Why is compost hot

That way it will keep any material from blowing away, it will keep any mice , rats or possums out of the compost whilst still allowing moisture in and out. Each day you will need to monitor the temperature of the mix. It will gradually rise in temperature over the first 5 days and get up to degree Fahrenheit. What will then happen is it will then start to cool. Once it gets below degrees Fahrenheit you get your fork and give it a mix which will introduce more oxygen and the pile will heat back up again.

You will need to turn your compost every days and after about 4 weeks you will see your compost heap look like the dark compost you are used to seeing.

The temperature will be low now, around 85 degrees Fahrenheit or less than 29 degrees Celsius. The next step is just to let your compost rest for around 2 weeks. This just completes the process, allows the temperature to come down and it is ready for your garden. The basic reason compost heaps heat up is because of the activity of the microorganisms that break down the organic material in your compost. As they chew up and break down the green and brown material, they use up oxygen and release heat.

This heat gets trapped in your compost pile and gradually warms up. If you are making a hot compost this will take a few days to get up to heat and level out. If the compost gets too hot, eg. The simple solution is to add some more brown materials and mix them in. It is really unlikely that your compost will reach this temperature but spreading it out over a larger area to allow it to cool, then piling it back up again may be necessary in the short term to release some heat.

The best thing about hot compost is that it breaks down quicker than a traditional cold compost. A well made hot compost will break down in just 4 weeks. A cold compost will take at least weeks but often much longer. Hot compost will also kill most weed seeds or pathogens that may be nasty for your garden. Technically you can put weeds that have gone to seed in the mix and as long as it heats up they should be no longer grow.

There are some exceptions however and many weed seeds can survive. I generally avoid putting weeds that have gone to seed into my compost just to be safe. The best way is pulling and adding weeds before they have gone to seed. Just as a side note, the best way to deal with weeds that have gone to seed is to make a weed tea.

I will write an article on how to make this soon. A compost heap will gradually heat up over days and then start to cool down. It really depends on your climate but once it gets below degree Fahrenheit then turn it over and make sure it is moist enough.

This will introduce more oxygen and then it will start to heat up again. After 4 weeks it should drop to a lower temperature where you can leave it for 2 more weeks then use in your garden. If you have the space and can access enough green and brown material than this is a great method for you. If you only have a small backyard with a small amount of fall leaves and kitchen waste you can still compost.

Just read my other article on composting and start there. If you have the space then go for it. I wet it and mixed it. Will hot composting work this way and should I keep the lid on or off? I have read a lot of your replies stating that a small compost bin cannot be used for hot composting. My question is that I live in Las Vegas and was hoping to utilize the extremely hot summers to start a hot compost bin. The temps this summer have been around F. Is that enough to be able to hot compost in a 10gal trash bin?

This will be my first attempt at composting. Would cold composting be the best method if I am looking to be able to add kitchen scraps and other materials to the bin regularly? Hi Michele, hot composting is a biological process that has critical parameters for it to operate correctly.

I live in iowa, and right now the highs are in the mid forties, can i still do this or do i need to wait until the summer when its warmer? I have grass clippings available at the moment, but not much else. Would it be an option to layer the grass with completed compost rather than laying it with other carbon sources like straw and manure etc? Layer the grass clippings with newspaper, cardboard, unbleached and unprinted paper, dry leaves, mulched branches and twigs etc. Completed compost layered with grass wont really work, a source of carbon is required.

I do have some cardboard and newspaper, but when I did cardboard a while ago, I found it to be a pain when trying to turnover the compost, so I wasnt going to use it again. Any one have any good methods of the best way to incorporate newpaper and cardboard without spending to much time on it?

It was partially decomposed. Since a lack of ready access to water has been a barrier to me hot composting, I might try putting my hot composting pile in the same ditch.

The trick with newspaper is to take the sheets and crumple them into tight balls without tearing them up, they help with aeration of the compost this way and provide a source of carbon. Works great with regular cold composting too! Twigs, branches, dried plant matter and garden prunings work well as a carbon source.

Break your materials up into small pieces it if you can — use a mulcher, put it on the ground and mow over it, or put in on the ground and chop it up the best you can with a spade. Remember, the greater the variety of materials that you use, the better the compost. You might as well just spread the lawn clipping straight on your garden if there are no weed seeds in it, or compost the straight lawn clippings in a tumbler style compost bin that you spin around by hand.

Hi, It is wonderful site to learn small but very useful thing. I am in India, Gujarat, I have plenty of vegetable oils waste. Do I use this as a ingredient of composting green materials? Waste vegetable oil is recycled around the world to produce biofuels, it is refined into a diesel fuel replacement for motor vehicles, and also into biofuels used for power generation and heating. After that you then put the most composted material that was in the middle of the pile on the outside of the new heap.

Fantatic information — many thanks!! Would this be effective or suggested to do, or am I putting myself at risk of spreading the bugger further in my garden? My thoughts were to layer it as a green source alternating with the manure and dried stuff and even pour a bit of urine on it for good measure? Many thanks again for your advice — I am very new to this all and find your site excellent. I will take on board what you suggest with the extra nitrogen — might get some extra cow or horse poo in addition to my chicken and lamb stuff I already have from my own farm.

My main concern was the blackberry canes mulched up and used in the mix would flourish being so evasive instead of breaking down. I would probably suggest that cold composting them would not be advised, but wasnt sure about hot composting. If I can put them to good use like this — then all the better!!! I love this info! Our school currently uses a method very similar. And have 3 hot composts and a vermicompost.

We also use pencil shavings once a week. I was reading your blog re water collection. We are collecting condesation runoff from the air conditioning units. Thanks for your great insight! Hi I found your site by pure luck — my husband and I are building a compost heap and I have quite a lot of brown leaves and some green freshly mowed grass.

My question is I also have some raw meat that I would like to compost in this heap. I have read your instructions and know to make layers 5cm thick each and to put kitchen waste in the middle. I also have prawn heads and shells and the shells of mud crab. As we are in Autumn now I understand I will need to keep the heap covered with a tarp. Would you advise me if I should use the raw meat and seafood in the heap please. I admit that I was sceptical about this method of making compost. I am therefore delighted to report that it worked.

I did not worry about having a precise carbon-nitrogen ratio mix: most of my raw material approx. I followed the instructions almost exactly otherwise, except that occasionally the interval between turning the pile exceeded two days.

I also watered the pile after turning it each time. The inside of the pile grew exceedingly hot during the composting process, as expected. The pile was typically smelly after having been turned each time, but this smell only lasted a few hours at most , and was attenuated with watering. In three weeks, all of the raw materials except for some twigs, woody roots and bits and pieces of other wooden matter had turned to compost.

The temperature dropped considerably and there was no smell; it was impossible to identify any of the original material. The final stage in the process — from the point where there was still some identifiable grass clippings, leaves and paper, to the point where I only had warm, friable compost — seemed to take place overnight and occurred very late in the process.

I noticed only a slight loss of volume overall. I began using the final product almost immediately. I screened some of it to use as a turf underlay, and used the remainder — including twigs and other matter, all of which I am told will eventually break down — on various garden beds, most of which have a poor soil base.

I have no doubt that my plants will thrive. A few points: 1. The twigs, etc. The regular turning of the heap is very good exercise! I am working as a partial teacher here in a district outside of Kathmandu city Nepal. Trying to help the Nepalese people move away from chemical fertilizing back to natural methods. This is the best How-To I have found yet!

Had a guy come out to look at our lawn as it had been left to its own devices for over a year We have just bought the place , It was strimmed back and treated with ferrous sulphate as we had more moss than grass! Would it be more carbon rich than nitrogen given that its mostly dead? Would it be suitable to mix the resulting compost with some sand to make a good top dressing for the lawn? Hi Neil, You can definitely compost the moss and grass, the iron sulphate should be fine, it will simply make an iron-rich compost.

If the lawn clippings are mostly dry, they will be richer in carbon, you might need to add a bit of nitrogen rich material to help it break down. You can use the compost straight as a lawn top-dressing, add teh sand only if you need better drainage.

Im trying to get hold of a shredder for some hedge clippings and brambles so once i have that ill get everything pilled up with some fresh grass clippings and see how it goes. Hi love the hot composting method but i must admit that i wasnt as diligent in turning the pile for about a week after the first ten days we were bombarded with rain for about 4 days so i had my pile covered with a tarp.

When I uncovered the pile i saw mushrooms everywhere so i turned the pile and watered it as usual but the next day a mushroom head was poking out.

I wanted to know is ths something that I should be concerned about and what could I improve upon to reduce the amount of mushrooms in the pile.

I have also heard of mushroom compost so could the sight of mushrooms be a benefit. My name is Joseph just a beginner composter that is looking for some answers. The mushrooms are just breaking down the carbon-rich materials in the compost heap.

Your information is great!! I have some questions… Can I put manures horse straight in the compost pile, or do I have to leave it until it dries before adding to the pile? And is it reliabe to use sawdust for the compost? My understanding is that microorganisms are what make a compost pile work, and microorganisms are found in soil. Hi Bob, in the first step I do mention adding activators such as old compost — this is because compost that is already made is the richest source of composting bacteria.

You can definitely help things along by adding soil if you have a rich, healthy dark humus soil with lots of organic matter in it that is packed with soil life. Unfortunately some soils are quite lifeless, damaged severely and quite sterile. The type of soil really matters. I have a slight worry though. I would have thought an open heap would be more prone to vermin, or does the high-temperature keep them at bay? Hello again, I have now made about a dozen hot compost piles, and never had one fail, winter or summer.

Excellent site. My question is, I want to heat my polytunnel over this winter with a succession of hot compost heaps, but usually my pile is about 3m cubed, so I want to get this down to about a metre.

Thanks for your help :. Great to hear your success with hot composting, thanks for sharing! No need to make your compost heap smaller, you can tap into the heat of the bigger pile and direct it to your polytunnel enclosure.

They just use a long heavy duty hose coiled under the compost heap. Instead of showering with the hot water you can have it circulating through a long copper pipe or a copper coil which radiates out the heat inside your polytunnel enclosure, and connects back to the hose as a big loop, like a solar hot water heater.

High Blackthorn, what a great site, I love it.. I have a 2 bay set up where I build up the heap progressively using any waste I can get from the garden and kitchen inter-layered with soil. When the bay is full I move it top to bottom into the 2nd bay, aerating it and moving the oldest compost to the top.

I get 3 bay-fulls about 3 cu. Its worked well but I really like the sound of the hot composting process and plan to start my first heap. I can get an almost limitless supply of wood chips from the local tip accumulated waste from arborists , so I was thinking of using this as my carbon content and chicken manure as nitrogen.

The woodchips are fairly course and I am wondering if this will work OK. I am using a lot of my organic waste from the kitchen and garden in my wicking worm beds these days, so there is less than there used to be for the compost heap. My guess is that the heap would starve of carbon very quickly. Many thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated, however I do want to make a couple of points.

First, I have been using woodchips in my cold compost for years without problems breaking them down, they are crushed in the chipping process which splinters them and increases surface area significantly. Second, I have been persuaded recently that the main benefit of compost is that it supplies food for the soil biology.

It is said that the diverse microorganism population of the soil breaks it down and provides nutrients to the plant in a form easily assimilated by them. Humus is probably the most concentrated form of food suitable for microorganisms, hence my interest in hot composting, but in nature cold composting seems to be the way microorganisms are naturally fed.

It seems to me that the origin of the compost is not so important as the micro-organisms attracted by it. In my worm farms built into raised self watering wicking beds I feed the microorganisms with finely chopped kitchen and garden waste A large handfull every 2 days.

In 4 days the waste has been largely broken down by microorganisms with the help of composting worms. Burrowing worms distribute the microorganisms and their food into the plant growing area of the wicking bed. A good article on this and related subjects can be found at Hi John, excellent points, thanks for sharing! I use a chipper type mulching machine with a large slow turning cutting wheel and feed heavy tree branches through it, which I then cold compost like yourself.

Thanks Blackthorn, The link to this page went in well before the C:N list. You can access them through a link in Wicking Worm Beds if you wish. Thanks again for your great blog, and the use of your C:N list. I am sure my blog visitors will get a lot out of them both. Today 1st day I recorded temp is 22C only. Was my mixing ratio wrong? If wrong, how to correct them now? Its open, no cover and rainy.

Regards, Jakir. Way too much wood ash, that would be very highly alkaline! Less wood ash, perhaps a greater variety of materials. What exactly is paunch, is that animal offal? Hi, Thanks. Yes that is cow paunch. I like to achieve a C:N ratio of Pls advise accordingly. I did not found any weblink that help to calculate C:N of paunch. You need a source of nitrogen that is more accessible to bacteria to get the whole thing started, such as manure, or blood and bone, etc.

Most often, meat is added to the centre of the heap in a small amount, in the form of road kill, bones with meat still on them etc.

In this position, where the heat is most intense, the meat is completely broken down. The nutrients are returned to the soil slowly that way. Thanks for the ideas and techniques under discussion. I just coil it in the Dalek-shaped compost bins! Compost near the aggie pipe matures sooner, I assume because of the oxygen it provides, and also the housing for worms.

I highly recommend introducing aggie pipe through your compost, particularly if you have a bad back, as turning is obviated and moving the mature compost is easier when you extract these air tubes. I have heard that compost aerators, which are usually a pipe positioned vertically in the centre of the compost, will cool the pile down. Does your method avoid this? Great read! I have been a cold composter for years but I am how moving into hot in order to try to heat water for a shower! Also I am working in the tropics of Thailand if anyone has any recommendations for systems or adaptations.

Thank you very much for such an enlightening explanation on how to hot compost. I want to let you know that I have a successful result from following your instructions.

Although the size of my pile never quite reach 1. I am harvesting the compost today, it looks like a rich, dark brown heap. Well done! I need to know the c:n ratio for fronds from palm oil trees, is it similar to coco palm trees?

So far I only get different conflicting figures. Apperciate the help. From Jen in Malaysia. If they palm fronds that naturally fall to the ground, they would be dry, no green colour in them, they will be mainly carbon. Ok, noted and thanks. Have used your technique for past 6 months using different carbon sources and vareity of palm oil fronds. We add compost activator, liquified 20 litres to every heap. Compost activator has anti oudour and EM additive to it. For each heap, the finished dry weight is approx kgs.

We are doing 6 batches per day for use in our 2, acre plot of oil palm, young and old trees. No chemical fertiliser as far as possible since plantation is beside national park reserve.

How do we post you pictures of our production using your method? You have contributed a lot to us in terms of knowledge and tech support. Then continue turning as per the procedure. Repeating this to the 3 foot high point, I add another inches of short brush and then more C and N layers up to 6 feet high.

The turning is eliminated since air easily flows through the pile from the heat. To slow the air flow I top the pile with soil or fine compost material. For the outer material that does not get hot I simply screen it out and add to the next pile build.

It sells for top dollar, and makes a garden like you need to see to believe. Plants growing in this soil are disease and parasite bug resistant and I use zero pesticides, and zero fertilizer for lush, large plants and vegetable yields.

Hi Angelo, Thank you for editing. Hi Claude, sounds like an interesting approach to composting, but how do you separate the cold composted outside material that will still have active weed seeds in it from the hot composted interior compost where any weed seeds would be deactivated?

I should point out that the purpose of turning the compost is not only to get air unto the mix, but to turn every part through the hot core of the heap to break everything down — pathogens, weed seeds, etc. If you dont mind, can you also send me some pix like what you did for BrisMatt? I did hot composting some time ago but gave up just because I cant turn it regularly.

I am a full time worker and by the time I get home I have very little time and energy to spare for turning the compost. This method of yours would really help me a lot. The only weed I try vainly to eradicate here is clinging burr.

But, like all others, it manages to sprout all over from wind, bird and animal tracking, so i simply add all i pull to the compost. Please re-read my pile-build procedure, Angelo, The outside material is separated out to go into the next pile.

I use a horse stable, ten-tine fork, and for larger screening, I have an old wire and spring bed frame that screens out brush and un-digested larger particulates. The moisture trapping and awesome nutrient content of the soil produces very heavy yields, and plants grow very late in the season, I pick raspberries to just past frost, and root vegetables keep in the soil all Winter, The rhubarb, mints, parsleys, perennial herbs, garlics, onions, and other biennial and perennial plants thrive here in the Puget Sound winters, and I pick Siberian Kale every month except for those with most days below freezing.

Artichoke grows to seven feet, and each stalk yields up to six hand-sized globes. I sow garlic like one sows a lawn, and the large bulbs crowd each other but with adequate water, the yield is amazing. Ditto Glads and lilies.

I have numerous pix of various stages of building piles, but it will take some doing to reform them suitable for the blog. Use this material for the ground layer, and the mid-pile layer, and I add some in finer materials that tend to clump together in thick wads.

The idea is merely to get and keep air flow in the pile, but not too much air, as it will dry the pile and halt the reaction. The frequent pile-turning is VERY labor-intensive, and the brush adds air to the pile without the turning. As for destroying pathogens, one or two days at — degrees Fahrenheit destroys such things as chicken bones, small meat scraps, all finer plant material, and begins attacking the lignin component in woody material.

The main source of destroying pathogens is not heat, though. The enzymes and living organisms in the hot compost pile — remember, oxygen is the worst enemy of all pathogens — attack the pathogens with vicious ferocity. Think of a bread mold on steroids. Hi Claude, I agree with you about the weeds, every plant has a purpose! If you need to add a range of micro-nutrients and trace elements to your soil or compost, add rock dust such as granite dust from rock crushers or seaweed extract or just seaweed itself.

I built the pile about 1. I used two thirds by volume dry brown materials, and one third green materials. The green materials were grass clippings, chopped up garden waste, some kitchen scraps and commercially packaged animal manure mostly sheep but also some cow and poultry. To get it going I used some urine, liquid seaweed and mollasses. I kept the pile moist and loosely covered with black plastic, and diligently turned it every two to two and half days, rebuilding the pile from the outside in.

It started off well — the material changed colour to a dark brown after it had been inside the middle of the heap and starting decomposing, and there was no smell.

It seemed to be on track until about 13 to 15 days in, when it cooled down but the material was yet to fully compost. That was about 10 days ago. The heap is now dark brown and coarse in texture, and the individual components are still visible eg leaves and the process appears to have stopped.

There are no worms to be seen as yet. I need a whole lot of compost to improve my clay soil, which is poorly structured and low in humus. Given this, I am not overly fussed about the coarse texture, but worried that if I use the partly decomposed compost it will draw nitrogen out of the soil. Should I use it and hope for the best, or try to get it going again with more nitrogenous material? Hi Sara, it sounds like your compost started off well, but cooled down too early.

If the carbon source materials such as leaves are still visible, it would suggest that the compost heap ran out of nitrogen. Also, try to make the shape a bit flatter, like a big cube or cylinder, a cone geometrically has the greatest surface area for the least volume, so you end up with too much material exposed and not breaking down.

Hope this helps. Give it a go and please tell us how you go. Most common problem with Compost failures is moisture. Either too much or too little. Because it went well to start with, i believe again its water. Because the stack got hot steamed and ran out of water. One direct benefit of this is the increase in earth worms feeding on the decomposing material. However, for clayey soil the critical issue is air-flow into the soil.

To assure that directly turned-in material gets air, add woody, stemy branchlets that are mainly vertical in the soil and one end is near the surface. The immediate results is that the soil can sustain some plants, and the long range effect is great, fertile soil in a year or tww, where material is added several times and the soil is naturally turned.

Farmers of staiky plants, lie corn, use this same principle to keep the field soils; organic content up, and maintain disease-free crops. It is ready to support most all plant roots in this stage, especially when directly turned into the soil. In a year or two it will be finished in breakdown due to soil-borne activities, such as earth worms, fungus and molds, and the myriad of tiny creatures feeding on it.

Hi there, I like to make hot compost aerobically commercially for a large volume, using cow paunch , wood chips , wood ash and chicken manure Pls advise me what would be the ratio of ingredients?

Very much appreciated. In your case, I would try 1 part cow paunch, 1 part chicken manure and 4 parts wood chips. Use only small amounts of wood ash. Since you only have one main carbon source, the wood chips, the ratios to use also depends on how much of the each of the nitrogenous ingredient the cow paunch and chicken manure that you have. Try these basic ratios on a smaller scale and adjust ratios depending on your availability of materials, and results in composting. If the composting process shows it has too much nitrogen, increase the amounts of wood chips.

If it is not getting hot enough or breaking down completely, add your nitrogenous ingredients. Also with your large scale hot composting, will it be in a huge commercial closed vessel or composted on the ground in open air — this will determine how much cow paunch you can use. The size and density of the woodchips will also determine how much paunch you can use, and how effective your carbon source will be.

Large chunks of heavy, dense wood will not compost very easily. My advice, test your ingredients and fine tune the proportions of each material with a smaller heap, then scale up after you can successfully hot compost on a smaller scale. Depending on your budget, and with that scale of material it appears substantial, you may want to look into forced draft composting if for no other reason than to lessen the very strong likelihood that with those very fine particulate materials, and especially the entrails, oxygen flow to the innards of any pile will be severely curtailed.

Commercial forced draft composters also speed the production by several magnitudes of scale, producing finished soil in less than two weeks, and for many dairies, in one week or just days. Of course, moisture and temperature are critical factors, as combustion temperature can be reached in a matter of hours. I am using a litre compost bin rather than an open pile and am only able to get the temperature up to 37C. I would like some help to get more heat. I am mixing up the C and N fairly well but maybe I have not enough C because the level of the compost keeps dropping a few inches a day.

Other thoughts I had were: 1 The first items I put in were not cut into very small pieces so maybe are rotting slowly. I am now chopping everything up as much as possible. Could the early larger pieces explain the low temperature? Do you think that this smaller capacity explains the temperature not getting any higher? Should I consider emptying out by tipping the bin over and put the compost back more evenly mixed.

Many thanks for the helpful article. Definitely got the compost bug!! Even added some urine this morning. The reason why the instruction specify that the compost pile needs to be of one cubic metre in size or larger over L is because you need that much material to reliably reach the required temperatures. A small compost bin, even a large one, simply cannot hold enough material to make a compost heap big enough that will hot compost.

I have several compost bins, four L bins and a L bin for cold composting, and no matter what material I use or how much I fill them, they cannot hot compost. Not sure why you use a bin, but it may be due to occlusion of air. Also, the finer the source material, the less trapped air — oxygen — there is. You might look into cold composting with a fungus mix for your operation.

The fungus destroys all material — seed, bacteria, and lignins, much like hot composting. Also, fall leaves clump together in mats that block air flow, and exclude air entrapment. This is one main reason I developed the addition of brushy material and the smaller limbs and branches to allow for air flow.

On a cool morning with the sunlight right, one sees a wispy steam rising from the top of a good hot pile with an earth or finished compost topping to partially seal the pile.

Thanks to Angelo, this forum promotes one of the nicest composting informations sites online — so, thank you, Angelo! Thanks Claude for bringing up another method of breaking material down like hot composting, but with a cold composting system.

The fermentation process is very acidic and destroys weeds and weed seed. After two weeks the fermented waste can be added to the compost bin or buried in the soil. Cover with a layer of soil and flatten. Cover with plastic or a lid to keep it from getting wet. I donate about a day per week to make soil for a community garden in Seattle. The other day one gardener showed me his new experiment with this His hopes were for kitchen wastes, and meat-bone scraps.

Pathogens are viciously attacked by oxygen-breathing organisms, and worms promote oxygen breathing flora and fauna, so vermiculture may be a viable procedure to produce safer material to add to the hot pile, or maybe use as is, which I know many do.

But I have not made an effort to determine what causes this. I do have some slug issues, but the rough texture of the compost turns most away, and for the persistent ones I scatter diatomaceous earth around the few plants slugs insist on messing with.

They do not cross the DE at all, and where it is on the plants they also stay off there. Has anyone here experienced composting plywood, or other similar glued-together wood construction material? I was given quite a bit of thin plywood which is separating at the glue joint.

I wonder if I should have added a commercial form of nitrogen, such as urea or ammonium sulphate to help the large amount of wood to break down. If anyone has experience with similar material your advice is appreciated. Also, Angelo, did you see any mention of the fungus being used for woody material breakdown? Wiltcher, D. Leungprasert, S. The glue in plywood is urea-formaldehyde glue, which is toxic on account of the formaldehyde it contains.

From the studies it looks like it takes days i. Its not worth poisoning your soil for, considxering carbon based materials are everywhere, autumn leaves, fallen branches, newspapers, etc.

Temperature peaks at days and gradually cools down by day I had not measure the temp before this. Can it get too hot? And this white mould, is that a good thing or a bad thing.

It has lots in the middle of the pile. I assume if I turn the pile now…it will heat up again and that is what you want? I have been told just to leave it. Perhaps add a little more water? It has a mix of roo poo, straw, blood and bone, lawn clippings and Lucerne hay. It gets incredibly hot, great to show the kids at school! Would appreciate advice, thankyou.

Hi Janelle, your hot compost is getting too hot! If it gets way too hot some of the bacteria that are more comfortable living at the lower temperature ranges get killed off I believe.

Only add water if it needs it to maintain the correct moisture level. Please let us know how it goes! Hi, I followed your hot composting instructions but the heap has cooled down now and is just warm. Is there any other other quick fix to warm it up? It was going so well, it is covered as the weather is cold here in France. Best regards Katharine. Hi Katherine, you can add ANY rich nitrogen source to make the compost heap heat up again.

Any animal manure will do just fine, as will human urine! Hi there Firstly this is an amazing source of information and inspiration, thank you. Secondly I am a total novice and have just started my first compost site. I am also awful when it comes to maths. So I was hoping you could help me. I have an abundance of the following; Rabbit poo and wee, mixed with sawdust. Chicken poo Grass cuttings Used organic compost used for last seasons veg growing Kitchen waste Butterfly bush trimming Willow trimmings Fallen leaves.

Again, thank you so much for building this resource. I used to be a secondary teacher and from this point of view you are excellent at communicating information that is accessible to a wide range of abilities.

Your garden waste , green wood and vegetable scraps you mention are already at the right ratio on their own! To make these heat up nice and fast, add chicken manure to these ingredients.

Grass clippings which are high in nitrogen need some material high in carbon such as dry leaves , so mix 1 bucket of grass clippings with two buckets of leaves. Hi Blackthorn. I have had to create the pile over a cple wks the space for the pile is about a metre square due to having the correct materials ready. Will this have made a massive difference and will it still be able together hot. It is about cm high now so still going.. With layering, should my carbon dry layers be thicker than my nitrogen green layers to get the correct carbon: nitrogen ratio or the other way round.

Also how thick should my layers be? Appreciate the help, it is a very exciting process. Regards, Sally. Thanks for the informative site. An example of something that would meet the conditions I outlined above would be damp hay bales or very large piles made entirely from wood chips. These can heat up a lot. There are several things at play in this example. If oxygen is suddenly introduced via turning the pile then a flaming fire can erupt very suddenly.

Actinomycetes are a common occurrence in compost and the white fungus they produce can be mistaken for ash. It means your compost is decomposing well. They play a critical role in decomposing the more complex materials in your pile such as lignin which is present in wood and newspaper. Actinomycetes are commonly reported in piles that have a lot of grass clippings as well as tougher fibrous materials. With the right amount of moisture this mixture of materials can heat up very quickly and the actinomycetes arrive to help deal with the tougher materials.

While you should be happy to see the ash-like substance, you should be careful that not to breathe in any dust because some people can be very allergic to actinomycetes. If you want to turn a pile covered in actinomycetes, wear a mask to be safe. Vermicomposters need to follow a whole new set of guidelines. Red wigglers are the most common composting worms. If your worm bin gets too hot, throw some ice on top.

This will cool it down and water the bedding. You should also stop feeding your worms until the temperature is back to normal. This means the food will just sit there and rot, which will drive the temperature up even more. Not what you want. You can prevent these from happening by positioning you bin in a cool place, and not adding food to the bin prematurely. Wait until most of the previous batch of food is gone.

If none of these ideas work, consider using a different type of worm. Red wigglers are most common, but there are several other species that are good for worm bins. Blue worms are from the tropics and prefer warmer temperatures. African nightcrawlers are another tropical worm. Too much sun can dry a compost pile out, which will bring decomposition to a halt.