My thought about why your pile is cool now but was hot earlier is that all
the easily digested food has been used up, and the microorganisms are not
able to consume the remaining food fast enough to keep the pile warm. It
will turn to compost or leaf mold if you keep it moist and wait.

"sherwindu" wrote in message
...
Hi Hob,

Sounds like you have taken the proper steps to get your mulch pile
working. I
would guess it has shut down partly due to the cold weather. I would wait
for
the
warmer Spring temperatures for it to get started again, keeping the pile
moist.
You
may be rushing things a bit expecting to get the fully composted nice
black
stuff this
early in the season. My guess is that the pile with the leaves and grass
should
work
better than the straight grass pile. I have a similar mulch pile and it
takes
at least a
year before it is fully cooked. I say be a bit more patient.

Sherwin D.

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 ?

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