The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

I talk to people about this and they look at me like I’m a little bit crazy, but turning the compost really is one of my favorite things to do. Compost basically takes care of itself, but if you want to help it along and check on its progress, you can turn it every few months to make sure it’s not too wet, and to mix everything up.

The compost bins we have make turning it really easy. Essentially, I just move the pile from one spot to another, and mix it up as I go. The bin un-stacks and re-stacks in the new spot.

I mixed in a bunch of leaves from under the neighbor’s tree, plus everything from cleaning out the chicken coop (food rinds even they refused, leaves, wood chips, and of course, lots of poop.) They say to strike a good balance between the brown (dead & dry) and the green (live & wet) in your compost, as Alicia expained in a previous post. Everything in the bin was pretty wet, so it was nice to give it some room to breathe by adding some dry material. Plus, there was about a 4″ layer of rotten apple chips from the cider pressing that needed to be mixed up with everything else, and below that the stringy rotting tomato and pepper plants from this summer.

Everything is looking good — I’m thinking that we can probably use this batch of compost by the end of next summer (there is also a batch that should be ready by the spring).