Cover your Compost!

This might be common sense for most folks, but I have discovered why my compost has been slow to cook.

I have not been keeping a sufficient layer of brown material on top of the pile that I am maintaining. I now consider it like putting on a hat in cold weather. You lose a lot of warmth from the top!

I would pull back the top of the pile to place new contribution to the pile and replace the top but never got a lot of action unless I flipped the whole pile. I now keep a nice inch layer of straw/weeds/browns on top of my pile and it really starts chewing through organic matter now.

I'm kind of embarrassed that I hadn't done this earlier but I wanted to share my realization!

Good observation. Composting is an ongoing experiment, and it's different in every location. Your mulch layer may hold heat or may hold moisture.

In my location we get less than half the rainfall. The air is dry and the composting season is short. It's tough to keep open-air piles damp enough to work, which is why I finally went anaerobic for the first phase. But with adequate humidity an aerobic system will also work; it just needs a lot of hand holding.

I have never covered my compost, except when the bin was full. Basically, as I fill one side, the other is being use. Once it is empty, the new side is turned into the one I empty. That is when the bin is covered, while I work on the next. One thing I work towards is making sure there is a balance of browns & greens. Of course when we got chickens, they were consuming much of our greens.

A 4-6” layer of carbon rich material (i use woodchips or char) will also capture a lot of off gassing nutrients. I add the same at the foot of my Johnson Su cages to absorb runoff during our very wet winters.

For my excess water, I've been adding horse pellet bedding. What a difference it is making. I need to discover if it is also carbon rich.  Probably not for the compost bins, plus straw would be so much easier to remove.
We are getting so much rain. Over the last few years, it has been extremely heavy.

When I have excess compost water, I pour it into 5 gallon buckets full of dry biochar. The char soaks it up and the stink disappears instantly. Rough and ready inoculant!

I was at a composting workshop many years ago and the teacher (whose name I have lost to the mists of advancing age and decrepitude) said something along these lines: "Topsoil is called that because you put a layer of it on top of the pile when you build it."

Apparently there is research to support this...putting active soil in, and especially over the top, of a working compost heap keeps lots of the goodness in the zone of action. It also dramatically reduces the bad stuff that composting inevitably produces, like methane and nitrous oxide. Same goes for biochar, and the mechanisms at play are probably similar. I try to go one step further and put a "hat" of wood chips, old hay or weeds over the biochar/soil layer to keep it from drying out.

My compost is a disaster..It only has weeds I dig up from the garden. Chickens eat all kitchen scrap, and the outhouse produces surprisingly little manure. I have a bucket for my night pot so some urine can be splayed on it. But ithe compost just sort of sits there and doesn't compost at all 😳