hob wrote:
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 ?



My compost is primarily brown matter: leaves from oak, ash, liquidambar,
and zelkova. The only fertilizer that I add is high-nitrogen: urea (in
very small amounts).

I had a great compost pile, just a mound against a corner of a block
wall. When I had new landscaping installed, the contractor tried to do
me a favor by cleaning up my yard. Not only did he remove all the leaf
mulch from my camellias, but he also removed my "mess" -- my compost
pile. Since then, I learned to always advise contractors to leave the
mulch and compost.

It took about 14 months for a new compost pile to finally produce a good
compost (actually a form of leaf mold). Now, however, I keep some of
the old compost in the pile when I add more leaves. This ensures that
the necessary micro-organisms are present. The time to compost should
now be about 6 months.

--

David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

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