A Simple way to Make Hot Compost Fast.

 

Hot Composting.

 

There are three main ingredients that make a good compost. Carbon, Nitrogen and Water. Approximately one third of each ingredient by weight.

• First is Carbon. This can be dry leaves, grass clippings and spent garden plants or even dead weeds. Always save your leaves. Trees are deep rooted and have lots of trace minerals and carbon.

• Second is Nitrogen. Kitchen scraps or coffee grounds are a good source. Animal manures, like chicken, horse, cow or sheep are good. Green matter like grass clippings or green leaves, also have Nitrogen and are a good source. Bean or Pea vines and other legumes while still green are excellent.

• Third is Water.

Chicken litter is excellent for compost, it is very high in Nitrogen, and all three of the primary nutrients, N-P-K, and contains most of the important trace minerals. Chickens are usually feed some form of calcium like oyster shell, so that they have good shells on the eggs. It will take less to get great nutrition in your compost. It really is excellent if you like doing a hot composting system.

I like to use a wire cage made from 2 inch by 4 inch fencing wire for making kitchen scrap compost, or a hot compost. You can use Bricks or pallets to keep compost contained until it is finished and ready to use, or just make a big pile.

If you have lots of leaves, set up a wire cage for storing leaves and dry plants until you are ready to use them. If you are patient or not in a hurry just pile your ingredients on in layers, and get some from the bottom when it time to use some.

 

Hot Compost. This is my favorite way to make compost. In the summer there is more green stuffs around, in the winter more dry stuff. As long as you have the proportions close in the mix, it should work well.

Take your ingredients and mix or layer them together as you make your compost pile. The smaller and cut up your ingredients are, the better. It will make more surface area for the Thermophilic bacteria to work. Maybe mist them with a light mist or spray of water as you are piling them up, so they have a good even moisture content. A good gauge for water content in composting, is to be about as wet as a squeezed out kitchen sponge. Nice and moist but not to soggy.

It takes about a square yard (3 ft by 3 ft by 3 ft) of ingredients to get a compost to heat up on its own. But if you don’t have quite enough ingredients to make a full size pile, take a tea pot or two of hot water and pore it down in the center of the compost. It will make the heat loving bacteria happy and start to multiply. In a hot compost there are natural heat loving Thermophilic bacteria that turn on and speed up the composting process.

Air flow is very important to a hot compost, kind of like when you are trying to start a fire. If you like, have a big piece of wood or 2 by 4 in the center, while you build your pile. Then when you are done building the pile, pull it out. This open space will allow air into the pile and act as a draft. If you are in a really dry area, or your ingredients are not chopped real small this is probably not as necessary.

Thermophilic bacteria use lots of oxygen when it heats up. If the pile gets too wet it might slow, or bog down from lack of air flow. If there is a big rain coming, cover the pile with something like a tarp or cardboard to shed at least some of the water, if it is not under a covered area.

You can have finished compost in as little as fourteen days with this process. After it heats up, just fork it over after a few days, and put the outside of the pile to the inside of the pile, and the inside to the outside. Then you can do it again just about the time it starts to cool down a little, if needed.

One really good thing about a hot compost is if it gets hot enough, it will cook most weed seeds or pathogens in your pile. So if your worried about weed seeds this works well. If your compost gets too hot