I have had the best results with tilling amendments in. I also broadcast lots of UCGs, alfalfa, and aged manure into established beds and as a result have lots and lots of worm castings under the mulch. No worries about diversity... Have been meaning to start harvesting some watercress to mulch or compost with - it should be rich with nutrients, too.

Cheers,
Michelle

"Paper may have a large volume of carbon and the Coffee grounds a fair amount of other nutrients, but the two mixed together as the only ingrediants in a compost pile are not compost and will produce a good, nutrient rich soil amendment. You need a wide variety of material in a good compost pile."
Oops. I forgot one small word in that sentence which should read, "and will not produce a good, nutrient rich soil amendment".

It makes more sense that way.

I agree that a wider variety of materials would make better compost, but UCG and paper can make compost, which was the question the OP asked.

Sorry, but what are UCG's?

Used
Coffee
Grinds

:-)

I thank the OP for asking this question because I am in exactly the same predicament and was about to ask the same.. just Starbucks coffee grounds and shredded cardboard and paper products in my bin! I do toss in kitchen scraps (no meats or dairy), but for just two people (me and the wife), we don't produce much waste to contribute. I want to diversify the ingredients in my bin, but this young neighborhood is very-lacking in available OM.

I'm hoping to find a score of leaves in the town I work in to toss in my truck on the way home one night, but either everyone is lazy or rich because there's not a single bag to snatch anywhere. I've been eagerly looking for weeks. I'm almost desperate enough to offer older/handicapped folks a free leaf-raking if they supply the rake and let me take all the leaves. My town sanitation/water company is contracted with another company to deal with yard waste and is not allowed to share any of it with the town residents (breech of contract).

So I'm in the same boat and was also wondering what kind of 'compost' I am making with these meager ingredients. It is certainly better than no ingredients though.

The compost you make with UCG and paper is just fine.

It would be better if it were made with more ingredients, but it will be a help as is.

I hit it big today! I was driving, looking for leaves and some older lady in her driveway was blowing leaves with her blower. I stopped and asked her if I could have stuff from her piles of random yard waste at the end of her driveway. She overwhelmingly said "YES"! She hadn't piled up any leaves yet, but welcomed me to come back anytime and pick up anything out front. I made out like a bandit with 4 rain-soaked bales of straw, several pumpkins and large goards, a fern, some other viney plant that I re-potted and a bundle of corn stalks. If this isn't diversity I don't know what it is. The bales of straw are so compressed I'm going to have a large regular supply to go with the Starbucks UGG for some time to come. AWESOME!

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