If you want fast, hot (to kill weed seeds and pathogens) traditional compost, you need 4 things in appropriate ratios:
carbon
nitrogen
water
appropriate microbiology
If you don't have
enough carbon to dance with all the nitrogen, your pile could start to smell like ammonia, and for sure it will outgass nitrogen compounds into the air and waste them. Carbon is often referred to as browns,
wood chips, dry brown leaves, corn stalks, any stable cellulose product qualifies as a brown.
If you don't have enough nitrogen, the pile won't heat up well, it won't kill weed seeds or pathogens, and it will take a long time. Nitrogen feedstocks are the primary fuel that the microbiology uses to digest the carbon. This is often referred to as greens. fresh grass out of the mower bag, fresh leaves, "fresh" rotting vegetable, fresh manure, and
urine are common examples. If your pile isn't going good/fast/hot, dump some dilute urine on it. (3:1, water to urine)
If you don't have enough water, the bacteria and other wildlife won't thrive. If you have too much water, it will exclude the oxygen and the pile will go anaerobic and stinky.
And finally, the right biology. If you don't have enough bacteria and fungi and invertebrates, it won't work--at all.
If you've never made compost before, it's not wrong to buy some activator to get the process off to a good start.
If a friend has a good compost pile, just bring home a 5 gallon
bucket of their compost--terrific activator.
Or...you could borrow a few shovel fulls of nice loamy dirt and leaves in a forest. The forest figured out composting while we were still swinging from the
trees.
If the pile isn't working fast enough, add some dilute urine, great activator, if you have sufficient biology there to start with. Ordinary human urine is sterile, so it's great at feeding the biology, but it won't supply the biology.
But as a regular addition to a compost pile, nobody needs store bought "magic" activators.
As a side note, if you are not in a hurry to make compost in 6 weeks, you can just bury it in trenches where you want better fertility next year. No turning, no watering, little outgassing, less work, much less fussy about the carbon to nitrogen ratio. But not as fast. You also don't lose nearly as much nutrient to the atmosphere with trench composting.
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