Compost piles around this area of the world that are frozen solid by mid December are the result of poor management, that is not an article I would recommend to anyone.

The writer there is as most composters just proud of their efforts.
I am too as are most here I believe. I'm so new at this I have to read it, think about it, and then study what you more experienced veteran composters either validate or contend as good or corrupt.

I love the response pro or con from you guys/gals. And then I have to put that up against what I have to work with or accumulate free or dirt cheap....
Keep it coming... knowledge is the best tool.

My musing now.. Thursday on craigslist a Troy Bilt tiller showed up, almost new. $400. I EM'd the guy and offered $300. He EM back said come and get it. At a condo in Charlotte from where he had moved from Pa., he rolled out a SuperBronco with reverse rather than the Bronco I thought I had bid on. Nice guy, paid him, got manual, tiller and left. He said he tilled a 20x30 spot 1 time last year and that was all it was used.
My little Honda tiller is 21 years old and still running but about to need clutch assembly. In the boredom of winter I feel good about--- new equipment ...AND the new KNOWLEDGE---- and motivation found from this board....

albert you are right! A very light-hearted look at composting.

I have to disagree with kimmsr on this one. Badly managed compost pile to one person is a cold, slow pile to another. Obviously the author of the article isn't worried about being on the composting fast track.

I compost in a similar way. Forgive me, I have committed many composting sins. I don't always walk kitchen scraps to the bin (especially guilty when temps are below 30 or above 90). I don't turn as regularly as would be considered "optimal". I don't have the perfect mix of brown/green. I don't always have the wrung out sponge moisture perfect either. I don't shred/chip leaves before adding them. My piles don't steam in the morning sun (although I sometimes envy those who do). I don't regularly scrounge the neighborhood for neighbor's cast offs (occasionally, but not regularly). I don't put every paper plate, cardboard food box, or napkin in the bin (the landfill Gods will get me for that one).

If my sins make me lose my gardenweb account and be cast into the eternal pit of lazy, slow composters.... so be it.

So many things to stress out about in this life. Managing my compost pile perfectly is not one of them.

May you all have a very safe and Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

Hey momstar, I'm not one of the oldtimers here, but the saying used to be "IALBTC".
Nothing wrong with a cold pile keeping that in mind.

"this area of the world"

More specific please.

Let's be realistic...the goal of composting is to build quality soil and divert some of our waste from a landfill. There is no reason to make it so complicated. Nature drops things and lets them rot where they lay all the time. We don't have to improve on that too much. I throw my compostable waste into the pile as is without thinking about the ratio of brown to green. I rarely add water or turn it either. Sometimes when I don't want something in the pile I just bury it in the garden. In the end my compost pile produces great fertilizer and my garden soil is great. No reason to complicate something nature makes so easy, patience is always a virtue in the garden.

There are no "composting sins" and each of us has our own methods and goals (often, these can change over time for whatever reason).

Lloyd

"Compost piles around this area of the world that are frozen solid by mid December are the result of poor management..."

Say WHAT????? Am I missing something here? I know Lloyd and many others out west make great compost but with the weather and temperatures they've been having, if he - or anyone else in western Canada - doesn't have a GREAT frozen compost pile at this time then I live on the planet Mars...

(I must be missing something here... Maybe if I leave and come back things will have been placed in perspective. Yep, I'll come back tomorrow...)

Oh, and Al, cute article. :O)

I, too, thought the article was a little TOO light, and not terribly sensible. Why write an article about composting at all if you don't really care about it and don't want to put any effort into it?

When I was a child my family moved from at apt. in NJ to a house in the country in CT. My mother made a big vegetable garden, and started a compost pile using kitchen waste in the hope of improving the garden soil. However, she did not do any research at all and she never turned the pile, and never added browns. We lived there for six years and NEVER got any usable compost out of that pile. It was slimy and stinky (too wet, not enough oxygen or carbon -- in hindsight) and there were recognizable chunks of stuff almost all the way to the bottom. All those bitter cold trips through the dark of winter with smelly scraps, for naught! A real waste of time and resources. A little knowledge and just a little more effort and we could have had a lot of fantastic compost.

When I moved to my current property a year and a half ago, I decided to compost and my first effort went anaerobic -- slimy and stinky. I did some research and added more browns, but then the bin got too dry and nothing broke down. Months went by with no progress. Here in AZ, compost piles will mummify (and do nothing at all) without added moisture. I learned that I MUST add moisture, I MUST be conscious of carbon/nitrogen ratios, and I MUST turn the pile at least once a week if I want to compost.

Now my pile and bins are cooking! I haven't achieved "black gold" yet but I'm about to harvest a pile and a bin of really nicely composted mulch to spread on my very poor clay soil to help my trees, and the third bin will be "black gold" in another couple of months, which will probably go in the veggie garden. It's really heating up and I'm watching it all rot before my eyes, without going anaerobic. It took some thought and some work, but was so worth it.

Quite often I see people on this forum say, "Just throw stuff in a pile and ignore it, it will be compost in a couple of years" and I am here to tell you, that is not always the case. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

--Maureen

"The saying used to be IALBTC" What is that?

Lloyd - Doesn't your compost freeze solid where you are?

Mine sure does, but it's not a huge pile like yours would be. I can dig into mine in early May and still the middle sounds like I'm hitting a rock with the shovel.

BTW I haven't read the article.

To me the Author simply was saying Kiss. I agree. This year I am forced into a cold pile and who cares? Nothing to turn and even if there were, I for one am not going out at 0 degree F and turn a pile, frozen or not. The pile works for me not me for the pile. Organics decompose! I will add to the pile till spring and mix it then.

Curt

IALBTC

It all leads back to "compost". I'm using quotes since it should be apparent that compost may mean different things to different people. To me it means humus.

There are some advantages to having large compost piles, i.e., larger than a cubic yard. It's been 20F here about a week yet even my haphazard piles aren't frozen. Yes, there is a frozen crust but steam appears when pulled back.

One thing I like about slow "cold" piles, earthworms will finish the soil interface to a fine crumble. But that may not be true in more arid climes. The comment upthread about mummification was interesting...wonder if maybe pit or trench composting would be more suitable for those conditions.

Lloyd, if you actually paid attrention you would have seen that I am in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 4a/5b in Michigan (which is what that MI stands for). Even though the temperatures here have been running, on average, 5 degrees colder than the 10 year average my compost piles are still activly working, albeit slower than when it was 80 degrees. Some of the outside and very wet material added over the last few days is frozen but not down in the center where the bacteria have been most active.

Thanks Mr. Millar, "this area of the world" might have meant the entire U.S.A. or North America, I'm glad you finally narrowed it down to just Michigan. I suppose I should just assume all the incorrect things you spout only apply to your specific tiny spot in the world.

Remember when you made this grand pronoucement? "Compost piles that freeze in cold weather have too much moisture in them." It would have been funny if you had not been serious.

It appears you might be trying to be somewhat more accurate by including a reference to geography and climate, you're almost there. It took a few years but you are getting a bit better, I have hope that eventually you'll get it correct.

;-)

Lloyd

Momstar - would you move up a bit, please? I'll be joining you in the pit.

My only response to kimmsr is that despite bad management, ie heaps which never heat up summer or winter, I have sent almost no kitchen or garden waste to landfill in 30 years. I am not buried in undecayed vegetation and the plants do not appear to object to the product I force upon them.

Beginners need to know there are lots of ways to compost and they're all o.k. (Except, and this is just my personal view and applies only to domestic composting, ones which require inputs such as oil and electricity to produce compost or get the composter worried that they're doing something 'wrong'.)

What is it that does freeze? There is only one substance that freezes.

For a brief moment I had thought that you were finally trying to give out somewhat more accurate information and then you post an idiotic statment like that. (shakes head)

Had you stated that piles freeze because they have moisture, as opposed to too much moisture you might get away with such a dumb statement as your last.

Combined with the "poor management" comment you made earlier as well as the numerous previous threads where you clearly blame freezing piles on people having their piles too wet, shows how ridiculous you can get sometimes.

Lloyd

P.S. Lot's of substances freeze. This reminds me of your Einsteins Theory of Relativity explanation or "no rubber in tires" assertation. ;-)

My pile freezes solid in winter. Its not a result of "poor" management. I have deliberately chosen to make compost using passive pile management, which is not poor management. I use less energy inputs, yet still create high quality compost.

In fact letting my pile freeze, helps break down the browns quickly when they eventually thaw.

I keep my pile on the dry side, high on browns, because I am less apt to get odors that way with passive management. Those frozen browns break down quickly, the pile shrinks considerably fast when it thaws.

I also keep adding scraps and browns to the pile all winter long. So there is fresh additions stacked on top of the frozen block of organic materials.

Oh! --about the what freezes question.
The first thing that comes to my mind was the guy on a TV ad that froze a "nanner" to -70 and hit it with a hammer........
That bugger exploded.......

I'm the author of the referenced piece, actually at the link below rather than the "new" blog page as listed by the OP. Didn't know I'd inspired such controversy until I checked to see where some of the visitors were coming from, which led me back to this thread.

Thanks for all the interest. I'm obviously not an expert, just another gardener having some fun. And for those who are interested, my compost pile was still frozen on March 1st but I was able to dig some out on the 20th....just in time to put on the strawberry bed.

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Musings blog on Compost

pt03,albert,momstar,joepyeweed, can I join the club?
I have one hot & 3-4 cold compost piles.
I put more greens in the hot one.
I know the cold one is ready, when the mushrooms show up.
Then I turn the cold pile for the first time, looking for earthworms( about 5 per shovel full means I have good humus).:-)
I do not have time to babysit 4 compost piles, so I let mother earth do most of the work for me. It is better then having one small 6 X 8 pile, when I can have 4 or more going at once.
Of coarse, I am way down the line from Lloyd, the compost King or JonH, the granite Garden King.

I have been very surprised over this last couple of years to see how bin composting has become almost sacred. How did this happen? After many decades of bin composting, I got tired of the extra work. The crops I grow do not need fully composted material. If I did grow those kinds of crops I might still be using bin composting. Instead, I only use sheet composting. I now have more time for quality of life and my garden does just as well, maybe even better.

Here is a link that might be useful: Building Up Soil

My passively managed pile o'er wintered and shrank by 2/3rds, so I suspect that it didn't freeze.