"John Wheeler" wrote in message
...
I suspect it's anaerobic, because of lack of oxygen. How does it smell
when
you turn it?

Sweet and a little moldy -

Thanx for the input - some more background -
I had the smell the previous year where too much "just grass" made it
"heavy" and sealed it. So I kept if from packing down when I put the mower's
bagfuls in, and I mixed in some of the previous year's dried shredded leaf I
had kept in bags for mulch, etc (my mower shreds dried leaves into bits
about half the size of a dime) to keep it form packing.
And being in the garden cloth seems to keep it from getting soggy.

It was mixed with a pitchfork about once a month.

Frequent turning helps bring in oxygen and mixing up the
ingredients. Layering by itself does little. Adding fertilizer that you
pay for is mostly wasting money.

FWIW - I got that fertilizer thing from the extension service's bulletin on
making compost bins, and from the garden show.

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John Henry Wheeler
Washington, DC
USDA Zone 7
"hob" wrote in message
. ..
Hi

I have been gardening for nearly 40 years, and two years ago I started a
compost bin for my lawn clippings.

I have two bins - one is a cylinder made of garden wire, 4 feet across
and
stands about 5 feet high.
The other is made of open-spaced planks and is 3 feet by 6 feet by 4
feet
high.

Both were filled again last year, the rectangular one with primarily
grass
clippings across the year; the cylindrical one with about a 50-50 mix of
finely shredded dropped maple leaves and grass clippings with a
hand-held
spread's worth of 10-10-10 every three inches of depth, watered to be
sure
it was moist around mid-September. They were turned once and twice last
year.

This early spring, I go out in the cold and check, expecting them to be
frozen solid, and they were loose and warm inside - they were busy
cooking.

But now, a few weeks later, they are definitely cold and moist inside,
and
the mix still looks like partly moldy grass and leaf shred. It
definitely
isn 't dark compost.

Since the microbes had fertilizer, moisture, no packing down, and time,
I
would have expected more breakdown, or at least the mix to not be warm
at
the end of winter and then cold now.


Any ideas as to why they stopped working, and/or what am I missing and
what
should I change, if anything ?


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