How to Make Compost

Most mornings when the weather isn’t too hot or too cold or too wet, my husband and I spend a half hour sifting compost. That’s how long it takes us to fill one cartload. Later in the day we spread in our raised bed garden. Sifting compost and unloading it in the garden are both good aerobic exercise.

Our farm is called Rocky Acres for a good reason. The soil here is nothing if not full of rocks. The farm is also on a slope. So we built our garden in permanent raised beds filled with soil and compost we sift with our homemade compost sifter.

Some people seem to believe making compost involves some secret, trick, or magic formula. Actually, it’s as easy as creating a pile from whatever comes out of your kitchen, garden, and barn.

Kitchen scraps are a no-brainer. Everything that’s unfit for our chickens or goats goes into the pile, except oil and grease. Oil and grease take a long time to decompose, and we’re usually in a hurry to create ever more compost for our raised bed garden.

Weeds and other garden refuse also go onto the pile. When we pull weeds we don’t worry about shaking off all the soil, because soil introduces bacteria and other microbes that help keep the compost pile perking.

Manure-soiled chicken litter and goat bedding, of course, go into the pile. Cleaning our various chicken coops and goat stalls by hand is hard work, especially on a hot summer day, but my husband and I console ourselves by reminding each other that we’re accomplishing two things at once — cleaning barns and making compost. We’re actually accomplishing three things, if you count more aerobic exercise.

Because we never seem to have enough compost for our garden, we turn our piles to minimize the time necessary for decomposition. When I first started making compost, I mixed it every few days with a pitchfork. Because our piles here on the farm get pretty sizable, we use a tractor front loader. Scooping up and mixing the piles invariably introduces rocks, hence the need to sift the compost before it’s applied to the garden.

Sifting makes the compost loose and fluffy, and removes not only rocks, but any bones, avocado pits, and other things that don’t readily decompose. Those go back into the next compost pile until they eventually disappear.

If there are any secrets to composting success, they are volume and moisture. Good composting requires a critical volume, which is at least 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet. In the early days we used enclosed bins. Now we just pile it up.

Making compost also requires keeping the piles moist but not wet. Sometimes here in Tennessee we have drought conditions, and other times we experience day after day of soaking rain.

During really deep droughts, we add water when we turn the compost. But most of the time the problem is too much moisture — soggy compost does not decompose well. So we invested in a few truck tarps to cover the piles during rainy weather. We also use the tarps to retain moisture during drought conditions.

That’s all there is to making compost. Pile up whatever organic material that comes your way, mix it occasionally, and wait for it to turn itself into black gold. Oh, and if you’re not in a hurry, you can skip the mixing. And if you aren’t blessed with more rocks that the police allow, you don’t have to sift it.