Generally, too wet/bad smelling means too many greens and too few browns, which for many of us is a common problem. If you are mostly doing food scraps and green plants and such, you're going to have too much nitrogen and moisture. Unfortunately, adequate browns can be hard to come by. I got around it by saving all my leaves last year, which is a much more brown heavy balance than I've had in the past. I have a friend who buys wood stove pellets as a cheap brown, although the idea of buying something just to compost feels odd to me. Pretty much anything paper/cardboard is a brown, and probably OK to use if you shred it. Lately, I've been emptying the office shredder every couple weeks for my worm bins, but you could use newspaper, old boxes, etc.

I am one of the odd ones who buy cat pine pellets to be the browns haha. I don't have much leaves around so I have to resort to pine pellets. I do shred paper to use as supplemental brown to compost though.

I will try to add more paper and pellets to dry it up.

We use feline pine for the cat, and it bums me out that I can't use the used litter for the pile, but hey, cats are kinda gross.

It is really mind boggling to me how much brown you really need. My first bin last year was a pretty bad experience, and in retrospect, it was more like 80/20 greens/browns, which is about opposite of what you need. And it was wet, stinky, and never totally broke down. But browns are a real bear to get your hands on for a lot of us. I actually built my new bin as a way of coping with our leaves (we have 5 pretty big trees, and a city that makes it real hard to dispose of them), and the composting was more of a happy byproduct. At any rate, 6 months later, I'm only starting to get close to the ideal 30% greens.

Many of us are not that excited about tumblers for exactly this reason. They seem to be more trouble than they're worth compared to a ground based bin or pile.

I have a theory that like the fruitcake there is only one compost tumbler - and it keeps getting re-gifted. ;-)

I refuse to pay for anything to compost. IF I have to pay I will just buy the compost.

As a general rule of thumb you need about 3 parts "browns" (high carbon material) to 1 part "green" (high Nitrogen material) and the high Carbon material is usually considered to be dry so excess moisture would not be a problem.

A mass of material to be composted should be just moist, although many usually wet that too much, and an unpleasant odor is a sign that the mix does not have adequate amounts of air (displaced by too much moisture) and anaerobic bacteria are at work. You need a dry, high Carbon, material to sop up the moisture, if there is room in the tumbler, or dump the material out and start over with the mix.

Some people have used tumblers with some success, once they learn to right ratio of material, but generally tumblers have too little volume to properly compost.

Perhaps this tutorial may be of some help. http://sarasota.ifas.ufl.edu/compost-info/

kimmq is kimmsr

Unless one lives at the South Pole,I don't see why brown material should be difficult to find. 500 lb bundles of cardboard can be had just for picking it up on CraigsList most any day you look. I don't consider myself a Greenie by any measure but feel it incumbet on all of us to diverte material from landfill when possible as a condition of living on earth. I wadger that fall leaves can be found free in most neighborhoods other than the Southwest. There is enough paper and cardboard containers flowing through most two person households to supply a tumbler. If not,perhaps it's time to let our neighbors know about our need for material.

Bassopotamus ... I sift out the poop and compost the pee-soaked sawdust.

It composts FAST and unless your cats have some deadly disease, is no worse than the oft-recommended addition of human urine, or stable bedding.

Hey klem1 - I could get cardboard from Costco and BJ but it'll be a chore to shred them up before putting it in the tumbler.

I got a steady supply of local newspaper I can use as more brown. Can anyone confirm that color ink on newspaper is okay?

Cardboard is easier to pull apart after left beneath drip line of the garden shed. Ready to go into pile unless the objective is drying the material. If the only option was cardboard and I needed it dry I would keep the ripped pieces in a large box under shelter until dry. In those cases where material tends to stay saturated larger pieces of brown and nonshredded leaves helps air circulation at the expense of lost capacity. Those with unlimited space and no way to shred can toss cereal and saltine boxes in as is.

Just don't forget to remove any sealing tape and staples from the cardboard first.

That too is a pain.

Conventional wisdom says the colored inks are vegetable based and without heavy metals these days, but I've started my fireplace with the colored ads and the flames sometimes turn colors, which makes me suspect metal content. That could be harmless metals, or not, and it could be insignificant amounts, or not. I would avoid putting those in the compost and send them to recycle instead.

Many people commonly think of leaves when they think of browns. But here are some brown items your household generates regularly: cereal and any similar grocery item boxes, tissue and paper towel rolls, used paper towels. But don't just think about your household. Ask your parents, siblings, friends to keep theirs, too. Not all friends will, but just 1 or 2 more households helping you could be a bonus.

Live oak leaves also drop in the spring, when many people have already cleaned up their yard and don't have those leaves left, but some neighbors probably are still cleaning up again because of those live oak leaves.

Being the compost fiends that we are, I think there might be times when it's OK to buy something to add to the pile, if we are short on browns. I think a paper cross-cut shredder is a good investment, and even buying a bale of straw could be something worthwhile. You get quite a lot of straw for that one bale.

This is in the case of urban homeowners who probably have a relatively small compost pile. For rural areas, compost piles might be larger and there are probably plenty of ways to get leaves or straw from neighbors.

And of course, free is good, so check your websites that have free local things being given away. Plenty of "moving boxes" that could be added to the pile.

Make requests, too. People have plenty of newspaper, maybe even old straw bales, sitting around that they never get to throwing away or didn't want to because someone might want it, and if you are openly asking for it, that's when it looks like no trouble at all to contact you to pick it up.

Not all colored inks are made of vegetable (soya) oil and those in the newspaper ads are the ones still made of metallic inks which is why you saw those neat colors in the flames. If you8 take those ads and hold them at an angle to light you will see shiny places on the paper telling you that the print has be3n covered with shellac or varnish to keep those colors from smearing.

kimmq is kimmsr